The Second Coming is of course closely connected to the doctrine of God’s kingdom. To believe in Jesus’ New Advent is to believe that he is the true king, that he will return to take his rightful place as ruler of the world, setting everything right again and governing a heavenized earth in justice and peace.
It Isn’t Over till the Master Returns
O shine again, ye angel host
And say that he is near;
Though but a simple few at most
Believe he will appear.
–from “All Faded Is the Glowing Light,” words by Thomas T. Lynch
The season of Advent points us in two directions: the past and the future. It helps us recollect the coming of Jesus into the world of first-century Judea, into the world of space and time and matter, that is our home; and it points us forward in anticipation of that day when Jesus will come again into our world, to judge it and establish his kingdom in its fullness, reconciling all things to himself and joining heaven and earth.
I believe we are apt to forget about the second purpose. The Christmas season (for all intents and purposes, the whole period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s in North America) has been dressed up in a lot of sentimental trappings—often lovely, sometimes even holy, and flowing naturally enough from the truths of the stable, the star, the Magi, and the rest. But concentrating exclusively on these things can make us forget to look toward the future world, which the beauties of Christmas point toward and which are the fulfillment of our hopes.
I suspect that many believers no longer await Jesus’ coming on earth. The passing years, decades, and centuries have dulled our sense of expectation, worn us down, caused us to fall into a complacent groove of sequential time consisting of the cycles of birth, maturity, old age, death. In any event, the idea of Jesus appearing among us—of divinity irrupting into our world once more—is too fantastic, almost a fairy tale. We have pushed our eschatological hope behind the veil of death, where it seems more plausible. The only future many of us expect is a disembodied one, a personal “afterlife” tacked on to earthly life. If we are aware of the second advent at all, we tend to sequester it safely in a murkily distant future. But what if the future is now coming forward to meet us in the present? What if the Master is at the door?
Thank heaven, the promises of orthodox Christian faith are far richer than the popular beliefs. Christ’s redemption applies to all of creation, the human soul and everything else God lovingly fashioned—all of which are to be reconciled with and offered back to Him.
C.S. Lewis was one of the most helpful Christian thinkers of modern times, as well as one who tended to approach Christianity as a Platonist. In his essays “The Weight of Glory” and “Transposition” Lewis interprets the imagery of future life—the banquets, the music, etc.—as symbolic. The beauties we know now are “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”
There is virtue in such an approach to the theology of desire, but I can’t help feeling that Lewis is missing something. His Platonism is leading him to take as symbols things which needn’t be merely or exclusively symbolic. A major weakness as I see it is that Lewis does not distinguish between “heaven” and God’s kingdom, two distinct though related concepts. (As I like to emphasize, “heaven” to the ancient Jews signified God’s base of operations, not our eschatological end goal.)
Let’s take a parallel case. The second coming has been reinterpreted as a purely spiritual or psychological event, a sort of renewed consciousness of Christ in our minds. We should not be so naively literal as to expect Jesus to appear in bodily form, some claim. But does this do the concept of Christ’s second coming justice? Can the spiritual and the literal not come in tandem? We believe the same of the sacraments; why not of the second coming?
Our faith is a complex interweaving of the symbolic and the literal, the natural and the spiritual. We believe the Eucharist is Christ’s real presence. It is also, on a certain level, a sign of a future presence of Christ not yet revealed, now still veiled under a sign. Yet the fact that the Eucharist points toward something does not negate its stature as a literal (not merely “symbolic”) reality.
Scripture certainly gives no indication that God intends to give up on the world of banquets and butterflies and music; and C. S. Lewis himself affirmed as much in his fiction, where the new creation appears as more solid and real—not less so—than the present world. And where he says, in Miracles, “the old field of space, time, matter and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.”
