[AI translation] Dear Brothers and Sisters! As you know, we are gathered here on the first Sunday of Advent. So we are once again in the season when the Christian man's attention is focused on Jesus, as He promised when He came among us: that He would return to this earth with great power and glory to judge the living and the dead. That is why, on the first Sunday of Advent, I read this great Advent sermon of Jesus, which speaks of the typical Advent expectation. Today I would like to deal with just one part of this parable, and that God willing, next Sunday I would like to continue with the other lessons of this parable.So here we read about these ten bridesmaids going out, taking their lanterns and going out to meet the bridegroom. They waited for the bridegroom to arrive at the wedding. Almost their entire behaviour is defined by that single word, they were waiting for something. They were waiting for someone or waiting for something. And I think that is what these ten girls are most like humanity today. Because waiting is a human trait. One is always waiting for someone or something. From a very young age, he expects to grow up when he grows up. And then later, when she's married, she expects to get married. Then again later, when he has children or when his children are grown up. Then later again, when he retires. There was a time when we waited in dread for war to break out and then there was a time when we waited in hope for war to end and for peace to come. We are always waiting for something, because it is a common human trait to always be waiting for something. Because waiting gives meaning and purpose to one's life. And you know, the biggest problem is when one is no longer waiting for anything. When he just stares at himself with resignation and thinks that now he has nothing to expect from this life, except death. Yes, Brothers and Sisters, anyone who feels or thinks to himself, "What am I waiting for?" is in fact testifying that life has no meaning for him. All hope is gone.
Well, the general human expectation has become rather confused lately. Back in the last century, in the second half of the 1800s, mankind was still looking forward, in a somewhat optimistic way, to the world that the promising technological advances of the past would bring about, with the fantasy of Jókai and Gyula Verne. The utopian novels of today's writers, however, are already full of visions of the most terrible horrors. Whereas in the past humanity reckoned with the unforeseeable possibilities of technological progress, today it concentrates almost all its energies on how it can escape the very possibilities that technology has now made possible and realised. Today, therefore, people's imagination is very much preoccupied with the question of what to expect, what to wait for. Really, what are we waiting for? The year 2000? The one about which we have read so many utopian pronouncements in the newspapers, or the new world Huxley envisaged, which is in itself horrifying? Or the universal destruction caused by a more terrible nuclear explosion than any other, which humanity is also capable of today? This question of what we are waiting for is now almost beginning to take shape, and so it is daring mankind to ask: what is waiting for us? What unknown shores is humanity's ship sailing towards? Yes, instead of the hopeful expectation of the past, humanity is now increasingly living in anxious anticipation.
Brothers and sisters! As you heard in the story we read, Jesus also speaks of waiting. These ten bridesmaids were also waiting, living in a state of expectation. But their waiting was somehow essentially different from the waiting of humanity today. Their waiting was a distinctively Advent expectation. It was not an expectation of what human wisdom or technology could achieve or even avert. Nor for what the passage of time would almost naturally bring, such as old age or death, nor for what could be inferred or foreseen from this or that turn of events. So these ten virgins were not living in the utopian expectations of modern man, whether optimistic or pessimistic. No! It is something quite different! This is about Someone coming! Someone is coming, Someone is coming to face them from the other side. And these people, the ones in the parable, can do nothing to hasten or delay or even avert the arrival of this Someone and their encounter with Him. For here it is not that they want to achieve something, some goal they have set for themselves, but that someone else has a goal for them. Because Somebody is on the way, Somebody is already on the way to meet them, but has not yet arrived. But it is coming! And they are waiting for it. That's why they are waiting, they are living in this particular expectation.
This is our Advent expectation too, Brothers and Sisters! This is the typical Advent expectation. To wait for the fulfilment of the promise that Jesus made when He said that He would come again. So what do we expect when we wait for Jesus to come back, when we talk about it? It is, first of all, the absolute certainty that the often confused, confusing, disjointed, incoherent series of events that we call history will one day surely come to pass! It will make sense. Events do not happen in a meaningless and random way. And it will not come to pass as if we humans are capable of directing either the course of history or the course of our own lives towards some goal, oh no! We will always be groping in the dark, and even the powers that be of the world who make history cannot predict which way the train whose switches they are now operating will run. And so we all are with the course of our own individual lives. Which of us can say today what awaits us tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? But it will all come to a finish line because that finish line will be set for Him by someone else, by Himself being there at the finish line. That He Himself will be the goal. That He will appear on the horizon of the world. This is what is actually expressed in this Scripture, which is written of the virgins, that they "should take their lamps and go out to meet the bridegroom". Do you know, Brothers and Sisters, how great it is to live like this?! To live in the certainty that Jesus is coming! So to live as if going out to meet the living, the returning Jesus. Because it is different for those who know what they are waiting for and who know what they can expect. Every event that happens - whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, whether it is joyful or tragic - changes its meaning, changes its significance the moment I know that a blessed, powerful and very loving One is coming to meet me, is coming to meet me and I am going to meet Him. All history runs to its destination and ends at His feet.
