The Inevitability of God’s Faithfulness

Christ is, was, and will come again | Advent 1, Year A

Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

Appearance to Ten by Ivanka Demchuk

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“Christ has died,” as we all say in the great prayer before communion, “Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” Prior to this, in the Creed, we said: “He will come to judge the living and the dead.” And of course, now in Advent, the refrain is common: Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Advent, which begins today, is about the coming of Jesus. Naturally, with its position right before Christmas, it would be easy for us to assume that the “coming of Jesus” we are referring to is his birth in a stable. However, Advent draws our attention to something more embarrassing to our rationality than our belief that our saviour was born in a manger – The Christian belief that Christ is going to return. While the other seasons of the Church’s year do, in fact, draw directly from the moments in the historical life of Jesus – Christmas, his incarnation; Epiphany, his light to the gentiles; Lent, his journey to the cross; Holy Week, the final week leading to his death; Easter, his resurrection; and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit and the open hospitality and welcome of Christ for the world – Advent, however, gathers up the past and present while looking for the return of Jesus that we confess in the creed.

“In a very real sense, the Christian community lives in Advent all the time. It can well be called the Time Between, because the people of God live in the time between the first coming of Christ, incognito in the stable in Bethlehem, and his second coming, in glory, to judge the living and the dead. In the Time Between, “our lives are hidden with Christ in God; when Christ who is our life appears, then we also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:3–4). Advent contains within itself the crucial balance of the now and the not-yet that our faith requires.”¹

Advent is, in essence, where history lives. The great Christian confession and hope is that time is unfolding on an arc towards God’s restoration and justice. Swords will become plowshares as Isaiah 2 promised. He is putting all things to rights. Christians, or more properly humans, are always Advent people, because Christ is coming again.

Christians, however, truly are Advent people because we know that while Christ is coming again (Adventus glorificamus), Christ did come in his incarnation (Adventus redemptionis), and “is come” in the now in the church, his word, and his eucharist (Adventus sanctificationis). So Advent calls us to live by the Holy Spirit in grace and love here and now.

Strangely, when we hear all of this, as humans, our tendency is to not hear it. Rather than accept the comfort of Christ’s presence and future hope, we are driven by a different anxiety: When?

To which our gospel today reminds us:

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36 NRSV)

Our anxious “when” is not new. Origen spoke to it in the 3^rd Century:

All who listen to the depths of the gospel and live it so completely that none of it remains veiled from them care very little about whether the end of the world will come suddenly and all at once or gradually and little by little. …But I know another kind of end for the righteous person who is able to say along with the apostle, “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world.” In a certain sense, the end of the world has already come for the person to whom the world is crucified. And to one who is dead to worldly things the day of the Lord has already arrived, for the Son of man comes to the soul of the one who no longer lives for sin or for the world.²

Most of us ignore this Origen however. The “when” question is still deafening to many of us. Especially when we read this week’s gospel text. Just this past September we were told that “Rapture Day” was apparently upon us. TikTok’s were aplenty and even CBC ran a story about it. Google’s AI, however, brilliantly understates: “The day passed without incident.” This didn’t stop more than a few people awaiting the so-called Rapture – the belief that texts like today’s speak of Christ’s sudden return and snatching away of the Church.

In recent history, multiple generations of the Church have been exposed to this idea, including in the form of a Nicholas Cage movie, and gained the impression that this a biblical idea. Most don’t realize that it’s a relatively new way to read these texts that seems, to me, to capture attention because of an early 20^th century tendency to doubt that God really could deal with evil and restore the world.

To say it plainly. The idea that God could simply remove Christians and abandon the world is not a biblical theology. Rapture ideas, possibly unintentionally, are an unwillingness to believe in God’s hand in the future. It is the opposite of Advent. The gospel text today invites us, as it alludes to Noah, to remember a God who will deal with evil by removing it at a time and moment in which God has chosen. It is evil and unrighteousness that is being “taken away”. That which is good is “left behind.”

“The future toward which God points is already present with him. And heaven is that future to which he wills to bring his people insofar as it is already present with him…When God comes to us, he comes from where he wants to bring us.” - Robert Jenson³

This is the future toward which God points, and from which Christ comes to us. Advent, through readings like today, is the season that reminds us that this is all in God’s hands. As such, our reaction to this gospel reading is to realize that our presence in this time is as a waiting, Advent people of God. James K.A. Smith frames it so well for us.

