Coming in Glory

For Sunday November 13, 2005

           Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year A)
           Judges 4:1–7, 14–25 or Zephaniah 1:7, 12–18
           Psalm 123 or Psalm 90:1–8, (9–11), 12
           1 Thessalonians 5:1–11
           Matthew 25:14–30

Prophecy chart (click for larger view)

           One of the challenges of following the lectionary week after week is that you can't "cheat" and weasel out of Biblical texts that you find too embarrassing, too strange, or too complicated to tackle. At least not entirely. In fact, this week I will conveniently ignore the Old Testament reading from Judges about the housewife Jael who drove a tent peg through the temple of a Canaanite military commander named Sisera. But three other readings (Zephaniah, Thessalonians, and Matthew) all address what Christians refer to as "the second coming" of Christ. This is a Christian tenet that I affirm, but which I also find hard to decipher. What might we say?

           On November 15 the publisher Tyndale House will release The Regime, the fourteenth book in the Left Behind series that celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. When Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published the first volume entitled Left Behind in 1995, who in their wildest imagination would have predicted that this series would sell 62 million books, not including auxiliary products like music, greeting cards, calendars and movies? These books are neither good theology nor good literature, but they comprise an astounding economic juggernaut. Multiply 62,000,000 books by $20.00 per book and you have more than a billion dollars in sales. Clearly, Tyndale House has translated pseudo-prophecy into mega-profits for itself and its authors.

Left Behind's latest.

           Potboiler fiction injects an element of frustration into examining the second coming of Christ, for there is an inverse relationship between its wildly popular influence and its value for Christian edification. Further, they make an easy target for cynical secularists who parody them. That's nothing new, though, for pagans scoffed at the early Christians for their hope in the second coming of Christ: "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation" (2 Peter 3:4). Despite these drawbacks, the Left Behind books have at least one redeeming feature. They remind us that millions of ordinary people have a palpable longing to understand a fundamental and deeply human question that every person ought to consider—how, when, and where will human history end?

           Prominent liberal theologians don't offer much better guidance. They tend to be as tentative as the Left Behind genre is zealous. In The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg confesses that he "doesn't have a clue...no idea" what the end of history or the afterlife might look like. "How can we know anything about it? What does this mean? We do not know." In his twenty or so books John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, is even more radical. For Spong, the second coming is not the physical return of Jesus to the world but rather "the conscious recognition within each of us of the requirement to love."

           Liberals get high marks for theological modesty, and for reminding us of the broad and diverse ways that Christians have interpreted these complex texts for two thousand years. Those are not inconsequential contributions. But it is often not clear to me where their legitimate appeal to metaphor and poetry ends and where an unapologetic affirmation of literal realities begins. In the small Presbyterian church where I grew up, every Sunday we confessed the Apostles' Creed (third or fourth century), one line of which reads, "from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." Similarly, the Nicene Creed (325) affirms that Jesus shall "come again in glory to judge the living and the dead." These creeds include this clause because it expresses themes that are broadly and deeply embedded in the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Paul. So, however appealing its modesty, liberal agnosticism tastes like half a loaf that leaves me hungry for more. Nor do I appreciate their implicit (sometimes explicit) subtext that early believers were naive and gullible compared to our own critically enlightened mindset.

Last Judgment, circa 1230,Stone Cathedral, Rheims.

           The Psalmist for this week who does not mention the second coming of Christ reminds us of an event far more imminent—what we might call our Personal End Times. He writes, "the length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength" (90:10). According to the Center for Disease Control, the average American can expect to live 77.6 years. But then you die. A reader wrote last week that she had just buried her father who had lived to the age of 105. But he too died. So, obsessing about the far future of human history pales in significance when we contemplate the certain End of our personal future.

           The End of Planet Earth will take longer than my Personal End, but it is every bit as certain. My friend and solar physicist Charles advises me that in about 5 billion years the sun will expand to 10,000,000 times its present volume, morphing into a red giant that will scorch and eventually swallow the Earth. Some time before then Earth will be finished history, if not non-existent.

The Doom, or Last Judgement, and the Weighing of Souls, West Somerton, England, medieval church.

           If we enlarge our purview to include the Cosmic End of the entire universe, physicists are divided, but equally bleak. If the expansion of the Big Bang continues to propel everything outward, our galaxies will fly apart forever, although individual galaxies will collapse into black holes. But if the forces of gravity prevail, the expanding universe will eventually reverse its expansion and collapse into a Big Crunch. In his book Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context, my favorite writer on Christianity and science, the particle physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, concludes: "It is as sure as can be that humanity, and all forms of carbon-based life, will prove a transient episode in the history of the cosmos." From star dust we came and to star dust we shall return.

           Our own human failures could complicate and compromise human history much earlier and so badly that I find it hard, say, to imagine what life in New York City will be like a mere 1,000 years from now. Human civilizations, however majestic and advanced, do not last forever. The confluence of ominous global realities—radical economic disparity, environmental degradation, the disruptive forces of technical progress, population growth in the places that can least sustain it, and the specter of nuclear annihilation that would make a LaHaye fiction look like child's play—all these remind us that thinking about the "end times" can be an exercise of enlightenment rather than a delusional escape.

           When I consider these various end-times scenarios, all four of which are as inevitable as the setting of the sun, I can't say that I find Biblical language more outrageous. Sure, it is couched in the thought and language of its own time and culture, as it only could be, just as our thought and language today will sound antiquated two millennia from now. I can imagine one of these scenarios "fulfilling" the Biblical plot. Nor do I find the notion of Christ's "coming in glory" any more audacious than affirming the other two major plot points in the Christian story. Having affirmed that an unconditionally good God scripted both Creation and Redemption, in the end I consider it a short step to the Consummation.

The Last Judgment by Michaelangelo, 1536-41 (45' x 43') (click for larger view).

           Christian "eschatology" (from the Greek eschaton, last things) teaches that humanity's Earthly End is not the Ultimate End. The God who created the world will consummate its redemption. To the believers in Thessalonika Paul thus wrote that we live with joy and confidence rather than as those "who have no hope." Jesus's parable of the "talents" points us away from theological speculation and toward personal stewardship, from eschatology to ethics, if you will. When the end comes, whether private and personal or cosmic and galactic, no one can avoid a judgment of sorts—exactly how and what did I do with my life? True, describing these major Christian motifs is easier than parsing their details. But few contemporaries of Jesus understood the significance of his first coming, so I am not vexed about unanswered questions surrounding his second advent. That puts me somewhere between LaHaye's enthusiasm without enlightenment and Spong's anemic "new reformation."

For further reflection:

* What do you think explains the success of the Left Behind series?
* Where do you see human history going? What "drives" history?
* Do you tend to be more optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's future? Why?
* Who or what has informed your ideas about "the second coming" of Christ?