First Sunday of Advent, Year A
November 28, 2004
Mt 24:37-44

Our gospel selection is taken from the larger context of several groups of sayings about the "parousia," the final and full arrival of the kingdom. Most interesting is the statement of verse 42 that compares the "Son of Man’s arriving unexpectedly with a thief breaking into a house in the middle of the night.

There may be few sayings of Jesus that made as big an impact on the first Christian generation than this comparison of the second coming to the arrival of a thief. For this saying about the thief is rooted in material that is present all across the New Testament, in both its oldest (1 Thess 5:2) and latest documents (2 Pet 3:10); in addition to Mt, it is also present in Luke's gospel (Lk12:39) and in both parts of the Book of Revelation (3:3; 16:5). It is found also in the so-called "Gospel of Thomas" (I,21.103), a Gnostic gospel directly dependent on oral preaching. The presence of a reference to a ”household owner” (oikodespotes) in three of these occurrences (Mt, Lk and Gospel of Thomas) makes one confident that this text is a ”dwarfed” parable, reduced to a single sentence in the gospels or just a one-word metaphor in First Thessalonians and the Book of Revelation. It is a demonstrably original element of Jesus’ eschatological sayings. For comparing Jesus to a ”thief” could hardly have come about as the product of the early church's "creative" way of expressing their beliefs in the divine Person of the Risen Lord.

The word "you know" refers to some common knowledge or every-day life experience, which is usually the point of departure for Jesus' parables. Here the parable certainly supposes rather rough living conditions. One might assume that in ancient times people frequently faced the need to defend themselves against criminal activity: the arrival of a thief in the night. The parable seems to project the conditions of urban living: time is effectively told by a watchman indicating aloud each "watch" (each hour) of the night. However, the gospel text speaks of the thief "digging in" that makes best sense in reference to huts built of mud bricks but even more plausibly built into the ground where "breaking and entering" meant breaching the wall by digging a tunnel.

The "parable of the thief" goes significantly beyond mere ignorance of the time of the Lord's coming. When we do not expect it (i.e., when we think that he is not coming), his arrival will take place.

Preachers and cathechists correctly apply the parable to the uncertainty of the hour of our death. Even further, one must see in the parable a warning not to miss the many - yet finite, and thus unique and non-repeated -- opportunities of grace which we easily overlook through our lack of watchfulness. In fact, by such a perspective, the connection between this parable and the "the days of Noah" at the beginning of the gospel passage obtain a deeper meaning. The repetitious and circular vision of time has always been and still remains the outlook of pagan hedonism: eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. The gospel's warning states not only that, indeed, tomorrow we die and will have to give account, but that this "tomorrow" may take place any time. Every day is a possible day of reckoning: encountering the arrival of a just judge.

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