Do you believe that Jesus will one day come back from where he has gone? Do you believe that there is actually going to be a point of time in our history, or better: in our future, when God will intervene in the flow of history in a way that will have a cosmic impact? Let’s have a show of hands: Who believes in the second coming of Jesus?
Let me ask you another question: Do you believe that Jesus could actually return during your lifetime—anywhere between today and some dozens of years from now? Who of you believes, that we could actually witness the second coming of Jesus while we are still alive?
One more question, and then you can sit back and relax. If you believe that Jesus is coming back and that that could be any time soon, how does that affect your feelings and emotions, your stress levels, your choices, and your behavior: the way you use your time, your money, and your resources? Think of that for a while: Does the thought of Jesus coming back soon have any impact on your life as you live it today? And I mean: real impact!
Well, I don’t know what your answer is to that last question. What I do know is this. Christians react very differently to the idea of Jesus’ second coming.
There have always been people with a strong sense of urgency about this. Many revival movements throughout the history of the church have brought this urgency to the surface. Their message has been pretty much the same as that of John the Baptist and Jesus: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!”
That urgency has led them to change the way they live. It has led some to leave everything behind and go on a mission to the ends of the world to proclaim the gospel as long as it was still possible. When Dr. Bill Bright back in the 1950s founded the global evangelistic organization Campus Crusade for Christ, his motto was this: To reach the whole world with the gospel of Jesus within our lifetime. His vision was that within one generation everybody living on this globe should have a chance to hear the Gospel and respond to it. And that vision inspired so many young students and professionals that, within forty years, Campus Crusade for Christ was the largest Christian organization in the world. And it operated in more countries than the United Nations. It was that sense of urgency that made students and professionals alike give up their careers in order to win people for Christ before his return.
But I think it would be fair to say that the majority of the more than two billion Christians in the world do not believe or expect that Jesus would come again any time soon—during their lifetime. I guess that a large portion of them is not quite sure whether Jesus will ever come again. They like to think of the prophecies concerning the end times and the return of Jesus as figurative. They don’t take them literally.
Some even suggest that Jesus came back in his Spirit on the feast of Pentecost—you know, the birthday of the Church when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the believers in Jerusalem. The apostle Paul calls the Church the “body of Christ”. So in a sense, it is not so far-fetched to think that Jesus’ return has already happened, and that Jesus lives among us and in us through the Holy Spirit. And so, what they expect is that, when their life is over, their body will be buried or burnt, and their soul will go to heaven to be with God. That is where the final judgment will take place—if there is any judgment at all for those who are in Christ.
When the Bible speaks about the end times and about Jesus coming again, there is always that tremendous sense of urgency. Jesus says that he will come “like a thief in the night […] at an hour when we do not expect him”. Paul echoes that view in almost exactly the same wording: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” So the question arises, “How can we be prepared for that moment?”
I wonder if you ever had a burglar raiding your house. I remember when I was a teenager, that we had an uninvited visitor once. I was home alone and doing my homework in my room in the attic. I heard some noise downstairs and thought perhaps my mother had come home. So, I quickly ran down the stairs and went to the kitchen, where the noise came from. I was just in time to see somebody disappear over the wall. A broken glass pane was all the damage there was. Nothing had been taken. But it was a deeply disturbing experience, which made me feel unsafe at home for a long time. It felt that there was really nothing we could do to avoid it from happening again. Except, perhaps, that the burglar knew there wasn’t much to be taken from our home.
Jesus’ advice is to “keep watch”. Earlier on in the Gospel of Matthew, he spoke about the signs of the end times that would be visible to those who look out for them. But in the same breath, he said that these are only the beginnings. Seeing the signs doesn’t mean that we can somehow calculate or predict the date and time of his return. They are just a reminder that we live in the end times. The fact is that, ever since Jesus was taken up into heaven, forty days after he rose from the dead, we have lived in the end times and need to expect his return. The various signs that Jesus speaks about are just signposts, reminders that he has not abandoned us—that the project has not been cancelled. But they don’t give us any clue as to how close we are. Just as John the Baptist said that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” so it is at hand today.
So keeping watch is not about looking for signs and trying to make predictions. It is about making sure that we are ready, even though we have no clue when to expect him. It is about 24/7 vigilance.
I believe that most of us don’t really expect burglars to raid our homes. We know it is possible, but we don’t want to think of it. So what do we do? We take precautions.
When we leave our home, we lock the doors and make sure that it is not easy to get in. Perhaps we install an alarm system. At night, before we go to sleep, again, we lock the doors. We don’t expect thieves, but we are all time prepared.
That may sound to you like an obsession. In fact, it is an obsession only, if you are all time in fear that something bad happens. Someone recently told me, that when she was on a short holiday abroad, she was constantly afraid that something might happen to her home. So she asked the neighbors to check the place every day. And the last night of her holiday, she had a sleepless night thinking about what might be awaiting her at her return home. She could not sleep, she could not eat. Fear and panic had her in its grip.
But caution and precautions need not be an obsession. In fact, they are just good security practice, wise property management and realistic risk assessment. By making the right precautions, we can actually avoid fear and panic. We can sleep in peace, trusting that the necessary systems are in place to minimize the risk of burglary.
When Jesus tells us to keep watch, he doesn’t tell us to have sleepless nights, fearing and panicking that Jesus might come back tonight. He tells us to make sure that our lives are ready to receive him when he comes. “You must be ready,” he says in the last verse of today’s Gospel reading. It sounds obvious. Of course, we should be ready to meet our Lord at any time. Even if Jesus were not to return today, we might get a heart attack or a traffic accident today and not survive it. Also then, we must be ready for our encounter with Christ, who is both our King and our Judge.
