What Time is it?

Advent 1                              29 November 2009

The words of Jesus in our Gospel lesson this morning seem very strange and difficult.  He seems to be talking in riddles, very mysteriously pointing to cosmic signs and portents that will herald the future redemption of his followers.  In fact, he was using a language very familiar to his apostles, if not to us.  It is called apocalyptic language—the language of revelation.  By Jesus’ day it had a long history behind it and would have a considerable history after it, although it has often been misunderstood.  Especially important for us, the signs and symbols are not meant to be taken literally: they are used to invest present events with their true and cosmic significance. For example, we have just observed the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  At the time it was described as an earth-shattering event.  Of course, the earth was not shattered, but the significance was profound.  The last book of our Bible, Revelation, is Apocalypsis in Greek, from which we get our word apocalyptic—the whole book is a series of cryptic images used to convey a revelation of the triumph of God’s plans and purposes, even though, at the time the book was being written, Christians were undergoing a very tough time. 

But where ancient writers talked about secrets and mysteries, modern writers and preachers have had a field day.  I have lived my whole life aware of a strong current of Christian belief having to do with the so-called “end times.”  I have always known some people who expected, or said they expected, the “rapture” at any moment, the notion which is the basis for recent best-selling books and videos called the “Left Behind” series.  According to this way of thinking, our Lord can return at any moment to snatch away those who truly belong to him and leave behind a world which will descend rapidly into chaos.  Speculations about such things have taken place in the church for a long time, although no one had ever heard of the rapture until someone invented it in the 1830’s and it became popularized through a set of notes in a particular edition of the Bible. 

The Church has always believed in the Second Coming of Christ—it is located in the very earliest creedal statements we have.  But much of the speculation about the end times is, I think, misplaced, and based on Scripture passages that have nothing to do with our Lord’s Glorious Return at the end of the ages.  For example: our morning’s Gospel lesson.  If you begin with some sense of context for Jesus’ words here, you realize that he was speaking to his disciples while they were sitting in a corner of the temple precincts.  He had just noted the widow woman putting her little copper coins into the treasury and then one of his disciples said something about how grand a place the temple was.  It is rather as if the stewardship committee had just been talking about the budget for next year and someone went on to say how much he loved St Thomas and appreciated the beautiful space and the holy place it is, and then the rector should have gone on to pronounce that it was doomed, ruined, and that he foresaw a time when no two bricks would be left standing one on top of the other.  That is what Jesus did.

The disciples immediately asked him for some indication of when this would take place.  And Jesus said: “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”  What did he mean?  Jesus’ ministry was conducted in a troubled age—a revolutionary age.  There was great dissatisfaction amongst Jews with the occupation of their country by the Romans.  And there were always hot-heads who thought that they could lead an insurrection and get away with it.  None succeeded.  But they kept trying.  Some of them believed that the time of God’s intervention was at hand—he could no longer let his people be oppressed—especially if a messiah were to push events along.  [We know about people who think like this—our newspapers are filled with such stories, mostly from the Middle East.]  Into these kinds of expectations Jesus came and he had constantly to guard himself against misunderstanding. He was the true Messiah, but he was not the violent, revolutionary sort that most people expected.  So, on the eve of his death, he told his disciples to be on the alert—not to believe people who came along and thought that they were God’s chosen or that they knew when the time was near. 

He told them that there would be lots of troubles in the world—wars and battles and famines and earthquakes and hurricanes.  They also would suffer persecution.  But these were not signs of the end.  Great significance would attach, however, to a time in the future when Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies.  Then people were to flee, for this was a sign that the kingdom was at hand.  Jesus associates the fall of Jerusalem with the coming of the son of man on the clouds of heaven.  It is a sign, as our lesson has it, that redemption is drawing near.  Then he tells the parable of the fig tree and concludes:  “So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” 

What could he mean?  He could only mean [and I pay my respects to Tom Wright here] that the fall of Jerusalem was a sign to the disciples that the Kingdom of the true King, that is, Jesus, was now truly present.  Those who belonged to his generation—that is, the disciples who were listening to him—would see it all.  Obviously, if this is what Jesus meant, he was not talking about the Second Coming at all.  It is hard to imagine that the disciples would have had any comprehension of a second coming.  The Son of Man coming on clouds was an OT depiction of the return of God to Zion, which Jesus claimed to have fulfilled.  His prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem was remembered and became a sign to the early Christians that Jesus’ Kingdom had arrived with the disappearance of the old one, and that they were a part of the true rule of God over his people. 

