Advent I : God is With Us

The gospel pericope is Luke 21: 25-36.  If you or I were to hold a press conference and and talk like Jesus did in this passage, we would be taken to jail, which is where we keep our mentally ill here in Oklahoma.   But the language Jesus is using is eschatological, a fifty-cent word referring to the last things in time.

Early Judaism believed in the possibility of the Kingdom of God on earth.  Later, some experienced discouragement and began to look for direct divine intervention.  This is apocalyptic eschatology in which people imagined that the end-time would be cataclysmic, with universal disturbances, as the cosmic forces of evil are finally defeated.  The Lord would arrive on Zion, serve an eschatological banquet at which the wine never ran out, abolish death, raise the dead to judgement, and create new heavens and a new earth that is paradise.  The prophet Daniel changed the script by introducing a mysterious Human One ("Son of Man") who would be in on the action, and whom people quickly began to identify with an expected Messiah.

We call expectation of the Kingdom on earth realized eschatology, and expectation of the Kingdom at the end consistent eschatology.  What Jesus himself introduced  was what we call inaugural eschatology meaning Jesus believed that he had brought the dawn of the inbreaking of the Kingdom, but that its full realization must await the end,which he talks about today.  He speaks of the actual generation in which he lived experiencing that end; yet, elsewhere in Lucan material, he says he has no idea when the end will come!   Perhaps Jesus thought his death would trigger the final age, the coming of God's kingdom in its fullness. 

In any event, as Christians we must see ourselves as living somewhere between the coming of Jesus and the end.  It is no time to be passive, it is the right time to work for Kingdom values.  In the film The Shawshank Redemption, we see the theme that being freed from prison after a long time did not bring joy but anxiety, because jail had become home.  We can be like that -- trapped in our old ways of thinking, mired down in the world's values.  So we resist liberation, perhaps without knowing it. With God as the beginning and end of our journey, and our companion in between, we can live new and bountiful lives, and prepare with confidence to celebrate again  the coming of the one whose name is Emanu-el, meaning 'God is with us.'