“Christians are a futural people. Every day we pray for God’s kingdom to come. But as long as we are praying it, it hasn’t yet arrived, which means we are also a waiting people… It’s not just that Christians keep a different calendar; Christians keep time differently because we are citizens of a kingdom that will arrive from the future.”⁴

To be Christian is not to ask “when is Christ coming?” it is to know that when Christ comes, it will be to put all things right. It is to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done.” There is an underlying nuance here that is important. It is all happening under God’s control, it is from him. This means that the heaven, or future, to which the world is being drawn is not some reward for us conserving the present, or even a nostalgic commitment to the past. It also means that it is not some utopian dream that we can enforce upon the future. Much like Christ’s coming the first time, the help will come from beyond us.

Christians are neither conservatives nor utopians – we are God’s people of Advent living between his comings.

We are waiting for his faithfulness, not he for ours. About the time “know one knows” (Mt 24:36), except that it will be “at an hour you do not expect.” (Mt 24:44). Jesus seems to be telling us that we are not in control of this. We are not making it work. Pay attention: How could we be? We don’t even know when it’s happening. It is simply an inevitability because God is faithful. Advent, Christ’s coming, whether now, then, or in the future, is simply an act of God rooted not in his nostalgia or utopianism, but his grace and love.

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As such, we the Church, in these exact and specific times, can still say confidently with St. Paul:

…our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. (Romans 13:11)

Paul knows not when Christ is coming, but what time it is. It is time, he says in essence, to wake up and get dressed. He reminds us that Christ has come, in flesh, and Christ will come again, in glory, so the call for those of us “in the time between,” as Rutledge called it, is to “put on Christ”. To be clothed with Christ, as his Advent people for the world. Here is the stunning realization of New Testament Theology. Christ has come, Christ will come, and Christ is present now in the world in the Church.

Unsurprisingly, Bonhoeffer understood this. In the growing global tension of the 1930s when many undoubtedly hoped for Christ’s return, Bonhoeffer reminded us that Christ is still present “in the time between”:

The space of Christ in the world is occupied by the church; it is the present Christ.⁵

Since Pentecost Jesus Christ lives here on earth in the form of his body, the church-community. Here is his body crucified and risen, here is the humanity he assumed. To be baptized therefore means to become a member of the church-community, a member of the body of Christ (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 12:13).⁶

Advent invites us to realize that we need the Church. This might be hard for some of us to hear. To be fair, it’s inevitable that our overly individualist approach to spirituality will baulk at the idea that I need anything other than “me and Jesus.” We’re suspicious of that kind of talk. As a result many contemporary Christians don’t really think they need the church. And many of us don’t realize that it’s really unusual for Christians to think like that.

For the earliest Christ followers it would not be controversial to say that to be a Christian the Christian needs the church. Our community with Christ is enabled through his church because the Church is the body of Christ “for us”. Christ’s body is always “for us” — as Bonhoeffer said ”on the cross, in the word, in baptism, and in the Lord’s Supper.”⁷ But it is also never for us alone, Christ has intentionally drawn us into community and that is how we are “clothed with him.”

Wonderfully ironically, however, Advent also invites us to realize that we will fail at this. And that is ok. Karl Barth brilliantly observes that when we come together as the church what becomes deeply and honestly apparent to us is our basic lack. But this is profoundly important. Our pursuit of being the “perfect church”, your pursuit of finding the “perfect church”, are rooted in a denial of the truth of Advent – that our and the world’s hope for redemption and restoration is singularly and only in God. This is why Barth famously says:

“What other time or season can or will the Church ever have but that of Advent?”⁸

This is not to defend our failings or harm within the churches that many of us have experienced or participated within, but rather to remind us that even our failings highlight how Advent leads us to pray: “Lord, have mercy upon us! Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Christ is coming. Not at our command, and fortunately not when we get our act together. And this is why we must not rush to Christmas but wait in Advent. We need to learn to wait “in the time between” and we need the church to do that properly. So perhaps I can say it like this: If Advent calls us to live as Christians between the two comings of Christ, Advent is telling us that it’s time to go to and be the Church.

Amen.

1. Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, p. 26

2. Commentary on Matthew 56.

3. Robert Jenson, A Theology in Outline, p.38.

4. James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time, p.148

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937 DWBE 14, p.446

6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship DWBE 4, p.218

7. ibid. p.217.

8. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part 3.1, p. 322.