The sad truth is that we often “spiritualize” our faith quite out of recognition. I realize there is a delicate dance to be performed when interpreting scripture, sorting out what is to be taken literally and what metaphorically, what refers to the present and what to the future. As the novelist Michael D. O’Brien has written, Christ “is not a linear thinker. He is not a one-dimensional man. He is God and man.” And the messages he gave us hold multiple dimensions of meaning, seemingly bursting through our neat categories of past and present, literal and symbolic. Our Lord did not teach like a scholastic theologian, with propositions and proofs. He taught with parables and images, often presenting a tantalizing glimpse of a mystery instead of a fully worked out system. The images are meant to startle us into thinking, asking questions, pondering various interpretations.
Let me be frank: when I hear Our Lord describing the future kingdom as a banquet, I take it literally. I take it that the kingdom will include, among many other things, actual dining (why else would Jesus have eaten broiled fish after rising from the dead?), along with the moral goods of welcome, fellowship, and belonging that come with dining. We are at present so fragmented, isolated, and broken that real fellowship is often impossible to achieve. The image of the banquet of the kingdom assures me that this alienation will be repaired, that we will be able to sit down together at last. Likewise, I take it there will be actual music-making in the kingdom.
Lewis in another essay criticizes, and rightly so, the modern tendency to privatize religion, to make it “an occupation for the individual’s hour of leisure.” This has had a serious effect on the way we experience our faith. People talk of emotional constipation, the inability to give vent to our feelings. I think there is a spiritual and religious constipation too. Because our civilization offers little opportunity to express our faith, we keep it bottled up inside of us. Everything of a spiritual nature is forced to turn inward, lacking an outlet even among friends.
Wrapped in spiritual torpor, we in the modern world wander around zombie-like, without history, without imagination, without specific hope. How often do we stop and ponder the wonders of history and faith? Bishop Barron has reminded us of a fascinating one. Consider how a group of fishermen in the first century quietly went about fishing for men, and eventually caught the entire Empire in its net. The emperors who persecuted them are long gone—but we have elected Peter’s (Shimon Bar-Yonah’s) 266th successor. How can anyone claim that there is no visible sign of Christ’s kingdom on earth?
Such truths have become commonplace, so we take them for granted; they do not even register. Yet Christians should be living on the edge, not settled down in humdrum complacency. The early Christians were animated by the prospect of Christ’s return. Rediscovering the wonder of our faith (what Chesterton called the “romance of faith”) should be our project too, as we live in imaginative expectation of what is to come.
That same Peter wrote, in the second of his letters, an admonition to stand firm in anticipation of Christ’s return. It is an admonition that could have been written last Tuesday. For there were “scoffers” already in the first century casting doubt on the truth of Christ’s second coming. And Peter goes out to meet this objection, seemingly jumping forward to our own time:
[…] scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.”
Peter reminds us that God’s timetable does not match ours.
But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
Finally, Peter offers us a blueprint of how to live our lives in the meantime, growing in grace and knowledge.
Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire! But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. […] You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability. But grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Peter implies that “the day of the Lord” will have an element of destruction to it—one order will end, another will begin. But this will not be the destruction of creation (a mistaken interpretation) but rather the destruction of the world’s evil in all of its manifestations, from the scourge of sin right on down to sickness and the final enemy, death itself. While that old order of evil will dissolve, something infinitely greater, a brighter and more glorious field of being, will open up.
The question that Peter anticipated right from the Church’s inception is now burning in our minds: why has Christ delayed his coming for so long? Might I suggest that it was in part because God wanted a Christian civilization to develop. Christ is after all not coming to whisk us away to heaven, but to bring heaven to earth. Since our destiny is to live in a heavenized earth, it stands to reason that we need a culture and civilization, and God graciously allowed for that. Now the time is ripe. Without this insight, history has no shape for us; we don’t know where we are going or what is happening to us. The point that comes through from the New Testament is that Christ’s ascension marked the beginning of the “end times,” which we have been living in ever since.
