The lectionary readings for Advent have a significant focus on the ‘second coming’ of Christ, a complex idea which can evoke an uncertain reaction for many Christians, and which often stands in contrast to the approaching Christmas festivities. John Parr delves into the origins and interpretations of the second coming to aid your worship preparation.
By the time Advent Sunday arrives, shops and businesses have been preparing for Christmas for months. The church claims the Advent season as its own particular time to prepare for our annual celebration of Jesus’ coming as a new-born child. The further we get into Advent, the closer the Sunday readings draw us to the story of his birth. As the season begins, however, our focus is not on the Incarnation, but on another coming of Jesus, ‘on the last day... in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead’, as the Advent collect puts it. We begin our time of looking back to the birth of Jesus by looking forward to his return.
In this year’s gospel for Advent Sunday, we hear about ‘the Son of Man... coming at an hour you do not expect’ (Matt 24:44). Like the flood in the days of Noah, this coming from heaven – what the church has called ‘the second coming’ since the second century – will rescue some people but not others. The epistle sees Advent as a time to heed Paul’s words to wake up to the approaching day of judgement and salvation (Rom 13:11). These readings have persuaded some churches to prepare for Christmas by preaching on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. Yet with the shops dangling visions of Christmas festivities in front of us, the Church’s downright ominous approach can feel jarring and uncomfortable. Simply put, rather than filling us with joy and hope, the prospect of Jesus’ second coming can leave us feeling confused, anxious and gloomy. How is it, then, that a festival so centred on hope, peace and joy can be preceded by a time apparently focussed on nothing less than the end of the world?
To understand this tension that seems to exist between Advent and Christmas, it is worth exploring this idea of a second coming in more detail:
- Where does it come from?
- What does it mean?
- What are the consequences for us today?
Why has the Church come to believe in the second coming of Jesus?
A good starting point is to acknowledge that the notion of the second coming as we know it didn’t emerge until around 160CE, when Justin Martyr, an early apologist, first distinguished between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ comings of Jesus. With time, his writings on Paul and the Gospels led to references to the ‘second coming’ being included in the Church’s creeds, formal statements of faith that are still used today.
Until this point, the early Church had a somewhat blurry understanding of ‘salvation’, partly due to the sheer variety of images and metaphors used by the psalmists and prophets of the Old Testament to convey God’s promise of salvation to his people. These ideas extend from:
- the restoration of an individual’s fellowship with God to deliverance from the powers of sickness, death and foreign armies (e.g. Psalm 27);
- the return from deportation enforced by victorious enemies to live in ancestral lands once more (Isaiah 43);
- and ultimately the renewal of all creation (Isaiah 65).
With such a wide-ranging scope, we shouldn’t be surprised that different understandings of salvation emerged over time. Some interpreters expected salvation to come soon, while others saw it as a more distant hope. These debates formed the scriptural background to Jesus’ own teachings on salvation; however much Jesus saw God’s kingdom taking shape in his ministry, he looked ahead to its coming ‘in power’, without specifying what he meant by this (Mark 1:15; 9:1).
What are the Old Testament origins of the second coming?
One of the most important passages in the Old Testament about God’s promise of salvation is a vision in Daniel 7:9-14 of ‘one like a human being’, who ascended to God’s heavenly throne room. According to the vision’s interpretation in 7:17,27, this figure represented faithful Israel oppressed by foreign rulers. His ascension symbolised God’s vindication of his loyal people and the promise of his blessing to reward them.
Daniel’s ‘son of man’ figure is the image of God’s ‘suffering servant’, normally interpreted as the people of Israel, but as is so often the case, Jesus reinterprets the Hebrew Scriptures to reveal his own role as the instrument of God’s kingdom. Onto the traditional interpretation, Jesus adds another layer of symbolism: Jesus himself is the ‘son of man’ who has come to bring salvation through costly servanthood (Mark 8:31-38; 10:45). In so doing, Jesus reveals that his sufferings and resurrection represent those of the whole people; they are ‘once for all’ (1 Peter 3:18ff). Despite his rejection and suffering at the hands of earthly rulers, he would come on the clouds as the vindicated ‘Son of Man’ who represented all of those who were faithful to God’s kingdom (Mark 13:24-27; 14:61-62).
