He Will Come Again

Advent is with us once again and along with it, comes the tempting tendency to make it merely a time to make our preparations for Christmas, to reduce Advent to a sort of preview of the coming bigger festival. It is indeed a time to get our minds and hearts right for the wonderful arrival of the Christ-child, but it is surely so much more besides. The Nicene Creed and the Advent collect remind us that all of human history is pointing towards its climax, when Jesus will return in His glory to judge us all – those who believe in Him and those who don’t – and to usher in a new heaven and a new earth, where He will reign in righteousness and truth, the governing principles of this amazing new world order. The mediaeval Christian Peter Abelard urges us on:

“Now in the meanwhile, with hearts lifted high,
We for that country must yearn and must sigh;
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
Through our long exile on Babylon’s strand.”

The two years since the Pandemic began could have been a time for the Church to proclaim the return of Christ, who alone will bring all death, pain and sorrow to an end. This message should have been even more relevant now that Climate Change is pointing so clearly towards the fact that even the earth itself has a finite existence. Instead the Church has linked itself lazily and uncritically to the “Save the Planet” bandwaggon, without having the courage to bring its own unique Biblical insights to bear on the problem. Jesus Himself forecast that the earth would one day pass away and He left us some very clear indicators as to what the signals of the end will be. They are there in all three Synoptic Gospels, St. Luke 21, vv. 25-28, St. Mark 13, vv. 14-27 and St. Matthew 24, vv. 4-30.

However, we should beware of a cause which has justifiably caught the zeitgeist of young people the world over, but significantly, also been hijacked by nearly every government and regime across the planet, both good and bad. It may be that the entire ruling class everywhere has spotted a unique opportunity to get out of an economic hole and build a new economy, jobs and fortunes upon carbon-free technologies. They have at last discovered a way to declare pretty well everything we now have completely redundant, realising only too well that the consumer economy has reached saturation point. There is virtually nothing left for us to buy – we already possess everything!

It is probably true that nobody has entered the Kingdom of God purely by being frightened into it, but rather because they have been captured by the amazing grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet Jesus‘s sad farewell words to the city of Jerusalem on His way to the cross in St. Luke 23, v.24 illustrate so clearly that His sacred heart both warns us of future catastrophes, yet yearns to see us human beings respond to His gracious invitation by repenting, believing and obeying Him.

Climate change should warn us all that pinning our plans on saving the planet is a forlorn hope. Many prominent scientists have predicted that we are already too late to do so. We should rather be proclaiming “now in the time of this mortal life” that people can become citizens of a new heaven and a new earth. Precisely because this Kingdom will be built around God’s principles of righteousness and truth it can and will succeed. Our present world is built upon the diametric opposites of these principles and is therefore doomed to fail. It is time to proclaim the truth of the Second Coming with confidence and gratefulness. Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus!