The Bridegroom is coming in the middle of the night.

on Matthew 24:36-26:2

The day of the Lord is coming - and we will be judged.

It’s popular to say these days, “Only God can judge me.” And that’s true. Only in the presence of God will it be perfectly clear whether we have turned our faces toward him or set our faces against him – whether we love or have let our love grow cold (Matt 24:12).  But if we’re saying, “only God can judge me,” as an way to dismiss the criticism we receive for some unloving or self-serving behavior, we may want to rethink that. He is coming. We will come into his presence. And his presence can and will judge us. None can stand in the presence of the Lord and not be judged. That inescapable judgment is coming.   

But when? Don’t you wanna know so you can be sure to be ready? It’d be rude, wouldn’t it, if he showed up unannounced?

Jesus Christ is emphatically clear that we do not know the day or the hour of the coming of the Son of Man. This warning cuts both ways.

In the early Church, it may have been more common for people to think that the end of all things was right around the corner. That the Lord was coming next week or tomorrow or after dinner. And there are those in the contemporary world, primarily among fundamentalist Christians, who continually endeavor to determine the date by means of strange interpretations and decontextualized passages of Scripture. Catholics too, of a certain bent, are given to imminent apocalyptic expectation, often associated with various Marian apparitions.

So, to these, the warning cuts against the desire to know more than the Lord reveals to us. Let us have a little humility. He declares that not even the angels of heaven know the day and the hour of the coming of the Son of Man. St. John Chrysostom tells us “that men should not seek to learn what angels do not know.” Christ is forbidding us to even inquire about this. We think we need to know everything, but the Lord who made us disagrees. Our ignorance of certain things reveals much about our character. Do we have any humility or patience? Are we capable of saying, “I don’t know”? We don’t know. So, let’s admit that we are not wiser that the angels of heaven, for God’s sake, and give up the pursuit of knowledge that God does not want us to have. If God does not give the knowledge, no effort on our part will reveal it to us.

But Christ’s warning cuts the other way too. Nowadays, most Catholics – of my acquaintance, anyway – certainly will admit that they do not know the day or the hour of the Lord’s coming, but they seem to think that this means that the coming of the Lord must be a long way off, and it's not something that we need to think about or expect or watch for. And this is dead wrong as much as – or even more so – than the notion that we can know when it's going to happen.

A clear point of the several parables we hear on Holy Tuesday is that we are to keep watch and be ready at all times for the coming of the Lord. We know not the hour and, therefore, we must live Every. Single. Hour. as if it is the hour of the coming of the Lord. It is as likely to be this hour as to be an hour some century after my death. We are called to constant expectation and watchfulness.

The Lord provides of the images today in the Gospel to shock us out of our complacency. One central image is that of the Bridegroom. Matins on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of Holy Week is called Bridegroom Matins because we especially reflect on this image on these days.

Christ Bridegroom Icon
from Saint Paraskevi Church in Langadas

We are like the virgins awaiting the coming of the bridegroom into the wedding banquet. And we have a fundamental choice to make: either to be prepared for his coming or to grow impatient and disregard it – thinking that, because he delays so much longer than we expect, we need not remain in readiness for him. We can be like the wise virgins or the foolish virgins.

And, by the way, if we are wise, the world will call us foolish. They’ll say to us, why don’t you indulge your passions now while you can? There’s plenty of time change your ways later. Carpe diem, and all that. YOLO. You don’t want to be thought a fool, do you? Like Noah building an ark on dry land? The wise man is willing to be thought a fool for the sake of the truth, who is the Lord.

If you are not prepared for the coming of the Lord and the judgement that comes with it, the hour to prepare is now. The day to become who you would want to be if you were standing in the presence of the Lord – to become who you really are – who God made you to be – is today. Do not delay. Behold, the Bridegroom is coming in the middle of the night.