The Second Coming
The Gospel readings for Advent begin not by anticipating the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem but instead by looking forward to the end of time and Jesus’ “second coming” in glory. Given that the church year moves toward its end with several weeks of parables looking toward judgment and then closes with Christ the King and the anticipation of final judgment, starting Advent with the “little apocalypses” of Mark, Matthew, or Luke draws things full circle. More importantly, it prevents us from embracing too nostalgic a view of Christmas that emphasizes the cuteness of babies and the wonder of magi while forgetting the preacher who came to tell the truth, even if it meant his life. The Jesus who came long ago, we remember, will come again to judge the nations.
But while the church year invites us to interpret Jesus’ first advent at Bethlehem via his second at the end of time, I wonder if we sometimes forget to do the reverse. That is, do we also interpret the second coming in light of the first? Too often, I think, the church – and particularly the culturally dominant conservative Protestant church of late – emphasizes Jesus coming in glory and judgment as if this future threat (I think it’s meant as a promise but I experience it as threat) is utterly disconnected from the One who came in our flesh, vulnerable as only a newborn is vulnerable, and proclaimed a message of blessings, forgiveness, and abundant life.
I suspect that when life is chaotic and uncertain we take a peculiar comfort from thoughts of judgment – that there is a Just Ruler who will settle all scores and right all wrongs and keep Order in the world. (This only is comforting, of course, when you’re pretty sure the Major Rule Enforcer is on your side.) And certainly our world is just crazy enough, just unstable enough, just un-just enough – with headlines each week about Ebola or Ferguson or unrest in the Middle East – that we may be tempted to embrace a notion of God and religion fed almost entirely by our need for a sense of stability and order.
But we miss the absolute scandal of the cross when we reduce it to a divine payment scheme. Jesus did not die to make God loving but because God is loving already and the only way to show us that was to keep proclaiming it in word and deed, even if it meant we would end up putting him to death because his message was so destabilizing (rather than creating order).
William Butler Yeat’s “The Second Coming” is one of the most frequently quoted pieces of poetry of the last hundred years. I thought of it as I was reading tomorrow’s Gospel passage (from Mark 13) and regretting how often we read it as predicting the end of the world instead of orienting us to God’s grace and mercy in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Writing the year after the end of World War I, Yeats, too, is reacting to a tumultuous world where nothing seems stable anymore, where the old rules seem no longer to apply, and where the traditional world order seems to be giving way to a new order that is, finally, not ordered at all. But while I sympathize with his lament, I’m not quite sure I’m willing to surrender my hopes for the future. Because in the end, we trust that the one who came to us in Bethlehem is still stronger than any image, idol, or beast that may today slouch toward Bethlehem or our homes, for that matter. But that strength is made manifest in weakness; that power is evident in vulnerability; and that judgment rendered through grace. Not what anyone expected. Not then, not now.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939. “The Second Coming” (1919) can be found in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Post image: Russian icon of the second coming, c. 1700.
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Thank you! My mind has been leaning toward seeking a new Advent all week. The chaos of news reports from around the world are interrupted by rapid fire “keep shopping” commercials. Even those who attempt to hold the center are in chaos, their anarchy hidden from view. So our new Advent seeks to shine light on dark agendas, wielding love and compassion for everyone (including the anarchists) as the alternative. A “new world order” was born in Bethlehem, and will not be held still by the swaddling clothes as he seeks his rebirth, and ours, in us daily. Thanks for directing my thoughts this morning.
Thanks for this David. I needed to read it this am. It gave me hope. Stir up your power, O Lord and come. Bring YOUR order into the midst of OUR chaos.