“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36)

In his philosophical dialogue “Aria with Diverse Variations”, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter muses on the difficulty of creating real suspense in the medium of a book – after all, a reader can tell just by the number of pages remaining in their right hand exactly how much of the story is really left, regardless of any attempts at misdirection by the author. The characters in his dialogue propose increasingly elaborate solutions, eventually settling on a scheme to include a “post-ending ending” where the plot goes off the rails and leave it to the reader to sniff out the dividing line where the real story ends.

Our lives as Christians simultaneously embody the sureness of a traditional book and its dwindling pages and the uncertainty of a story where we may already be living in the epilogue without knowing it. Nothing comes around with more clockwork regularity than Christmas every single December 25th, and even our less rigidly fixed celebrations such as Easter are still set with formulas that can be calculated indefinitely into the future. Yet despite how regularized our day-to-day liturgical experience is, Jesus reinforces here that the timeline of our world’s ultimate destiny is beyond even the most sophisticated attempt to pin down.

So how do we reconcile the predictable progression of our newly opened Advent calendars with the radical uncertainty of this passage? Many over the years have gotten tangled up in trying to connect the evocative imagery of floods and thieves and rapture to the circumstances of their own time, but the real key to understanding lies in the glue that holds it all together – Jesus’ straightforward instructions to “keep awake [and] be ready”. As much as we can see Christmas coming on the calendar from a mile away, it still has a way of sneaking up on us if we get too caught up in the material trappings of the holiday. 

Every once in a while over the next few weeks, then, give yourself a little “fire drill” by thinking “what if Christmas were tomorrow?” You wouldn’t be ready with all the presents and cards and meals that require weeks of careful orchestration to stick the landing at a specified time and place, of course, but none of that is the reason for the season. As long as you simply find yourself prepared to welcome Jesus into this world at his most vulnerable, you’re ready – for Christmas and everything after.

[NOTE: This piece was written based on an assigned piece of Scripture for a collection of 24 Advent reflections by the parishioners of St. Catherine’s Episcopal Church.]