For Paul and all the early Christians, the coming apocalypse would unveil Jesus himself. When Jesus returns, or when he ‘reappears’ (as Paul and John put it in Colossians 3.4 and 1 John 3.2), the twin halves of the good creation, heaven and earth – at present mutually opaque – will become fully and visibly one. Paul speaks of this moment in 1 Corinthians 15, Philippians 3 and elsewhere. But in the present passage, it is Jesus’ people themselves who are the subject of the ‘apocalypse’. They are themselves to be ‘unveiled’. As he says in Colossians 3.4, when the Messiah appears, ‘you too will be
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