Jesus’ retelling of Daniel’s vision encapsulates the tensions between understandings of salvation as an immediate prospect or as a long-term one. He emphasises that he is the hope of Israel in the flesh, with them in the present, but yet their redemption is not complete simply by him being with them. He still has work to do as the Son of God and the ‘Son of Man’. Salvation is both standing before the people now and as a prospect of the distant future.
Paul picked up the present/future tension in Jesus’ teaching. He saw God’s present kingdom in Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, which revealed the redeeming love of God (e.g. Rom 5:5), and its future as ‘the glory about to be revealed to us... the freedom of the glory of the children of God... the redemption of our bodies’, for which creation waits with us for its freedom ‘from its enslavement to decay’ (Rom 8:18-24). Paul saw the gateway to this glorious future as ‘the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ... so that you may be blameless on the day’ (1 Cor 1:7,8), a phrase he borrowed and adapted from the prophets to refer to the revelation of the ascended Christ from heaven (1 Thess 1:10; Col 3:4)1. Jesus’ resurrection assures our own – and thus represents our imminent salvation – and anticipates it, giving us a vision of a salvation that is yet to be fully realised. For Paul, salvation is present in Jesus, but it remains incomplete until Christ becomes ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28). It was in using these teachings of Jesus and Paul that Justin Martyr formulated his understanding of ‘the second coming’.
How wise is it to interpret ‘the second coming’ literally?
Although the Scriptures require us to balance the literal, immediate interpretation of Daniel’s vision – where Jesus is the ‘Son of Man’ in the flesh – and its symbolic interpretation, where the elevation of the ‘son of man’ represents the redemption of all of God’s people, over time the literal view became dominant. Once Christian teachers began to speak of Jesus’ second coming as the culmination of his birth, ministry, death and exaltation in glory, it seemed obvious to regard it as the climactic historical event in the coming of salvation from God.
In this light, Paul’s references to ‘the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’ were read in a very literal sense and the Acclamations in contemporary eucharistic prayers appear to endorse this. After hearing the narrative of Jesus’ last supper before his arrest and execution, the congregation says: ‘Christ has died: Christ is risen: Christ will come again’. Worshippers are led to expect that Christ’s coming again, his ‘second coming’, will be as public, observable and datable as his first.
Literalist Christians have always tried to work out when this second coming will happen, despite Jesus saying that no-one, not even the Son but only the Father, knows when the Son of Man will come (Mark 13:32-33). Delays and disappointments don’t seem to have quenched the spirit of those who take these words literally. If anything, they’ve generated a resilient spirituality that combines faith in God’s sovereignty, trust in God’s Word and detachment from the distractions of worldliness, including politics.
However, there is a more sinister side to this literalism. Many evangelical Christians, especially in the United States, use the Bible as a code to interpret the sweep of history. If life in the world as we know it is building up to the actual return of Christ on the clouds, some literalist believers insist that Jesus’ second coming will be preceded by other events that can assumed from scriptural interpretation. Several Old Testament passages look forward to the repatriation of the descendants of those who were deported from their ancestral lands by Assyrian and Babylonian armies in the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, and the restoration of Jerusalem and its Temple (e.g. Zech 8-14). The book of Revelation expects a ‘battle on the great day of God the Almighty’, in which the heavenly forces led by Jesus Christ will defeat earthly kings fighting for the powers of evil (Rev 16:14; 19:11-21). This will precede the coming of God’s new creation, with the descent of the throne of God and the Lamb at the heart of the new Jerusalem (Rev 21, 22). The site of the battle will be Armageddon, which some locate about 60 miles north of Jerusalem. A literal interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:17, in which Paul wrote of Jesus’ followers being ‘caught up in the clouds... to meet the Lord in the air’ when he descends from heaven, is the basis of belief in ‘the rapture’ of believers as part of the run-up to Jesus’ return.
