Photo credit: Carla J Roth
Luke 21: 25-26; Jeremiah 33: 14-16; Psalm 25: 1-10.
“When you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom of God is near.” (Luke 21:31)
WELCOME TO ADVENT, the season of deep expectation and intense preparation. So what is that we are anticipating and getting ready for, exactly? The trick the season plays on us is that we already know – or think we know – exactly what we are waiting for. We are waiting for a birth. We are longing for peace, for deliverance, for hope; for pathway towards life renewed. This is what the coming of Christ means, we believe – and rightly so.
How strange, then, that the central reading for this first Sunday in Advent in the New Common Lectionary seems to strike a quite different set of chords. The twenty-first chapter of Luke’s gospel is about anticipation, certainly. But in the context of darkness, distress, foreboding, dislocation in the natural world, and warnings about dissipation, disorder and trials among us.
In one sense, the connection seems all too relevant in our era. Today we seek redemption, the inbreaking of God’s transforming love, at a time of what social scientists are calling a poly-crisis: the cumulative and intertwined existential threats of global heating, the crucial loss of biodiversity in the natural world, ever more dangerous wars and conflicts, a renewed nuclear threat, loss of security for many millions of people who have become refugees, the rise of authoritarianism, and an economic system based on unregulated consumption which is literally killing the planet.
It feels as if we are living in apocalyptic times, ones which portend catastrophe more than deliverance. Yet there is also the strong resonance of the hope we desperately long for: the prophet Jeremiah’s anticipation of the arrival of justice and the promise of safety to a battered and bruised people. The Psalmist hymning God’s steadfast love in spite of life’s tumults. Then there is Jesus’s enigmatic statement: “When you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom [or realm] of God is near.” It’s all rather confusing, is it not?
Today’s readings remind us that learning to read the signs of the times in the light of the bringing together of authentic humanity and divine life in Christ is of crucial importance. Get it right, and there is indeed hope for our world. Get it wrong, and the seeds of destruction will be sown deep.
Some of you may remember Nick Adams, who used sometimes to come to St James with his family when he taught theology here in Edinburgh. He’s now Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham. Nick once wryly observed that almost any text – not least a biblical one – will be open to a whole range of possible interpretations. But, he warned, we should not forget that some of those interpretations will still be wrong!
So it is in America today that many people use passages like this one in Luke to speak of the return of Christ (the proper meaning of which we will return to later) as a Rambo-like figure who will bring about a cataclysm in the world in order to wreak vengeance, violence and destruction on anyone who is not like them.
The Rambo-Christ of the religious right has nothing to do with the Jesus of the gospels, and I call this figure Jeez-Us (‘jeez’ and ‘us’). That is, the living Christ turned into a total caricature, a death-dealing justification of the self expressed as a wholesale rejection of the other – issuing in hatred and fear of refugees, foreigners, strangers: all those marginalised people who Jesus of Nazareth calls on us to love, and in whom to recognise his presence.
In short, the Rambo-Christ is anti-gospel. So how on earth do we get to this level of distortion, dilution and depredation? By making Christ in our own image, rather than having our image remade in Christ, and by reading our founding texts in the light of that very hijacking of the divine image.
Now the difficult part of this is that it would be untrue to say that the Rambo-Christ has no scriptural warrant at all. Take the book of Revelation. First the good news. Amidst the complex and sometimes obscure symbolism there is both a moral core, and a promise of a New Heaven and a New Earth. The moral core is that the Lamb who sits on the throne is the lamb who was slain, and restored to life – not a representative of the slayers of lambs. Jesus is not the Emperor, and he is not Rambo or John Wayne. His rule is one of love, not terror. Meanwhile, the promise (echoed in Luke 21:31) is that the habitus of the divine and the habitus of all that lives and breathes and has its being alongside us will finally be united in God’s new creation.
But the bad news is that woven through the text of Revelation there are also more than a few bloody revenge fantasies in there. Perhaps it is understandable that those fearing or experiencing persecution would wish God to crush their foes. But, like those imprecatory Psalms which talk of dashing babies heads against the rocks, such passages are not to be read as injunctions, but rather as warnings. We need to understand that they are not the way of the Prince of Peace, for whom we wait.