We believe, to be sure, that the Kingdom did not first come with the fall of Jerusalem. It came with the resurrection and the Coming of the Spirit and is present with us in the same way it was for Jesus first apostles.  But his prediction of Jerusalem’s fall confirmed it, and the association of it with all the old apocalyptic language, answered to the way of thinking that people used in those days.  Stars falling from heaven and the Son of Man coming on a cloud, and other phrases like them, all come from ancient prophecies and were not meant to be taken literally but were figurative ways of expressing the significance of events that were happening in God’s plans and purposes.  The conclusion we are to draw from all of this language is that these OT prophecies have now come to pass in the events associated with Jesus.  They have come to pass in a way that could not have been predicted ahead of time, but they have come to pass.  Those of us who now look back on those days and Jesus’ predictions see that what our Lord said actually happened.  That ought to lead us to a greater hope for the fulfillment that we still expect.  What we now look for is the consolidation of the Kingdom when our Lord returns, that is, its full expression, its clear manifestation.  But we don’t know how it is going to happen—or when. 

Most of the apocalyptic language of the Bible—that is, those great and powerful images and symbols—are meant to indicate to us that the Kingdom is present with us now.  They don’t give us much information about how the future unfolding of the Kingdom is going to work, but if we let them sink into our imaginations, they put us in touch with the Kingdom now.  One of the marvelous images from Revelation is that of the descent of the new Jerusalem.  Will a city actually come down from the sky?  Probably not.  It is a graphic symbol of the joining of heaven and earth.  Will this joining come as the evolutionary climax to a gradual perfection of life on earth?  A hundred years ago, lots of Christians thought that this is the way it would work.  That was before two world wars, the cold war, Stalin and Mao, Viet Nam, the Khmer Rouge, and all the rest.  The 21^st Century doesn’t seem to be going any better.  Now with terrorism rampant and global warming and the economic violence of globalization dislocating so many people, we may think it more likely that God will have to intervene simply to save us from mass destruction.  But we don’t know.  And it is, I think, less than helpful for people to point to some obscure passage from Daniel or Revelation and confidently assert that Saddam Hussein is the anti-Christ or that Armageddon is just around the corner with Israel versus the Palestinians or the Syrians or the Iranians—as popular preachers have done in recent years. 

What time is it?  Is it the end time?  Merton once wrote that it is always the end and every event brings us a little closer.  What we do know is that in our times the Kingdom is present with us.  And that seems to be what Jesus was trying to get through to his group of listeners: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”  I think the heart of this message is that it is futile to worry about God’s timetable.  We have to be on guard so that our hearts are not weighed down with distractions and dissipations.  We have to be present to our Lord—hearts clear, minds open, spirits docile—so that we can live the life of the Kingdom in the world in which we are placed.  That is a much more important thing than fussing with the end times and worrying about the millennium.  And that, I fear, is the thing that is not getting done. 

This is the work of Advent.  As our collect puts it: we are to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.  This is taken from a passage out of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 13: “. . .you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  For St Paul and many of that first generation of Christians, there was a fervent expectation of our Lord’s soon return.  That seems to have been disappointed, for no matter whether you think of 1000 years as one day to the Lord, 2000 years for us is a considerable time.  We don’t know when our Lord will return, but St Paul is always right about what time it is: our salvation is nearer now than it was.  We cannot say how world events will turn out nor what God’s timetable is.  But we can always give an answer to ourselves when we ask what time it is.  It is time to wake up, lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.  It is time to push away the things which distract us and deflect us from listening to God and doing his will.  It is time to go deep—deep into our hearts, deep into the scriptures, deep into the presence of God—so that the effect of our lives will be light and not darkness. 

Advent is a symbolic time.  The days keep getting shorter and the darkness grows ever greater—as if it were reminding us that this old world cannot go on in the way it has been much longer.  But it is not meant to lead us to despair, it is meant to teach us to see through the darkness into light—to be light ourselves, children of light, signs of hope to a dark age.  As the days get darker, we light more candles on the Advent Wreath, until finally at the darkest time of the year, the Light comes, Christ is born, the Sun of Righteousness illuminates the dark.  The Advent Wreath is only one of the symbols that can draw us into the reality of the presence of the Kingdom, and one of the weaker ones, in fact.  The Church is filled with symbolic depictions—in our windows and altar and walls—of the reality of the Kingdom.  But perhaps the most powerful of all is the symbolic meal we participate in at every Mass: sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ, the Real Presence of the One who fills all in all, conveyed to us through bread and wine. 

Have we cleared ourselves of the distractions and dissipations of normal life in this world so that there is that within us which can resonate spiritually with the power and depth of these symbols?  There is an Advent task.