The Fourth Sunday in Advent – December 21, 2025
In dreams, time moves differently. On this last Sunday of Advent, we get a Christmas story, Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth embedded as a flash-forward in Joseph’s dream. In our waking world, homilists and music ministers will constantly have to fight the urge to think sequentially and impose a linear lens upon the liturgical year, as if the seasons were a diary recording Jesus’s life: await his birth in Advent, celebrate his birth at Christmas, journey with him to Jerusalem in Lent, and mark his final days in the Triduum and Easter season. Advent comes, rinse and repeat.
Advent is a wake-up call for Jesus’s disciples to an eschatological way of living in which we spend every moment doing the ordinary things disciples do, making each day an extraordinary moment of grace.
The paschal mystery, however, into which we are immersed is not a sequential reliving of the past but an encounter with Christ in our present moment. Our memorial of Jesus through the feasts and seasons gives us the lens through which we recognize how “God is with us” right now, drawing us deeper into God’s reign.
From the beginning to the end of our days, God is indeed with us when and where we least expect, in ways that will not follow human and social conventions. Whether dreaming or awake, in days of sorrow or joy, awaiting the promise to come or seeing it already fulfilled, let us proclaim, in and out of season, that God is with us “until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).
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