The Wondrous Gift:
The Coming of Christ at the End of Time
by Sr Ann Swailes o.p.
What I want to explore now is how we can and should nevertheless see this coming too as a gift and, in particular a gift for us when we are feeling anxious or fearful. There is plenty in our world at the moment, goodness knows, and perhaps in our own lives too, to alarm and frighten us, and I’m not suggesting that thinking about the last coming of Christ provides us with a magic wand to conjure away our anxiety. But I do think it can help to put it into another, slightly comforting context. This is very much work in progress for me, but I’m going to be sharing with you, in the next twenty minutes or so something of how I’ve been thinking about this recently. If this is any help to anyone here, I’ll be glad, but more importantly I’m going to invite us to see what gift the Lord might have in store for us today as we listen to both words and music that speak of this final coming of the Lord in ways that I hope will speak, too, of peace.
But I think it is important to begin by asking ourselves just why it is that we may find it difficult to see the gift in this final coming of the Lord, and I suspect the first thing to say here is that, if we’re honest, we quite possibly don’t really think about this coming of the Lord all that much or all that often at all.
Perhaps that’s partly just because it seems so remote from our day to day experience.
And in this again it seems rather unlike those other two comings of the Lord that we’ll be thinking about today. After all, we do all celebrate Christmas every year, and generally that requires us thinking about it rather a lot. And, please God, we do all have the experience, at least from time to time, of gratefully recognising God at work in our lives in all sorts of ways in the here and now. But it has been nearly 2000 years since Jesus ascended to his Father in heaven, and while his first followers seemed to expect he would return very soon, he – hasn’t, and it’s easy to forget that he said he was going to.
But I’m not sure that this is the only reason we don’t think about the last coming of the Lord all that often. I suspect it’s also precisely because we do find it hard to think of this as a gift, hard to see it as something to look forward to.
The pictures that our scriptures give us of the return of the Lord after all, are somewhat disturbing to say the least.
St Matthew, for instance, tells us this:
“Immediately after the distress of those days 'the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’[b]
“Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth[c] will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
It’s all apparently at least as much threat as promise, and so I think it’s quite likely that part of the reason we don’t think that much about the final coming of the Lord is that we – very understandably – are afraid to. It’s understandable – but I think it’s a mistake, precisely because I think these pictures, which do seem on the face of it rather terrifying, can, if we let them, help to heal our fears, fears of what the future may bring,
To let that happen, though, there is something rather simple we need to remember that, oddly enough, I think we rather often forget. And it’s this. The three comings we reflect on in Advent, that we are thinking about today, all have the same central character. The Jesus to whom we sing lullabies at Christmas, the Jesus who comes to us in the tiny fragile host at Mass, is not a different Jesus from the one whom, we are told in this passage and others like it. will come in power and great glory on the clouds of heaven, despite all appearances to the contrary.
The sun and moon will lose their light, the world will rock on its foundations, the stars will tumble to the earth to welcome the return of the Lord who comes with clouds descending. And, at first sight, that might seem like a bullying display of naked power, an assertion that might is right, and there’s nothing we can do but tremble in the face of such a demonstration of brute force. It’s the sort of thing that is sometimes humorously acknowledged in that sentence sometime printed on tee-shirts and the like: Jesus is coming, look busy. But behind the joke, there perhaps lurks for some of us a serious anxiety: a secret fear of what might happen when we meet him. But whatever these tremendous convulsions in the heavens mean, it surely can’t be that, precisely because this is not a different Jesus.
The Lord who is returning on the clouds of glory is the same one the gospels portray as he who will not break the bruised reed or quench the flickering flame, the healer of the sick and friend of outcasts, the one who has lived the precarious vulnerability of human life from birth in the outhouse of an overcrowded pub all the way to a death by execution deliberately designed to be obscenely humiliating, in order to bring us home to his Father and ours. He’s also the same one who continues to invite us to meet him and let him love us day by day in the sacraments. We might be – we should be – in awe of this Lord and his compassion for us, but we should never cringe in fear of him.
