When Jesus spoke about the coming of the Messiah figure, the warning signs he named had already happened – and he, of course, was already here.
Here’s a transcript:
We’ve just got a couple of days to get ready for our Thanksgiving celebrations, but I’m thinking about Advent. This coming Sunday, the first of December, is also the First Sunday in the Advent season, in which we are preparing for yet another great holy day: the celebration of Christmas.
We also change gospels, moving from a year with the Gospel of Mark to a year with the Gospel of Luke. And as you might expect to begin a season preparing for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, this week’s text is in the twenty-first chapter of Luke (Luke 21:25-36).
Jesus spoke these words to his disciples in that last week before his crucifixion, in the Jerusalem temple, and talking about, well, the end of the world.
He talked about signs of earthquakes and of panic and of wars and of great waves. He spoke of more prosaic kinds of things, that you can see when trees put forth roots to become leaves, you know that summer is coming. And so you’ll know, Jesus told his followers, that end times are coming when you see end times kinds of events.
The problem, of course, is that the end times kind of events that he described, things like earthquakes and great waves and people in panic: they happen all the time. So when, we might ask, will the Son of Humanity — the Christ, the Messiah — draw near.
Apocalyptic used that kind of imagery so that authors could talk about the things that were going on in their own time in a kind of coded way, so that they could criticize rulers and powers without running quite as high a risk of being targeted by them for oppression, arrest, even death. Using the imagery of apocalyptic, Jesus once more made the case that the promised one, the Messiah, was already here. All these waves, all this panic, had already occurred, and Jesus was here.
The very beginning of his ministry, and throughout it, Jesus’ core message was that the reign of God is at hand: repent and believe in the good news.
So as we come into Advent we anticipate something that has already happened: the birth of Jesus. As we come into Advent we anticipate something that has not quite already happened: that is, the return of Jesus. Of course, in his resurrection he did return.
In this Advent let us remember that Jesus is always here, always with us, so that we can get through the storms and the wars and the panics not alone, but accompanied by the one who loves us best.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
