As you can see with the way our church has been so nicely decorated, we enter this Sunday into the time of Advent, those four weeks leading up to Christmas, and it’s also the beginning of our liturgical year. This is also the time when we move to another Gospel, and this year we are going to read from Luke’s, as you may have noticed when I announced the lesson. Interestingly, the passage we have just heard differs very little from the passage we have read from Mark’s two weeks ago, the “little apocalypse”. If you remember the story, there was this man admiring the Temple in front of Jesus, and Jesus started predicting the destruction of the Temple, and his disciples mistakenly though he was prophetizing the end of the world. So today we have a continuation of this passage, only in Luke’s words, and this time it looks like Jesus is moving from talking about the Temple and to actually talking about the end of all things with the return of the Son of Man, his coming, his “advent“, which is the reason why it falls in our readings today. It’s also a “little apocalypse” although scholars rather call that “an eschatological discourse”, in Greek a discourse on the last things.
Okay, so concretely, why should we hear about the last things and what is it that we want to know about them? Well, we talked about that already that it looks like basically all generations, when contemplating the amount of evil and destruction in the world, have come to believe they were witnessing “the beginning of the end” of the world. So of course it’s scary, and we want to know exactly when this is going to happen in order to prepare, and we all have heard about the craziest ways some people try to prepare for this event. And now this is exactly what Jesus is going to address in this discourse, although he may say something that will first leave us a bit disappointed.
In fact, the first thing that we need to realize is that Jesus did not know when these things were going to happen. In Matthew’s Gospel, he says it very plainly: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ” (Matthew 24:36). Now this indeed can be disappointing for us to understand that, in the same way it was disappointing for the disciples when they heard that, some of us may even find it shocking, assuming that if Jesus was God, he should have known about that. Well, as we get ready to celebrate the mystery of the incarnation at Christmas, our belief that God “took flesh” in Jesus, we have to be a little clearer about what the incarnation means. God was not present in Jesus as if God’s mind was hidden behind the appearance of a human body. Jesus had a real human body which means he had a human brain, a brain certainly limited would it be only by its perception of time and space. Jesus did not just come down from heaven, he came from his mother’s womb, as a child who had to learn how to talk, how to walk, how to eat. He didn’t know everything, we even have to consider the possibility that at the beginning he knew nothing. Yet what the Gospels tell us is that even as a child people could see his wisdom, his holiness, his deep understanding of the Scriptures, his unique relationship with the one he called his Father, and this all in Luke’s Gospel (Chapter 2). This is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews concludes: “[He is not] unable to empathize with our weaknesses (…) yet he did not sin.” Jesus was exactly like us, except that he did not sin, but that’s the “only” difference with us.
So why am I saying all of this? Well, when we think about the end of times, if we can acknowledge that Jesus did not know when it was coming, we should have the humility and the wisdom to not be too preoccupied with finding when it’s coming or finding someone who pretends to know when it’s coming. We are limited with our understanding of time and space and if sometimes it’s a great thing to try to transcend our limits, sometimes it’s also very foolish, as it is the case here. We should only worry about imitating Jesus in our desire to grow in wisdom and holiness. If we do that though, we can hear the actual message of Jesus in this passage, but also throughout the Gospel, since it is his first predication in Mark 1:15 : “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”. In our passage again today, the last teachings of Jesus before he died, we hear him again telling his disciples “The kingdom of God is near”, and if they were attentive to what’s going on around us, as they look for the sign of summer in nature, they would be able to discern it. The world as it is is unraveling to let another reality take place. Jesus talks about this things taking place before “this generation has passed away“, but we have to understand that in Biblical language, a generation is not always a number of decades, it is often an expression used to talk about “sinful people”, a brood of people if you will.So really what Jesus says is that our sinful and broken world is coming to an end because something else is meant to replace it, sinful people will be made new, and as Jeremiah as prophetized it in the first lesson we have heard, the Messiah will be the sign of the beginning of these things: “I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness“.
And so, this is what we have to understand: not knowing when the end of this world is to come, we have to see Jesus as the sign of the coming of God’s kingdom, and now Jesus asks his disciples to live accordingly to this reality that is taking place. Telling them that this world isn’t going to last, Jesus tells his disciples how to live in this world. It’s interesting because it’s something we’ve just talked about in Bible study this week: How the biggest assumption about Christians is that they don’t want to face reality so they have this fantasy of heaven that helps them cope. I don’t know, maybe people are a little right to say that, maybe we have become like that sometimes. But the thing is, when we read the Gospel today, we have to realize it should be exactly the opposite: Jesus tells his disciples to hold on to this truth that the world is passing away so they can be in the world now without fleeing or ignoring it. He opposes two attitudes: People fainting from fear and foreboding at what is coming upon the world on one side, and on the other side disciples who stand up and raise their heads because [their] redemption is coming near; and again Jesus opposes People who have their hearts weighed down by dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of life on one side, and on the other side disciples alert at all times, praying to have strength to escape [what is evil]. Because we have this vision of the end, because we know that the world and its values are passing away, we don‘t make this world our ultimate goal. If we don‘t make this world our ultimate goal, then we should not be so terrified when the end come, rather see our Redemption, our liberation, we can therefore face reality. And it’s true that so many of the people who say Christians don’t want to face reality are the same who seek oblivion in those things Jesus name: dissipation, drunkenness or even the worries of this life, so many people today lead busy, busy lives so they don’t have to think about its ultimate meaning.
Okay, so again, concretely, why should we hear about the last things and what is it that we want to know about them? So we may prepare accordingly, not preparing by stocking up on food and first necessities, rather by stocking up on faith, courage and trust. We have started this celebration of the first Sunday of Advent by lighting the candle of hope. Hope is not this thing we can hold on to so we don’t have to face what’s happening now, rather we can face what’s happening now because we have hope. We know God’s kingdom and God’s justice will prevail so we can live according to those values right now. Hope is a strength that makes things happen in our world. This is also what Jesus calls watchfulness. This past week, I had an opportunity to watch a documentary about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a theologian who lived in Germany during Hitler’s dictatorship. And it seemed to me that he really embodied this spirit of what it means to be alert. While many churches were trying to compromise surrendering in fear, Bonhoeffer called to resistance against evil and did everything in his power to oppose the Reich, denouncing its crimes, especially against the Jews. He ended up in a Nazi jail where he wrote many letters. In one of them, he confessed that he wondered what kind of person he was, if he was this hero people seemed to believed he was, or if he was just this anxious and very scared man he knew himself to be. The answer is probably that he was a little bit of both, an ordinary man and yet a man to whom God gave the strength to do all those things he was afraid of, and this because he had this vision of what was real and meant to endure: love between people, kindness and justice, and he could also see all those things that were to passe away: nationalism, love of power, exploitation of others. Like him, we are called to cling to this vision of the kingdom, and this not to escape, but to resist. What are the evils we have to resit so we can stand in vigilant hope in the world today?