Extreme forms of biblical literalism fuel the unqualified support of many American evangelicals for the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people. In their view, driving the Palestinian people out of Jewish ancestral lands, even if this sparks all-out war in the Middle East, only accelerates ‘the second coming’ of Jesus Christ, because these events are seen to fit into the Bible’s agenda for the coming of salvation from God.
How else might we interpret ‘the second coming’?
As we have seen, symbolism is important in the Scriptures relating to the second coming, so what if our belief were also more symbolic? Height is often used in the Bible to symbolise God’s transcendence. The same is true of time. ‘The beginning’ (Gen 1:1) is God’s time; ‘the end’ is when God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28), and ‘we will see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2). On this understanding, the Bible’s ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ are not datable events but symbols of God’s transcendence, which we can hope to share in some way.
If the ‘coming of Jesus on the clouds of heaven’ is symbolic language rather than a historically datable event, what is it saying? It tells us that God’s intentions for all creation are revealed in the crucified and exalted Jesus. Life as we know it finds its end in Christ himself, the Omega (Rev 1:8; 21:6; 22:13), not in the progress that eventually eliminates disease and injustice, or the economic growth that generates more than enough wealth for all, or the establishing of world peace. These vital goals may seem worthy pursuits but will ultimately turn out to be beyond us, because as we strive for them, we end up making the world in our own image when we really ought to be becoming more like God’s image. ‘The second coming’ symbolises the hope that God’s good purposes for creation are revealed in the gift of Jesus Christ, whose living for God and others, and victory over every kind of death, are God’s ‘all in all’. Rather than thinking of the second coming as the ‘end’ of history, we should think of it as the fulfilment of history, when Christ will be ‘all in all’. Then we shall be made complete, fully redeemed and living like the risen Christ. This prospect of a fully redeemed people living in a redeemed world is our Advent hope, which began with the birth of Jesus.
What difference does believing in ‘the second coming’ make to our faith?
Belief in a literal ‘second coming’ affects the way in which Christians engage with the wider world, but a symbolic interpretation of the ‘second coming’ also has important practical consequences. Jesus came to show us how to live. By emulating him, he will come again through us as we become more and more like him until eventually God is ‘all in all’. Luke’s Gospel tells of the expert in the law of Moses who asked Jesus how he should live now in the light of God’s coming kingdom (Luke 10:25-37)2. Jesus directed him to Moses’ teachings and then told him the story of a Jew who’d been beaten and robbed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and a compassionate Samaritan who looked after him. Like Daniel’s ‘son of man’, the Samaritan presents us with layered symbolism. On the one hand, he represents Jesus, who has come to save fallen humanity; on the other, he represents the calling of the whole people of God. ‘Go and do likewise’ (Luke 10:37) was Jesus’ answer to living through the tensions between God’s present and future reign or, as he put it elsewhere, ‘take up [your] cross and follow me’ (Luke 9:23).
If, at the second coming, we will see Christ in all things, then this is why Jesus instructs us to look for him everywhere, especially in the most vulnerable. In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46), the coming day of judgement casts its shadow across the present and makes it impossible to inherit the blessings of God’s kingdom without seeing the face of Jesus in the world’s most vulnerable people. The parable makes the point that at the second coming, the whole earth will be filled with the presence of God, but we will need eyes to see it.
The second coming of Jesus Christ holds before us the goal of a salvation that always lies beyond us and yet comes down to earth in Jesus’ call to live compassionately. This now includes acting as wise stewards of the sacred trust that is God’s earth: to ignore this only makes the world and its many forms of life more fragile. Paul’s Advent call to wake up to the gospel’s Christ-centred vision of hope and judgement and to welcome Christ into our hearts has never been more important or urgent.
Footnotes
1The phrase is often used in the Old Testament. See James D. Nogalski’s article, ‘The Day of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible’.
2This is the gist of his question about ‘inheriting eternal life which is an alternative way of referring to ‘entering the kingdom of God’ in Mark 10:17-31 and elsewhere.
Image credit
The Second Coming of Christ window at St. Matthew's Lutheran Church in Charleston, SC