However, it is precisely passages like this which White Christian Nationalists and Christian Zionists (among others) extract from their biblical context and seize for their own manipulative purposes. So how we read texts like this, and today’s gospel, can literally be a matter of life or death. For as God says through the words of the Deuteronomist (30:19) in the Hebrew Scriptures, faced with destruction and death: “Therefore, choose life”.
In Jesus’s day, the storm brewing would lead to the destruction of the Temple in AD70, unlike its preservation in the hopefulness of Jeremiah. Some therefore see passages like this one in Luke as referring back to that in coded form. Under Roman occupation you had to be careful what you said.
But let’s return to Jesus’s enigmatic “when you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom of God is near.” Were Christ and his disciples expecting the sudden end of the age? Albert Schweitzer thought so. In 1906 he published his famous book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He concluded that Jesus was yet another apocalyptic madman, and horrified by this discovery, he fled to Africa and to nature religion. He did a lot of good and contributed to the stock of both humanitarianism and environmentalism. But it was a sad and wrong verdict.
What we know is that the world did not end, and predictions of its ending throughout history have failed – though we may be tragically closer to fulfilling that grim narrative now than in any past generation, given the crises to which I have referred. Other scholars suggest that the gospel writers are putting an expectation of the ‘end of the age’ back into the mouth of Jesus, or that he is actually referring to something else – the inbreaking of God in his own crucifixion-resurrection and ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Disturbances in the natural and human order are built into many of the texts around these episodes. So that fits with the symbolism of Luke.
(Incidentally, whereas in the Hebrew scriptures God’s enveloping presence on Sinai, in the giving of the Law, or in the Shekinah glory around the Ark of the Covenant, involves the clouds descending, in the New Testament an ascending into the clouds accompanies Christ’s bodily disappearance from the presence of his followers, prior to his re-appearance at Pentecost and beyond.)
The truth is that the exact meaning of the words attributed to Jesus is not clear, though they are evidently a call to attention, interpretation and understanding of God’s coming in our confusion and distress. Our difficulty is that we too readily assume, when reading passages like this, that ancient peoples told literal stories which we are smart enough to take symbolically. Whereas the truth, as John Dominic Crossan often points out, leans the other way. They often wisely spoke of the inscrutable God’s ways symbolically, and we moderns are dumb enough to tie ourselves up in knots trying to take them literally.
What we do know is that ‘the realm of God’, which Jesus spoke of in parables and lived out in love of despised neighbour and acts of healing, is both now and not yet. It is within us and yet also among and between us; it is present to us and yet ahead of us. It is an existential reality not limited by geography or temporality. It is an invitation to taste God’s future right here, and to long for its coming at the same time.
We also know that the Rambo-Christ is a terrible lie. The advent of the true Christ is all about choosing life. But it entails doing so against the hoard of destruction that we see in our world, mirrored in this passage from Luke. That is why verses 34 to 36 of chapter 21 call us to attention rather than drunkenness, alertness rather than dispiritedness.
When we read the signs of the times rightly, whichever times we are in, we will discover that even in the darkness, God’s presence is to be found, breaking through. Our job is to discover and nurture the practical gestures and actions of love, grace, justice, forgiveness and hope which connect us to the inbreaking realm of God, and to see in them the healed future to which we are invited, no matter how compelling the narratives of doom in our world remain.
For the return of Christ, to which this passage in Luke and others in the New Testament seem to refer, is not a singular event. It happens again and again. Or it will, if we are paying attention. And its fulfilment will be when the love of God made manifest in the suffering, life-giving love of Christ is in all and for all. That is a matter of God’s eternity enveloping and restoring our brokenness. We are not in control of when and how it happens.
If all this is so, then to be a companion of Christ is to live perpetually at the end of the world as we know it, in anticipation of a new world coming. That is what Advent invites us to consider. The challenge is to imagine, and then work together to enact, what it means for our lives here and now. What it means to become peacemakers. To act justly. To forgive repeatedly. To share endlessly. To hope ceaselessly. To love without limit.
The gospel calls us to nothing less than a personal and social revolution. To see in the vulnerability of the coming Christ-child and the weakness of the crucified Lord a complete reversal of our ‘normal’ human understanding of status, power and possibility. In our own strength this may seem impossible. But through small steps, through prayer, and through assisting each other towards the Light, tiny miracles can happen. May this be the Advent journey for us. For “when you see these things taking place, you will know that the realm of God is near.”
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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is an address given at St James Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh, on 1 December 2024.