Take heart: we are not stuck in an endless cycle. History is leading somewhere. The cyclical skeptics, those who say “it was always thus,” will of course dismiss such speculations. Every age has believed it was the last, they say; predictions of the end of the world are perennial. First, let me specify that I do not believe in “the end of the world” in the popular, doom-and-gloom sense of that phrase. My sense of “end” is more the teleological sense of the Latin word finis: fulfillment or completion. Second, it is simply the case that our faith is not cyclical but teleological (goal-directed). Waiting for Christ to return is precisely what we are doing, and the lack of seriousness about this eschatological dimension of faith in many quarters is troubling to me. It seems to me that many believers do not have a very clear sense of what the substance of Christian hope is. And I do question whether the common Heaven–Purgatory–Hell theology that we were raised in is adequate to capture it fully. (Do not misunderstand: I am not saying the theology isn’t true, only that there are other parameters by which to view the complex topic of the future life. Remember, our Master is a multidimensional thinker.)
Once we have adjusted our vision to see, as the New Testament writers did, that Christ’s rising again inaugurated the final age, and that we have been living in this period ever since, we could take the further step and see (this is just my personal proposal; take it as you will) that the period of the world wars onward has been the “final age of the final age.”
It’s worth noting, by the by, that the Church has not been around precisely “for 2000 years,” as we often carelessly state. We have not reached that bimillennial mark yet. That will happen in 2033.
Consider for a moment: have you experienced life as a series of sudden jolts and abrupt changes, or as a gradual fulfillment (though perhaps with some bumps and moments of darkness along the way)? Different people might answer differently, but for me the latter has been the case. This seems to be how God works in time—through a slow unfolding of his purposes and an incremental revelation of his glory. This is also how I believe we will experience the end times leading to the age to come. Alongside any global cataclysm, I suggest that on a personal level there will be elements of a gradual transition to a new life. We will, perhaps, awaken to realize that time has dissolved into eternity.
The second coming is of course closely connected to the doctrine of God’s kingdom. To believe in Jesus’ new advent is to believe that he is the true king, that he will return to take his rightful place as ruler of the world, setting everything right again and governing a heavenized earth in justice and peace. (What form this will take we can only imagine. Though many have theorized about it, we have never yet had one-world government, and only God is capable of heading it.)
The title of this reflection is adapted from a marvelous phrase of the theologian N. T. Wright. Jesus, as you will remember, told a story about the return of a householder from a wedding feast, to be understood as a parable of his own return. Astoundingly, Jesus implies that upon his arrival he will proceed to serve and feast us, his servants.
Midway through this parable in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus abruptly shifts the image and compares the human being to a householder and himself to a thief breaking in during the night; St. Paul echoes this in 1 Thessalonians, telling us that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
But while the kingdom is indeed sneaking in, there is a major interference: it is being laid siege by rival kingdoms. We are partially under enemy rule, living in a tension between the inauguration of God’s kingdom and its fulfillment.
Yet God is in charge and will set things right again, and everything we do now will be part of the structure of God’s future house. Exactly how, we don’t know—but that intriguing unknown is part of what pulls us onward. There are books to be read, ideas to be explored, good deeds and creative endeavors to be performed in every area of life. My own personal project is the renewal of the mind through the study of the past; perhaps you have another project. In any case, it is time to declare our faith, to stand up for core truths. As the year turns once again, let us with boldness proclaim that we are waiting for Jesus to come again. God’s project of restoration begins now.
“I shall know the fullness of joy, when I see your face, O Lord,” says the Liturgy of the Hours. The hunger and thirst for Christ, for Christ’s full presence, is growing in many of us, perhaps even reaching fever pitch. This is as it should be; God wants our appetite to increase.
But there are sobering thoughts that come with that enthusiasm. Will we know the Master at his return? Will he find faith on earth? (Lk 18:8). For the truth is that we have to be fitted for the kingdom; we should delude ourselves that we are ready yet. Love is tied to knowledge; as St. Augustine reminded us, we cannot love what we do not know. Therefore, we must steep ourselves in our faith, dedicating ourselves to knowing the Son of God through word and sacrament. And as we do so, let us look for the “accompanying signs” and become ourselves heralds of his arrival.
__________
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image, uploaded by Wolfgang Sauber, is “Last Judgment – Tuba angel” (1780), by Johann Georg Unruhe, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
