Come Again?

Propers: Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let’s talk about the Second Coming of Christ.

Jesus, as you may know, was born into a sea of messianic expectation. The Prophets—or at least the interpretations of the Prophets dominant in Jesus’ day—all pointed to a divine Messiah who was due to show up any time now. There were certain signs for which the faithful were searching, in the way that Tibetan Buddhists look for signs of the Dalai Lama’s next rebirth.

A star was supposed to rise, a new star, a special star. Foreigners were to come from afar bringing gifts: gold, frankincense, that sort of thing. It’s all there in the Psalms. And there’s a suffering servant who’s to die and rise again, and a virgin who’s prophesied to give birth—or a maiden, depending on which version and language you read.

The point is, this was all due to happen right at the time of Jesus. And it wasn’t just the Judeans who thought so. The Greeks and the Romans knew of the Hebrew prophecies, and had a few of their own: about a Savior from Judea, a Hebrew Child who would silence all the oracles of the gods. It was in the air back then. And let’s be clear on what they expected this Messiah to be.

The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah have been around, in one form or another, for a long time. They trace their roots way back. And according to their own stories, their own histories, they have been conquered, enslaved, and exiled many times over. By rights, they should have vanished, like so many other forgotten peoples of the ancient world. But Israel kept getting back up; Israel kept resurrecting. And this, they believed, was because of God. Not just a god, mind you, but the God.

Israel came to understand that their god Yahweh was in fact the One God of all peoples, all places, and all things: infinite, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, all good. And He had given them a mission: the mission to spread ethical monotheism to everyone. Israel was a chosen people with a chosen purpose. Israel had the promise of God.

Now, throughout that long history, checkered so with tragedy and triumph, the kings, priests, and prophets of Israel were anointed with oil—as a sign of God’s blessing, God’s Spirit, and God’s superabundance. The Hebrew for “anointed” is “messiah.” And in Greek, the language of the New Testament, anointing is “chrism.” Thus, one so anointed is “christ.”

During the Babylonian Exile, half a millennium before Jesus, the Prophets of Israel began to speak of a new age, of a new covenant, heralding the resurrection of the dead and the forgiveness of all sins. It would be led by a messiah, but not just any old anointed one—not just any old prophet or priest or king. This would be a new sort of Messiah for a New Covenant: a divine Messiah, a cosmic Christ, who would not fail as did the kings of old. This Christ would come from heaven, not earth; some even seemed to think that He would somehow be God Himself, God in the flesh, Immanuel, God-With-Us.

And this expectation took on new importance when the people of Israel, the people of Judah, were once again conquered, this time by the Empire of Rome. They were all looking for this new King to show up, raise an army, boot out the pagans, and reëstablish the Kingdom of Israel as the political Kingdom of God. And this is what everyone wanted Jesus to do, isn’t it? Everybody wanted Him to take up the sword—or better yet, start throwing fireballs!—and bring about God’s Kingdom in iron and blood. That’s what kings do. That’s what messiahs do.

And there was no shortage of takers, you know. This is what I think a lot of Christians don’t quite understand: that there were many messiahs, many claimants to David’s empty throne, and to all the prophecies of the Exile. Did you ever hear of Judas the Galilean? No? He raised a little war-band, which was quickly killed off by Rome. Ever hear of the Zealots and the Romano-Jewish War? They tried to build a theocracy, and got the Temple burned instead.

Or how about Bar Kochba, the messianic leader whose name means “Son of the Star”? There was a contender! But his war ended in a place called the Cave of Horrors, which should tell you just how well that went. History has not been kind to him. All of them messiahs of the sword, and all of them quite dead. In fact, apart from scholars and a couple bookish clergy, chances are that you’ve never heard of a one of them. Rome squished them all like roaches underfoot, and barely broke a sweat.

In our Gospel reading this morning, James and John have asked the right to stand at Jesus’ side, one on His right and one on His left, when He comes into His glory. They want to be out front, you see; they want to be the vanguard for when the revolution comes! And Jesus has to tell them—He has to make them understand—that they’ve got this whole Messiah thing exactly backwards. They don’t know what they ask. The people on His right and left are crucified as well!

But at least in this, James and John are far from alone in their ignorance. At one point the Apostles gather a few pathetic swords, and Jesus sighs at their misunderstanding. Peter openly rebukes the Christ for talking of crosses and tombs. And Judas—well, we all know how far Judas was willing to go in order to force Jesus’ hand, don’t we? To force Him to start a holy war. Judas wanted Jesus to be his revolutionary, his zealot, his Son of the Star. And when He wasn’t, when He refused to fight, Judas couldn’t live with what he’d done.

Jesus was the opposite of all those other messiahs. That’s why He’s the one whom we remember! He’s the one whom Rome could not keep buried in that tomb. And because of that, because of who He is, Jesus is the only one to go and conquer Rome! —not with the sword, not with fire, but with the Good News of salvation. The Empire that crucified Christ, and so many others, would one and all bow to the Messiah whom they’d murdered on that tree: the Christ who does not fail.

But here’s the kicker. The same humanity, the same religious zealots, who got the first coming of Christ so completely and utterly wrong, have by and large applied the same mistaken expectations now to His Second Coming. Okay, they say, so, when Jesus showed up the first time, He didn’t bring fire and blood and the sword and the conquering hosts of heaven, I’ll give you that. But the second time, oh, surely the second time that’s exactly what He’ll do.

Then He’ll be the War-Christ we’ve always really wanted; that James and John and Peter expected Him to be; that Judas sought so strongly to awaken and provoke. I guess Judas’ real sin was that his timing was just a bit off, right? Wrong century. He should’ve been a twenty-first century American fundamentalist. Oh, my friends.

The Second Coming of Jesus will not be what we expect. Christ Himself says not to listen to people who say, “Oh, there He is! Wait, no, He’s over there!” for the coming of the Son of Man will be like lightning that leaps from east to west. The Second Coming of Jesus will not be a specific date on the calendar. It’s not like August 29, 1997, when Skynet goes online. The coming of Jesus—what theologians call Parousia, the “Presence”—exists beyond time. It is in fact the event that connects eternity to every moment we know here below.

When you read the Scriptures, you see that there is not one single Day of the Lord, at least not in any sense of once-and-done. Rather, the Day of the Lord is whenever eternity breaks into time, whenever Creation connects to the Creator. The Prophets of old talked about the overthrow of earthly kingdoms as the Day of the Lord. Peter spoke of Pentecost, in the Book of Acts, as the prophesied Day of the Lord, when the Spirit falls upon all peoples and the moon turns to blood.

When the Evangelists speak of the Day of the Lord, they’re quite clearly referencing the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple in AD 70, as is John in the Book of Revelation. And for each of us, the Day of the Lord will arrive at the hour of our death. If the Apocalypse doesn’t come to us, we go to the Apocalypse. And that’s true not only for individual, bodily death but for the death of peoples and nations, relationships and families. There are a thousand-thousand Days of the Lord, which are really just the one Day, the Parousia beyond space and time, which breaks into our world at every Eucharist, every Baptism, every liturgy.

It is what lifts us up from death to life, from earth to heaven, from our grave up to our God. And yes, it’s true, the world will end, time will end. But for we who are made one in Christ, the end is already here; and the resurrection is already ours.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.