The First Sunday of Advent 2007

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.

Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.

Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.

So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.

We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.

If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.

Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.

These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.

The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?

The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.

Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.

The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.

Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.

Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.

That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?

Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.