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Advent Sunday, Year A 2025; Matthew

Although the wider world tends to think of the seasonal themes now as comfort, joy, and consumption, the arrival of Advent suggests that the preparations needed to welcome the coming of Jesus are rather more bracing than just tree-trimming. Even though we have begun a new liturgical season and year, and for that matter, a new cycle of the Lectionary and are reading from a different Gospel, this apocalyptic material sounds very much like what was being read just recently. In fact, this passage follows on from Matthew’s version of the reading we had from Luke two Sundays ago in which Jesus was, again, both proclaiming an end and urging caution about misunderstanding it.

Jesus’ proclamations of “the end” seem to have three consistent characteristics. First, he announces that there is a divinely ordained and imminent end of time and history, and in doing so gives some cryptic but dramatic sketches of the events that may be expected to come. Yet (and second) we also consistently find some accompanying caution or warning to the audience about anticipating how imminent this might be, or misreading their own experiences so as to identify some person or event with that cosmic end. Third, Jesus warns that awareness of these things, or more specifically watchfulness, is required, despite the impossibility of drawing specific conclusions from current events. So, paradoxically, what is being taught includes just what it is that cannot be known.

Remarkably, in this passage the unknowing even extends to him: “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (v. 36). Perhaps the striking language used here—“the Son” juxtaposed with “the Father”—underlines the theological difficulty. This is one of only two occasions in Matthew’s Gospel (cf. 11:27) where Jesus speaks of “the Son” in an absolute sense (i.e. without any addition of “of Man” or “of God”) and in relation to “the Father,” language much more common in the Gospel of John. This makes it the more remarkable that even “the Son” to whom “all things have been handed over” (11:27) does not know the hour.

Some early Christian writers were befuddled by this claim of ignorance on Jesus’ part, and simply tried to push past and ignore it, or to reinterpret it to mean something else. And we’ve seen elsewhere that an editorial approach to such Gospel difficulties sometimes seemed the most effective one: just cut it out.

Predictably perhaps then, a few early manuscripts do not actually include the phrase “nor the Son.” This was despite Mark’s version clearly including it (13:32); Mark however was less at issue, since Matthew’s Gospel was much more widely used and cited. And while most ancient versions of the Matthean text do have the full phrase, that convenient possibility suggested by this shorter text—that, by implication, the Son did know—was appealing to later copyists. It became the default reading in the Latin Vulgate, and in the Byzantine textual tradition; thence it came even to the KJV. Yet the better-attested version we now read in NRSV and other modern versions, in which the Son shares in the ignorance of the angels and the rest of us, is what we must deal with as Matthew’s text.

What to make of Jesus’ not knowing, though? The great scholar Origen of Alexandria took Jesus at face value, taking his ignorance to reflect the reality of the incarnation. The reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) also took the not-knowing of the Son seriously:

Now as he took upon himself all other elements of human weakness, so he has also accepted human knowing and not-knowing, actually accepting human reason and intellect that with time multiplies - increasing and even decreasing.¹

T Shirt at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Boston, November 2025. Author photo.

While Matthew is not yet thinking in quite the terms of the Nicene Creed, where the two share the same substance or being, there is certainly an implication here of the intimacy of Jesus and the Father. That makes Jesus’ emphasis on his own ignorance of “the time” all the more important. Matthew had also reported Jesus saying just a few verses ago that these events would happen during the life of the generation to whom he spoke (24:34), although by the time of writing decades later this too must have given pause for thought.

Another part of what is common to both readings, and crucially important to understanding them, is the proximity of the Cross in the narrative. Jesus does not speak these words at some random point in Galilee, or simply to demonstrate his prophetic leanings, but in Jerusalem near the end to align the fate that he is going to undergo with the struggles that await the world. His professed ignorance of what will come aligns then with his vulnerability, two things that affirm his solidarity with his hearers and Matthew’s readers in their humanity.

In the Middle Ages, this message of watching faithfully for an unknown end was translated into a focus on the fate of every individual who, like Jesus, had to think about the end of all things in relation to their own mortality. Thus, on the four Sundays of Advent it was traditional to consider the “quattor novissima” (the Four Last Things): death, judgment, heaven, and hell. This somber set of themes may not be an easy sell today—and it risks putting too much on the fate of the individual and not the wider world— but it represents at least part of what Jesus proclaims.

Jesus’ apocalyptic proclamation is framed by Matthew not as futurology, but as a call to live in a particular way now. This is encapsulated in the parable of the thief waiting to take advantage of the inattentive householder, and the call to “watch!” So while Jesus warns from trying to correlate world events and the end of time, the paradoxical message remains that the reader needs nevertheless to “watch,” even without knowing just what we are watching for.

And as our medieval forebears recognized, the one thing that was both clear as a fact about their lives, yet mysterious in timing as otherwise, was death itself. Yet they knew that our death, like Jesus’ death, is more than it appears; its inevitability and unknowability calls us not to dread, but to live fully and with attention to all God has given and promised. Watch!

1. Cited by Luz, Matthew (Hermeneia), 3.214