A Sign in the End Times: Fourth Sunday of Advent

Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:
the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,
and shall name him Emmanuel.

Here we are dear brothers and sisters in Christ, at the fourth Sunday of Advent. It would be a good time to ask ourselves, how have I spent this Advent season? Has it been in the spirit of fast and abstinence. Has it been in preparation for the final coming of Our Lord. Or has it been one of pre-Christmas feasting, and living as if nothing has changed? If our lives this Advent has not been one of patient preparation for the final coming of Our Lord, then shame on us.

God the Father offered us a sign, not so that our lives would remain unchanged, but so that we could learn to live eschatologically – to live knowing that the end times have begun, and that any moment now the King will return and put a permanent end to all evil and reign in triumph forever. To empower us on this journey to the end, He came to live among us, not just in the Eucharist, but through the Eucharist in our hearts and our bodies!

So, how does one live as a sign of Our Lord in the end times? As always, St. Paul offers us an answer; as:

a slave of Christ Jesus,
called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God

My dear brothers and sisters, we are not free to do our own will, but having been rescued from the useless ways of our ancestors (1 Peter1:18), we are called to be His servants. We are not only called to be apostles, to proclaim the Gospel, but as the words “set apart” indicate to us, we have to zealously separate ourselves from all things, and persons, who do not live according to the Gospel.

As Saint Paul says later in this reading from the letter to the Romans, we:

are called to belong to Jesus Christ;

… called to be holy.

To be holy is to consent to being set apart, to belong to Jesus Christ, and to Him alone.

And it is not just for our own little lives that we are called to be holy. As the Lord says through the Prophet Isaiah (49:6):

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
    to raise up the tribes of Jacob
    and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

And this is precisely what, through the words of St. Paul, Holy Mother Church teaches us on this final Sunday of Advent. We are called to be holy:

to bring about the obedience of faith,
for the sake of his name, among all the Gentiles

This, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow Christians, is what we are called to be Christian for. To be obedient to the faith, and to bring others, the Gentiles we live among, and the Gentiles we can often become, to the faith. This is all we must live for, to bring others to obedience of the faith, all the while operating as a sign of what this kind of life must mean.

There may be costs to this separation, in fact I am dead certain that there are costs, but this we can gladly bear because we know what the end will be, both for all things and persons, and particularly for ourselves and those who repent and believe.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, if we have not spent this Advent in any kind of fast and penitence, without preparing ourselves to be the signs of His first coming and preparation for His second, there is still time. We have a few days, when we can embrace the spirit of Advent and triumph, for remember, God is with us and He makes all things possible.

Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful in Concanim at the parish church of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 21 Dec 2025.)

(Image reference: The Baptism of Christ, Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altar, c. 1485/1500, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.)