During Advent, the Church uses two different Prefaces at Mass: one for most of Advent, the other for Advent’s last nine days. We have two because their foci are different: Advent Preface I looks forward to Christ’s Second Coming at the end of history, while Advent Preface II shifts back, in the final days before Christmas, to Christ’s First Coming in Bethlehem.

In Advent Preface I we pray, “When he comes again in glory and majesty… all is at last made manifest.” The Last Day is a time of full disclosure, complete declassification, utter truth. Perhaps that makes our world nervous. Our society, for example, is very hung up on the idea of “privacy,” yet here we have the Son of God promising “all is at last made manifest.” Further, “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open” (Lk 8:17).

What, after all, is the purpose of the Second Coming and the General Judgment at the end of the world? The point is simple: the Kingdom we are now invited to accept in faith will be manifest, so that it is not a question of “faith” but of fact.

This world is God’s. He created it. He redeemed it. And He will restore all things “in His Son” (1 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20) through whom He made that world (Jn 1:3; Col 1:16). Good, not evil, will have the final word in human history — and that will one day not be “just” a matter of faith.

At creation, God made man in His image and likeness, endowing Him with a participation in His creative work through the ability to give life and to exercise dominion over the world. Like the steward in the parables, the Master comes home “after a long time” to settle accounts: was his steward faithful or faithless, entrepreneurial or craven?

The Last Judgment is a “settling of accounts,” not in the sense of Divine revenge but in the sense of Divine Truth. What were God’s designs in history (and in your life)? How well or ill were those designs realized as a result of human choice? How much did God do to set straight the crooked lines with which men tried to write? The General Judgment is not some sort of “appeal” from one’s eschatological fate set at death. What one at death became will one remain.

But human beings are social beings. As Clarence the angel says in It’s a Wonderful Life, “One man’s life touches so many others.” For good. For ill. It touches people immediately around him. It touches people he will never know generations in the future. Did St. Paul and St. Luke ever imagine you in the 21^st century would be moved by their words? Did Martin Luther or Adolf Hitler imagine their decisions would reverberate down the centuries? (Okay, since Adolf wanted a thousand-year Reich, maybe). My point is: how our lives fit into the lives of every other person in this world needs to be made clear, because the good or evil we do is not just its immediate consequence but also the reshaping of reality that consequence sets in motion. And so it is only fair that “all is made manifest” to show that God is just. What did someone do with the graces God gave him? What did someone not do with those graces? What graces were accepted and which were refused, and what happened as a result of those choices?

One reason people lose faith is in demanding that God justify why the world is like it is. Because, except for Voltaire’s Pangloss, few actually believe we live in the “best of all possible worlds.” God has no obligation in justice to keep making conditions optimal when man chooses to make them suboptimal. That God in love may do that is among the things that, on the Last Day, will be “made manifest.”

Which is why Advent constantly reminds us to “wake up,” “keep watch,” “arise from your slumbers,” “the night is far gone,” and “live in the light.” Because the Last Day is the Lord’s Coming in Glory, and glory is light, not darkness. It is the light that sweeps away the shadows hiding those people “who prefer darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil” (Jn 3:19). Indeed, John’s observation is astute, because while many moderns may want to call their deeds “choices” and “autonomy,” even supposedly sanctioned by the “privacy” of “conscience,” the Last Day strips away all those euphemistic equivocations, revealing good as good and evil as evil because “all is at last made manifest.” There is no “right to privacy” that shields any part of God’s creation from God’s Truth and Good.

Is this a cause for shame? No, only to the extent that one nevertheless “preferred darkness instead of light.” The glory of a St. Augustine is not that he was both a rigid dualist as well as a libertine with a concubine and out-of-wedlock child — which he was — but that he changed thanks to God’s grace. The glory of a St. Paul is not that he was a murderer and persecutor of Christians — which he was — but that he changed thanks to God’s grace. The glory of a St. Peter is not that he was a boastful coward ready to run in the other direction when suffering was present — which he was — but that, thanks to God’s grace, he changed and came back. The shame is only those who decided to cling to evil, to trade what God put on offer for not even a mess of pottage. Spiritual heroism needs to be recognized and acknowledged. So, too, does spiritual stupidity.

And that is why “at last all is made manifest.” Because justice demands a history with no secrets, no false appearances, no corners insulated from the healing — or scorching — ray of Divine Light.