Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

For one thing, religious systems that ignore the dark side of life are fundamentally dishonest (all the great poets know this).

The Christian sees and acknowledges “the continuing sin of men and above all of himself among them,” but “he expects the coming of Jesus Christ in glory. . . . This implies something forceful and decisive. . . . It means even for him, too, glory and reward and gain. It means pardon in the final and strictest sense. . . . It means his translation out of the darkness around into the great coming light” (IV/3.2, 244).

“When . . . any one of us . . . looks up to him, to Jesus Christ, a momentous change takes place. . . . A great and enduring light brightly dawns on such a person. . . . Such a person experiences joy in the midst of his sorrows and sufferings, much as he still may sigh and grumble. Not a cheap and superficial joy that passes, but deep-seated, lasting joy. It transforms man in his sadness into a fundamentally joyful being. We may as well admit it; he has got something to laugh at . . . not a mockery, but an open and relaxing laughter . . . honest and sincere laughter, coming from the bottom of man’s heart. Such light and joy and laughter are ours when we look up to him, to Jesus Christ. He is the one who makes us radiant.”

Does Advent run backwards? The movement is from the second coming to the first coming; it doesn’t seem to make sense. The season begins with the last things and ends with the nativity in Bethlehem. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

If we began with the nativity and then moved to the last judgment, we would be so softened up by that little baby in the manger that we wouldn’t be able to take the second coming of Christ in power seriously. The solemnity and awe do not lie in the fact that the baby becomes the eternal Judge. What strikes us to the heart is this: the eternal Judge, very God of very God, Creator of the worlds, the Alpha and the Omega, has become that little baby.

We must, as Karl Barth writes, “pass into the burning, searching, purifying fire of the gracious judgment of the One who comes” (IV/3.2, 931). In Advent, we pause to take stock of this uniquely sobering fact.

“I have told you all things beforehand.” The Master tells his disciples what they should expect from the world as they go out to preach the gospel. Here is something similar from the first epistle of Peter: “Be sober, be watchful.

The devil, of course, is not a man in a red suit with a pitchfork. We all understand that. What is he, then? We need to know.

Let me say right here at the beginning: no one has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil.

The classic definition of evil is “the absence of good,” privatio boni in Latin. I never liked that definition, because it sounded weak to me, lacking purpose and agency.2 The Bible personifies evil in the figure of Satan, which embodies purpose and agency.

Unaided human beings can make no lasting headway against evil. Don’t you think this is obvious by now?

But evil implies a different universe, controlled by extra-human forces. Wrong is a human offense that suggests [that] reparation is possible. . . . Wrong is not mysterious. [But] Evil suggests a mysterious force that may be in business for itself and may exploit human agency as part of a larger cosmic conflict—between good and evil, God and Satan.”

I think the best way to begin understanding this is to note that there are three actors, or forces, on the stage, not two.

Why is there evil in the world? We don’t know why, but we know that it is a terrible Power and that, against it, unaided human beings are helpless. The Power of Sin and Death is external to the human being, working on us from outside, so that, in the words of one of our great prayers, “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”8 We are in bondage to Sin and Death. We are “tied and bound by the chain of our sins.”

Good intentions get twisted. Attempts to help often turn out badly. Sin is able to “work death in [us]” even “through what is good.”

Evil, therefore, is not part of the creation. That’s why the definition privatio boni, the absence of good, is such an important idea, in spite of its apparent blandness. Although evil made its appearance in the creation, it possesses no existence or being of its own, but is rather a negation, or corruption, of being.

And, if evil was not created by God, how did the serpent get into the garden of Eden? Again, we don’t know, and the book of Genesis does not tell us.

The sunny-siders have been dragged willy-nilly out of their safe places. We are beginning to see more clearly now that no office, school, or church is truly safe; that the Internet has greatly increased our capacity to share lethal information; that terror is only a click away.

No one is free from the Power of Sin and Death. No one has power in himself to help himself. No one can say to herself, well, I’m not a murderer, so I’m not so bad. The widely admired writer Primo Levi was a survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote that the Holocaust showed us that “Man, the human species—we, in short—[have] the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.”

If there was no insatiable appetite for narcotics in America, there would be no murderous drug cartels in Mexico. If pornography was not a multibillion-dollar industry, young people’s minds would not be full of distortion. If we did not put our prisons out of sight, out of mind, there would not be so much potential for inmates coming out worse than when they went in. If we had not abandoned our American standards out of fear, the CIA would not have created “dark sites” for torture.12 And so on and so forth. Americans are complicit in many evils.

Lincoln knew that neither the South nor the North was free from blame for the terrible war, so that he was able to summon both sides to the work of reconciliation.

Part of the greatness of Martin Luther King was that he recognized Sin in himself. That enabled him, like Lincoln, to be nonpartisan in his cause. He had a deep sense of the suffering love of Jesus for all sinful human beings.

The promise of the second coming tells us that God is Victor over Sin and Death. It tells us that evil is vanquished now, in suffering love, and will be vanquished forever in the triumph of God. I cannot tell you why God delays that day, and neither can anyone else. I can only tell you that when we see the resistance of Christians, we see living witness to the hope that is in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Shouldn’t we forget about the theme of the second coming of Christ and get on with the job ourselves? And isn’t that a good reason for being Episcopalians instead of fundamentalists? We don’t believe this business about a second coming, do we?

Advent is not really the season of preparing for Jesus’s birth, as though he had never come in the first place. Advent is the season of preparation for his coming again.

We should take the phrase out of the Nicene Creed: “He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” We shouldn’t say that every Sunday if we can’t believe it.

Waiting and hastening! How can you wait and hasten at the same time?