Brothers and sisters, if I know where a journey ends and how a journey ends, I will experience and travel the intervening stretches of road with a different spirit and a different hope. Where does the road end? At the feet of Jesus. And how does the road end? Well - symbolically - with a wedding! So, with something unspeakably great and joyous, to which we are invited. Pascal once said that it must be a sublime thing to sail in a ship which, though tossed to and fro by the storm, and though the waves crash over it, I know for certain that it will come into port. Well, Brothers, they say that life is an adventure. There is indeed something in it. What is adventure? A series of events whose outcome is unknown. Who among us can tell what the course of our own lives will be? What joys or what sufferings, what loneliness or what fulfillment of hope awaits him in life? None of us can tell! So in that sense, our lives are an adventure. But the man who believes and waits in Advent expectation does not experience this adventure of his life as it is described in detective stories. A good detective novel is also a series of adventures. But the suspense is precisely that you don't know from the first page to the last page what the outcome of the novel will be, how it will turn out. But there are other kinds of adventure. There are great adventure novels, there are great tragedies, in which the reader knows in advance, perhaps the author indicates in the subtitle, what kind of tragedy or what kind of optimistic ending this story will have. And the tension here is not in where it will end up, but rather in what else will happen between now and then and in order for the story to reach the end that the reader already knows.
Well, Brothers and Sisters, Pascal's analogy is precisely to tell us that God did not intend our lives to be a detective story. Not as an incoherent and meaningless series of events whose end we do not know, but from the very first page - yes, the first page of the Bible, and the first page of our lives, when the blessing of baptism was pronounced - he knew where the path of our lives would lead us. He made it known that Jesus alone remains the victor. And that on the horizon of history and our lives there is One with whom all journeys end. You may have all kinds of strange adventures along the way, but you still know that Jesus is at the end of the road. And you may be battered by storms, you may be passing through sunny landscapes, but your journey will lead you to Jesus, to a one-to-one encounter with Him. For God, my life is like a fugue composed according to precise rules, with a theme that always remains. I often hear it as a jumble of incoherent voices. But I still know that the greatest master is playing His instrument, and that everything in my life is geared towards the grand finale. So life may be an adventure in some phases, but it is certainly not in its conclusion. In other words, it could be said that a person living in Advent expectation is never a vagabond of life, but always a wanderer. The wanderer has no destination. Where he is at a given moment is entirely contingent and occasional, and the wanderer knows at every stage of his life that he is on his way to the end. The wanderer's feet take him, but he doesn't know where he is going, and the wanderer, even if he can't see the way because it's dark, knows where he is going. That is why there is a reason for all well-intentioned human endeavour that truly seeks the good of mankind. That is why it makes sense to have a great unity that works for peace for humanity on this earth.
I once read somewhere that someone on a voyage to America saw a dog on a ship. It was a big sheepdog that his owner had entrusted to the crew of the ship while he himself was travelling by plane. The dog was feeling doggone sick in this big, strange environment! He had no idea where he was. All the smells, all the situations, the whole world was strange to him. The poor dog had no idea what navigation was, and that there was a compass and a destination and a time of arrival. He lived in a kind of great animal nihilism. He could not be comforted the whole way. On the way back, there was a dog on the boat again, a little lapdog, but its owner was there. This dog also felt alien in this totally unusual environment, he could not imagine what was happening to him, he was also scared and he was also scared, but when his little dog heart was beating very loudly with fear, he looked at his owner with great dog confidence, as if to say: if you are here, it can't be so hopeless! And in that he was reassured. It is written somewhere in the Bible that you have earned yourself glory through the mouths of babes. Well, I feel that God also gets glory for himself through the eyes of dogs. We don't know the laws of the great navigation plan by which this or that happens in our lives. But we do know the One who stands on the bridge of command, and who waits on the other shore in the harbour. For Jesus is the Captain, the One to whom the waves and winds yield, the One who walks on the water, and He is also the One who waits for us on the other shore in the harbour. Everything is uncertain, but this one Someone is certain: the One who sails with us and towards whom we sail, and to whom we will arrive. And if one turns away from this one solid point in this world, takes one's eyes off it, one can feel like that dog on the boat: hesitant, surrounded by fears, bewildered in a vast, alien space. But when our eyes rest on Him again, we are encouraged. It doesn't mean that we will then understand more of the mysteries of navigation, no - but we know the captain!
These virgins were men - the "clever" virgins - whose lives were lived in the spirit of one great moment. The moment when the bridegroom comes and they meet him. The moment of meeting. They take their lanterns, they go out to meet the bridegroom. Because it's certain that the groom is coming, it's just not certain when. It could be today, it could be a month from now, it could be 10 years from now. But it is this very uncertainty of the date of arrival that heightens the alert anticipation to the extreme. You know, in a way, it's like when we were at school, we always had to prepare our homework because we never knew at what moment the teacher would call us to answer. So you always had to be ready. Just like we don't know when He is coming or when He is going to call us to Himself. We don't know the moment when everything that we have considered so important, so indispensable in this life on earth, everything in the world: our successes, our failures, our achievements, our inefficiencies, our health, our sickness, our happiness, our unhappiness, everything will be buried behind us and there will be no one left to care about us, but Jesus!
This is why we must be careful and why we must count on Him at every moment. Because every hour that we live is marked by that hour, that one moment when we will stand alone face to face with Jesus. And if someone pretends that this moment will not come in his life, he is missing the very climax of his life. So let us live like these ten virgins who took out their lanterns and went out to meet the bridegroom. "Beware, for you do not know on what day or at what hour the Son of Man will come."
So let us pray:
Teach us to believe, Lord, teach us to ask.
Jesus, you will come again, teach us to wait!
When you look with mercy on my life:
Let me stand still, teach me to believe!
(Canto 479, verse 4)
Amen.
Date: 27 November 1966.
Lesson
Mt 25,1-13