I've been thinking a lot about waiting these last few days - about the sense in which all our prayer and all our praxis lies within this provisional time that Advent spells for us in big letters, but which is the only place we have to live, ever, or ever have lived. We are all creatures of the between time, whichever way we choose to dice our eschatology, and the sooner we learn to live like that the closer we actually are to Christ's coming.
I think this is what the Lord was getting at in Matthew 24 and 25. It all boils down to, "Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour." (25.13) We don't know when; in fact "about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (24.36) but we do know that we are living in "this generation" (24.34) - not I think in the sense, as is sometimes assumed, of a period 30-odd years, but, in the equally good reading of the Greek genea, "the whole multitude of [women and] men living at the same time," as Strong's (G1074) has it: the people who are waiting, the people between.
Waiting for Christ's second coming and waiting for the resurrection are one and the same. The second coming is the coming of the risen Christ, raising our mortal bodies with him in the glory of God. Jesus' resurrection and ours are central to our faith. Our resurrection is as intimately related to the resurrection of Jesus as our belovedness is related to the belovedness of Jesus. Paul is very adamant on this point. He says: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ cannot have been raised either, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is without substance, and so is your faith" (1 Corinthians 15:13-14).
Indeed, our waiting is for the risen Christ to lift us up with him in the eternal life with God. It is from the perspective of Jesus' resurrection and our own that his life and ours derive their full significance. "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only," Paul says, "we are of all people the most pitiable" (1 Corinthians 15:18). We don't need to be pitied, because as followers of Jesus we can look far beyond the limits of our short life on earth and trust that nothing we are living now in our body will go to waste.
(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)
2 comments:
This post brings to mind the paradox of the Kingdom of God, which is right now, but not yet, the paradox of waiting for the One who is already amongst us, Jesus, "he who was, who is, and who is to come".
Our hope is in Emmanuel, God with us, in the past, right now, and in times to come.
Absolutely, Mimi - the Gospel's full of these paradoxes, isn't it? Like we have eternal life, right now, we're living it; and yet we long, with all of Creation, for "the freedom of the glory of the children of God."
"O come, O come, Emmanuel..."
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