Not until the final intervention of God in the last day will the true and lasting peaceable kingdom come. That is the not-yet of Advent. That is why we wait. “Thou must save, and thou alone.”

A lot of little actions, little decisions, little sacrifices had to be made before all those menorahs went into those windows. Lots of different people had to make quick decisions to help or not to help. These kinds of things don’t just happen.

Advent is the time of both “waiting and hastening”; Barth loved to quote a verse from the second letter of Peter: “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (II Pet. 3:12). Advent is the dialectic between the waiting and the hastening, the faithful confidence that strains forward toward the day and the long endurance that’s required to wait for it. There is no time given us in this life other than this time, the time between the first coming of our Lord in humility and his second coming in glory. This is a strong theme in the Gospel of Matthew.

They have been storing up oil for generations. On Friday night, they were standing out in the courtyard of their horribly violated church, and they were singing “Let My Little Light Shine.”

You know that Advent itself has been called the season in between, “the Time Being,” as W. H. Auden wrote. It is a not-yet time, a time for “the hope of glory” that is yet to come. It is a time for looking toward the future kingdom of God in the sharp realization that the kingdom is not realized.

The Advent world is a world without Jesus Christ. “Darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples,” writes the prophet Isaiah in words set to music by Handel in Messiah. A world without God’s presence is a world accursed, and the sign of God’s curse is destroyed families and destroyed relationships.

Heaven means that the reality of God’s perfect love in Jesus Christ will become a reality for all humanity.

This is a fundamental truth of the Advent message. Unassisted human nature is under the sign of the wrath of God. But light is breaking, brothers and sisters, the dawn is coming.

As in the prophecy of Malachi, there is no promise of joy without reference to the curse. In our class this morning, there was a witness who reminded us of the wrath of God. In this world, there can be no talk of heaven without talk also of hell. But there is light ahead. In the collect that we will say together on Sunday, the great collect for the first Sunday of Advent, we will pray to “cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life”

by referring to God as “the judge who is God of all,” and then by the last sentence of the passage: “Our God is a consuming fire.” It’s the same God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (the God of the Old Testament) and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (the God of the New Testament) are not two gods, but one God.

There are not two gods, one wrathful and one loving, but one God who is Judge of all. “Therefore,” says Hebrews, “let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe” (12:28). The writer wants his readers to know “what sort of power they so blithely invoke.”

I am certain that this monstrosity does not belong to God’s good creation, but rather has come in as a result of the Fall. Like sin and with the demons, it cannot simply be done away with but can only be despised, combated, and suppressed. That [is] the task of the doctors [and] good nurses. . . . Apart from this, however, I am getting along remarkably well. The main thing is the knowledge that God makes no mistakes and that proteus mirabilis has no chance against him.

“The drawing establishes that murder requires concentration, a sure method, and sudden energy, and that it hurts. Of course, this isn’t just any homicide. It’s the first—a cosmic disaster.”5 Ever since that cosmic disaster, the blood of Abel has cried out for justice.

Throughout the Psalms it is continually repeated: God is the One who saves, the One who is powerful to deliver. God alone can make right what is wrong. God alone can overcome death and the demons.

It noted Niebuhr’s insight that humans become self-destructive when they define themselves as sinless and manifest arrogance toward others. That’s the danger of losing sight of the theme of divine judgment. Part of being a Christian is understanding that we are all in need of the divine judgment.

He is not awesome in the way my grandchildren say that movies and fashions and soccer games are “awesome,” but in the real sense of the word—causing fear and awe by power. Only a truly awe-inspiring God is able to shake the earth and the heavens in order to defeat evil and cause a new kingdom to come into being, a domain that cannot be shaken.

that hour, it was their confidence in the promise of their Savior and Redeemer that gave them superhuman strength. In the earliest years, the certainty of his coming again was the most powerful of all motivations.

Evil is more than the sum of individual misdeeds. Evil has a life of its own. It is not enough to stand aside from it. If it is not actively resisted, it sweeps all before it. Part of a Christian’s calling is to resist evil, and in doing so, to endure to the end. “To him that overcometh, the crown of life shall be.”

That’s why some of the modern translations of the prayer, instead of “lead us not into temptation,” have “save us in the time of trial,” and instead of “deliver us from evil,” have “deliver us from the evil one”—meaning Satan. Don’t worry, we’re not going to change the words here at Grace Church any time soon. However, this translation does give a greatly enhanced understanding of our calling to locate the prayer at the frontier, so to speak—the frontier where the ages meet, where the Christian community faces the powers of evil and is called to bear its witness in the face of all that “the ruler of this world” can do (that’s what Jesus calls Satan in the Gospel of John).

I realize that the interpretation of the prayer that I’m offering tonight is not a familiar one to most people, even though it’s been accepted in scholarly circles for some time. I realize that it’s not practical, perhaps not even desirable, to change the translation to read “Save us in the time of trial, and deliver us from the evil one.”

we see how even in the Pastoral Epistles the call to be faithful in the daily grind is set into the cosmic panorama of the coming of the Lord of the universe in glory and power. In his “eternal dominion,” the time of trial will be over, and the evil one will be not only conquered but obliterated forever.

Some of us are conflicted about unfair treatment of colleagues. Some are trying to decide whether and how to get out of a relationship. Some are seeking reconciliation with their parents. Some are wondering how long we should “go along to get along” in various situations. In every such situation, whether minuscule or world-historical, it will be a time for us to “make the good confession,” to “bear testimony” to the Lordship of Christ. In a sense, every time is an apocalyptic time because every time brings trials in which we may or may not glorify our Redeemer by our actions.

Perhaps the first stage of endurance is the willingness to see. Look around you! Where is the Lord’s work being undone, and where is it being built up? “Aim at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.” Aim at righteousness! Isn’t that encouraging?