Year A Advent 1—Matthew 24:36-44
I’m not a very patient person really. I like things to be done in good order and on time; and I’m not averse to getting annoyed with myself or with other people when they’re not. Yes, patience is definitely a virtue that I’m still working on.
So, I’m not all that patient about the promises of God either. I want God’s realm of justice and peace right now! Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for? It’s all very well to talk about “the final consummation of all things which Christ will bring”, which the Basis of Union does, and about the “promised goal”; but just when is this promised end going to materialise—after all we Christians have been waiting for 2000 years already and the Jewish people have been waiting for a lot longer than that. Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for?
Of course, I’m not much interested in the end of the world as the movies have it—lots of chaos, havoc and destruction; nor am I much looking forward to the kind of scenarios that appear to be described in our Gospel reading for today—two people working together and one disappears; and I’m definitely not interested in the that rather dubious theological concept popularly known as the “rapture”. I really have no idea what some of our Christian brothers and sisters think that has to do with our shared Christian theology and the wonderful promises of God’s reign. Who on earth would think that that was worth waiting for?
In our shared Christian story, we wait with expectation the coming of the day of the Lord Jesus, i.e. we wait for the fullness of the relationship between God and Creation that Christ embodies, inaugurates and prefigures. But we do not agree on how that will happen, what it will be like, and the means by which it will come about.
The scenarios in today’s Gospel reading have tended to be popular around significant dates like turns of the millennia. Those stories were made very popular in the 1970s by a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson and by songs like Larry Norman’s “I wish we’d all been ready”. More recently, in the 1990s, the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins resurrected them again for popular conception, with the same distortions of meaning that have plague this text for a very long time (but especially during the 19th century and a particular kind of what’s called “dispensationalist” doctrine).
The scenarios from Matthew are put together by “rapture” devotees with equally and even more gruesome tales from other apocalyptic literature in the Bible, i.e. with stories that predicted great disasters and even total destruction in the face of the coming reign of God. And this rather indiscriminate matching of biblical texts with its highly judgemental interpretative approach produced a rather dubious understanding of the Christian expectation that Christ will come again. The return of Christ was envisaged as a three-stage process: a time when “true believers” are caught up into God; a waiting period “in which the rest of humanity struggles to comprehend its situation and find faith”; before Christ’s final return (Vicky Balabanski, “A Surprise Ending!”, Seasons of the Spirit 28 Nov 2010).
New Testament scholar, Vicky Balabanski points out that, in this text from Matthew, we aren’t even told whether being taken is good or bad. Are the people taken rescued or are they taken away for judgement?
What is important is not the what will happen, but its relative predictability. Jesus is saying to the disciples in his “farewell discourse”, and Matthew is saying to his readers after the destruction of the second Temple that, if they think they know what is going to happen, they’d better think again. If they think they know what is going to happen, they’d better think again.
The disciples and the early Christians are warned against speculation. They are warned against thinking that they can control or even understand the future. In fact, probably the most important verse of the passage today is the first one, v. 36: no-one knows the day or the hour… except God. No-one knows the day or the hour except God. No-one knows the future. No-one can control events. No-one can predict—no-one except God. And we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can.
But if you think that’s about scaring us into submission, about frightening us into being good, so that we won’t be found wanting, then you’d also better think again. Any visions of the end times, any notions of what the fulfilment of all things in Christ will mean that are intended to instil belief in God through fear miss the point entirely. Waiting is not about doing good because we’ve been scared into it; or don’t want to end up eternally damned. Waiting is about taking the time to explore our relationship with God, about learning to love God and to love God’s creation. That’s what we’re called to do in this time of waiting—to explore our relationship with God; to get to know God. Not in order to win a place in some far off paradise; but because that is the very best that is offered to us right now.
The kind of scenarios envisioned by the “rapture” crowd shift the attention off God onto us; and even more than that they create a God-shaped image that is nothing like the God-shaped revelation we have in Jesus. Bill Loader, another New Testament scholar, reminds us that “it is a Jesus-shaped God who is our hope”: a God who empties God’s self for the sake of the Creation; a God who loves sacrificially; and stands in solidarity with the world God has made (Bill Loader, Advent 1 www.staff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtAdvent1.htm).
As the people of God, we are called to wait attentively and patiently—not in an empty space, but in a God-given time for relationship with God and with one another. It isn’t about twiddling our thumbs, but being engaged. It isn’t about always looking for the next thing, but being present in the world in which we find ourselves, the world that God has given us.
It’s about being aware of what the God of future promises is saying and doing right here, right now, today. It’s about seeking God’s “perspective on the issues of today”—personally, environmentally, communally, nationally, internationally. It’s about making ourselves open to the vision of God now. That’s the patience God asks for in our anticipation of the fulfilment of all God’s promises already begun and accomplished in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Now is God’s time—our time to wait in anticipation of the fulfilment of all God’s promises; not by trying to predict the future, but by seeking relationship with God know—by proclaiming justice, feeding the hungry, comforting the sick and bereaved, and announcing God’s reign in God’s world. Our left-behindness is not to be found in some future apocalypse but in the opportunities which exist now right before our very eyes—the opportunities to explore relationship with God and the whole of God’s creation. And that sort of patience is a virtue, I'm going to need to do a lot more work on.