But the truth is that many of us procrastinate. We easily become sloppy in the way we conduct our lives. We know that there are things in our lives that God is most certainly not happy about. Things we do or fail to do. Relations that have gone sour and need mending and healing. Decisions that we postpone because we dread the effort they will demand from us or the change that they will bring to our lives. The Spanish have a word for that: “mañana”—tomorrow! Tomorrow I will start going to the gym. Tomorrow I will start losing weight. Tomorrow I will go and talk to that difficult friend of mine. Tomorrow I will pick up my Bible reading habit again. Tomorrow! Let me enjoy my messy life still today. Tomorrow I will repent and get my act together.
The problem is that tomorrow never comes. When you wake up after a good night’s sleep, you will find that it is again “today”. Look at how Jesus instructs his followers to live. Think about it that more than two billion people on earth claim to be his followers. When you add that up, wouldn’t you expect the world to be quite a different place? Why have the Christian faith and the Christian Church made so little impact on the world? Is it not because so many of us procrastinate when it comes to giving up our comfort and our self-serving ambitions? Is it not because we are so reluctant to get up on our feet and out of our comfort zone? We wait for the right moment. We wait for others to move first. We give it a try, but the force of gravity or the friction inertia is too strong. And so, we never get moving. Mañana—tomorrow, not now.
If we know that there are things in our life that need corrective action, and we just wait for tomorrow to get it done, or for others to make the first move, we will never be ready. That is when the thought of Jesus coming again, or of us facing death any time soon, can send us occasionally into a fit of fear or panic. But we need not fear or panic. We can be at peace, if only we give the control over our lives over to God. If we do so, we can even look forward with a good conscience, and with joy and anticipation, at his return.
In the first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul echoes the message that Jesus delivers in Matthew 24: “The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.” And like Jesus, he tells us to be ready: to be awake and sober.
“While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly.”
Who are those people? Those who do not lock their doors at night, because they do not believe that somebody could actually come to their house by force and rob them. In other words, those who do not believe that Jesus could actually come again, or that they could actually die some time soon. And who therefore see no reason to set things right in their lives—just yet.
Somebody recently said to me that I am a control freak. When I come to think of it, there is some truth in it, although I don’t think I am the worst control freak around. I like to have things organized. I want to be prepared for everything: not only for the things I expect, but also for a lot of scenarios that I hope will never happen and that are actually quite unlikely.
But the fact is that we cannot control our lives, or the time of our death. We cannot control when Jesus is coming back. Therefore, we need to live our lives so that we are ready to meet our Lord any time without reason for fear or panic.
Paul tells us that we should not conform to the norms and practices of the world in which we live. On the contrary: we should stand out from the crowds. In these ten verses, Paul uses many dichotomies—pairs of words that express sharp contrasts. In verse 3, false security is contrasted with destruction. And he goes on: light and darkness; day and night; awake and asleep; sober and drunk; salvation and wrath; life and death.
What Paul is saying here is this: Don’t go on living as if nothing has happened to you when you accepted the Gospel and became a disciple of Jesus Christ. Don’t imitate those who reject Jesus as Lord of their lives. Make a difference! Let Christ redeem you from your former way of living. Let the Holy Spirit transform your lives to be pleasing in God’s sight. Conduct your lives so that they can stand the light of day— at any time, not only on Sundays. You are children of the light and children of the day. You should be an example to others. Your conduct and your integrity should make others jealous. They should make others want to have what you have—peace in Christ Jesus.
We all have our weaknesses. We all have areas in our lives that are not under God’s rule. We have bad habits that we just don’t want to give up. We have addictions that we are not strong enough to break loose from. We have desires that at times are stronger than our desire to follow Jesus. We need to take those seriously. We need to expose the darkness in our lives to God’s penetrating light.
Paul does not try to cause panic when he talks about the day of the Lord coming as a thief in the night. His approach is positive. It is an approach of encouragement. “Encourage one another and build each other up.”
It is easy enough to criticize one another and find fault with one another. I have seen Christians turn away from the faith, not because they were disappointed with Jesus, but because they were constantly criticized for not being good enough Christians—for not being worthy even of God’s grace. But that is not what we are instructed to do here. On the contrary, we must be positive and encourage one another and build one another up instead of tearing one another down. How? Not by claiming that everything is fine—“I’m okay, you’re okay.”—that kind of thing. But by reminding one another that “our Lord Jesus Christ died for us so that we may live together with him.”
When people fail to live out their Christian faith—when they stumble, or when they tend to retreat into the darkness again—we are called to reach out to them with forgiveness and grace. We are called to help them to get up on their feet again and continue in their walk of faith. The Christian life is like a journey. We are on that journey together. Today, I am strong and know the way, while you feel weak and lost. Tomorrow, the roles are reversed: you are strong, and I am weak. We are a community of sinners redeemed by the blood of Christ. In that community, we can and must support one another, encourage one another, and build one another up. But we can only do that when we recognize and admit our own weakness and failure, our own blindness—and often, our own reluctance to change—to let God’s Spirit transform us.
When Jesus hung on the cross, a robber and murderer hanging beside him asked him: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” There was nothing this man could do to change his life, or to make up for what he had done wrong. There was only a last-minute change of heart, and the recognition that, if there could be a turn for the better, only Jesus could make that happen. And Jesus told the man, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
It is not our spiritual success stories that encourage others. We do not help others by showing off. What truly brings encouragement, and what truly builds up, is the recognition that Jesus, in his mercy and by his death, raises us from death to life, moves us from darkness to light, from wrath to salvation. That should be our testimony. And in that awareness, not of our own superiority but of God’s boundless mercy, we can face the prospect of meeting our Lord and Judge any time, whether it be after our death or when he comes back as he promised. Amen.