These pictures though, are there in our scriptures and in our liturgy, especially our Advent liturgy, for a reason , and it’s a reason which – a bit counter-intuitively, perhaps - can also do something to calm our fears if we allow it to, I think. Certain ancient commentators on the scriptures read this language of the sun and moon hiding their light, the stars falling from their places, as in itself a description of a kind of liturgy: creation bowing down in worship of its Lord and maker, singing, as it were a Hallelujah chorus to its Lord who will reign for ever and ever. And this kind of notion of creation at prayer is certainly a very old one: a text written by a priest in Rome around the year 215 AD, for instance, speaks of a tradition being “handed down to us by the elders”, according to which at midnight, “every creature hushes for a brief moment to praise the Lord. Stars and trees and waters stand still for an instant. All the hosts of angels serving him, together with souls of the righteous praise God”. The author of this work connects this with the coming of the Lord at the end of time, with all those parables of the Lord that suggest this will take place at night. But, interestingly, it’s perhaps also another reminder that the Jesus of Bethlehem and the Jesus who comes at the end of time are one and the same.
Some of you may know the poignant little poem by Thomas Hardy entitled The Oxen, which refers to an old west country legend according to which, at midnight on Christmas Eve the cattle in their stalls kneel in honour of the birth of Christ. There are numerous variations in European folklore of a story of how animals are given the power of speech on Christmas Eve and announce the Nativity, sometimes with their distinctive cries being made to sound as if they are having a conversation about it in Latin: so the owl enquiring where Christ has been born hoots “u-u-u- ubi” and the sheep bleats in response “Be-e-e-etlem”.All of this, of course, is in a very different key from the grand biblical images of the heavenly bodies bowing in adoration . But it does seem to be an echo at least, of something similar, making the same point about the first coming of Christ that the scriptures make about his last: this is the creator of all things, and so all things worship and adore him, both at his coming into the world and at his returning to the world.
But why might this soothe our fears?
Simply because the pictures our scriptures give us of the sheer greatness of the creation that bows before the Lord points to the still greater greatness of the creator. In his Confessions, St Augustine describes how, before his conversion, and desperately searching for God, he wonders whether the mighty works of nature are themselves divine and asks the sun and moon directly: are you God? They tell him they are not, and Augustine questions them further: tell me something about God. And the heavenly bodies cry aloud with one voice of praise: “He made us”. And that is indeed to tell us something very important about God. If the sun and moon and stars are so great that they can, in their majesty and beauty be mistaken for God, then how much more beautiful and majestic, how much more worthy of praise, must God himself be, but also how much mightier? Whatever created thing threatens us is smaller and weaker than our creator, however mighty and invincible it might seem to us. But this almighty creator, the one whom the sun and moon and stars adore, is also the baby at Bethlehem, and also the one who whispers to us in the silence of our hearts.
So let’s turn to that Lord.
What we are going to do now is to look once again at a vision of that triumphant return of Jesus in majesty, but through this new lens we’ve been thinking about this morning. I’m going, first, to read another short extract from the gospels describing that return, this time from St Luke.
There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.
And then, we’ll listen together to that Hallelujah Chorus I suggested we might imagine the heavenly bodies singing to the Lord. The words of that chorus, set to Handel’s unforgettable music, come from the Book of Revelation, and they describe how the whole of creation, natural and human, has been transfigured by the coming of Jesus into the world, and by his death and resurrection and ascension to the heaven from which he will come again: the Kingdom of this world has become the Kingdom of our Lord God and of his Christ.
And whilst we listen, you might find yourself simply joining in that great chorus of praise, giving
thanks that the Kingdom of this world has indeed become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Or, if and when you feel ready to do so, you might want to place before Jesus just one thing of which you are afraid, over which you would like him to triumph. It might be a situation in your own life, or the life of someone you love; it might be some part of the anguish of our world at this time. It might not even be something you can name all that clearly, just a vaguer but still horribly real sense of being overwhelmed. It may be that all you want to do, all you need to do, all you can do, is rest for a moment with and in the words and music you hear. Maybe that is what the Lord wants for you right now. There is no one right way to welcome the coming of the Lord. And whatever the words and the music bring you this morning is the gift of the Lord who is to come.