The Great Denial

The Great Denial

As we enter the season of Advent I always pity the poor people who create lectionaries. Advent is the season of anticipation of and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ as Christmas.  Of course those who create the Revised Common Lectionary or other lectionaries for the churches want to give us scripture readings that fit the theme of Advent. They have, however, a big problem when they set out to do that. The simple truth is that there are very few biblical passages that fit the theme. Yes, the Gospel of Luke has a rather complex story that leads up to the birth of Jesus, but that’s about all there is. So our poor brothers and sisters on the lectionary committees resort to a solution to their problem that really is no solution at all. They give us readings that really have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and they do it in two different ways. We see both of those ways in the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary for the first Sunday of Advent in Year B, the second year of that lectionary’s three year cycle. Since I began writing this essay on the eve of that Sunday let’s take a look at those readings to see what I mean.
We see the first way in which the Revised Common Lectionary solves (or rather doesn’t solve) its Advent problem in the first reading it gives us for that Sunday. It’s Isaiah 64:1-9. That passage dates from after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon in the late sixth century BCE. It begins with a prophetic plea for God to break into the world and solve the world’s problems. Verses 1 and 2 read, in the NRSV translation:

O that you would tear open the
  heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would
    quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
  and the fire causes water to
    boil—
to make your name known to
    your adversaries,
  so that the nations might
    tremble at your presence!

It is quite obvious that this passage has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. First of all, it was written more than five hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Beyond that, Jesus’ birth hardly caused the mountains to quake. No nations trembled at his presence except maybe for King Herod in Matthew’s version of his birth story.
Third Isaiah here is giving us a brief example of the “day of the Lord” prophecy of the ancient Hebrew prophets. We see an earlier example of that sort of prophecy in chapter 5 of Amos. There we read:

Alas for you who desire the day
    of the Lord!
  Why do you want the day of
    the Lord?
It is darkness not light;
  as if someone fled from a lion,
  and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested
    a hand against the wall,
  and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the Lord
    darkness, not light,
  and gloom with no brightness in it? Amos 5:18-20

These day of the Lord passages from ancient Hebrew prophecy are explicitly about the coming of the god Yahweh into the world to judge and to punish. They are not about the coming of the Lord Jesus into the world to reveal God’s unshakable love for and solidarity with humanity and all of creation. Yet the lectionaries give us some of them in Advent because, I suppose, they at least are about the coming of God into the world in some sense, which is about as close as scripture gets to texts about the coming of Jesus.
We see the other way the lectionaries try to solve their Advent problem in the Revised Common Lectionary’s Gospel reading from this same first Sunday of Advent, year B. This lectionary gives us as the Gospel reading for that day Mark 13:24-37. Chapter 13 of Mark is known as the “little apocalypse of Mark.” It is set during Jesus’ last week on earth, not in the period before his birth. It is about a supposed second coming of Jesus, not about his first coming. In that passage four of Jesus’ disciples ask him when “this” will be, referring apparently to Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple at Mark 13:2. Jesus replies:

‘Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.’ Mark 13:5b-8

In the part of chapter 13 the Revised Common Lectionary gives us for this Sunday we read:

     ‘But in those days, after that suffering,
    the sun will be darkened,
      and the moon will not give
        its light,
    and the stars will be falling
        from heaven,
      and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see ‘the Son of Man, coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Mark 13:24-26

What that has to do with with birth of baby Jesus escapes me. It clearly refers back to the ancient Hebrew day of the Lord prophecy I mentioned above. It bears no real relationship to the birth of Jesus at all. The reference to the coming of the “Son of Man” is taken from the book of Daniel. See Daniel 7:13-14. Jesus used the phrase “Son of Man” as a term of self-reference, but Jesus didn’t come in clouds with great power and glory. He was born as a helpless newborn infant with no power at all. As with the passage we’re given from Isaiah, Mark’s little apocalypse is in some way about the coming of God, or of the risen Christ, into the world, but it has nothing to do with the first coming of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas.
Yet the way the lectionary gives us second coming language for Advent raises an even bigger question for me than the question of how to preach during Advent. It is the issue of the Parousia, the second coming of Christ. There is no doubt that the earliest Christians expected Jesus to return in power and glory and that they expected him to do it soon. We see that expectation in the oldest writing in the New Testament, namely, First Thessalonians. There, referring to the belief that no Christians would die before Christ returned but also to the reality that some had died and Christ hadn’t returned, Paul writes:
     But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16

The earliest Christians did indeed believe that Jesus was coming back. As we see in this passage Paul apparently believed that Christ would return during Paul’s lifetime.
Yet 1 Thessalonians was written nearly two thousand years ago, and Jesus still hasn’t come back, at least not in the way those earliest Christians thought he would. So it seems that we today must ask: Why did our earliest forbears in the faith believe that something would happen that still hasn’t happened roughly two thousand years later? Yes, they put words about his coming again into his mouth, but it seems virtually impossible to me that Jesus of Nazareth, who saw himself mostly as a prophet, would ever have said any such thing. So I don’t think they spoke of a second coming because Jesus had spoken of a second coming. I can think of only one reason why they would have believed in Jesus’ second coming, namely, that they were profoundly disappointed with his first coming. John Dominic Crossan even calls belief in the second coming the great denial of the first coming. I am convinced that he is right about that. So I want to consider here why the earliest Christians would have been disappointed in the first coming and thus believed in a second coming of Jesus Christ.
To understand why the earliest Christians would have been disappointed in the first coming of Jesus Christ we need to consider who Jewish people of Jesus’ time expected the Messiah, the expected deliverer of Israel, to be. There were different views on that question, but the main one was the belief that he would be a person who would drive out the Romans and restore the kingdom of David through military violence. Borg and Crossan quote scholar John Collins as saying about the messianic expectation of the first century CE: “This concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of Israel and institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era….”1 The Messiah was to be a descendant of King David who would defeat the Romans militarily the way David had defeated the Philistines militarily and who would establish a Jewish kingdom like the one David had (as they believed) established one thousand years earlier.
The earliest Christians confessed Jesus as the Messiah, but of course Jesus was not that kind of Messiah. He hadn’t raised an army to fight the Romans. He hadn’t even tried to raise an army to fight the Romans. Indeed, he had preached nonviolent resistance to the evil of the Roman Empire. The main reason for the earliest Christians’ disappointment with Jesus and for their belief in a second coming was that, while Jesus was indeed the Messiah, those damn Romans were still there. Neither the political nor the economic situation of these people’s world had changed. Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence had not rid them of the Romans with their oppressive military occupation, heavy taxation, and other harmful policies. God’s people were still ruled by a Gentile power, something that the Hebrew people had always considered wrong, indeed had always considered to be a kind of divine punishment. Clearly Jesus had left the Messiah’s mission unaccomplished. He needed to come back and accomplish it.
Put another way, Jesus needed to come back and do it our way this time. To all appearances his nonviolent approach to overcoming the Romans hadn’t worked. His strategy of changing the world by changing individuals from the inside out was taking too long.2 Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again, and those damn Romans were still there. Clearly, people thought, something more had to be done. In typical human fashion they decided that that something more was violence. Human violence of course wouldn’t do it. Rome was too strong. So what was needed was divine violence. God breaking in as conquering force, that’s what they thought was needed. So you get a revival of the old Hebrew prophetic notion of the “day of the Lord.” You get things like the little apocalypse of Mark, Mark. Finally you get the most violent book in the Bible, either Testament, the book of Revelation, in which there is massive violence; and it’s all done by God.
All of this violent second coming stuff comes down to this: Nice try God. Jesus was nice and all. Lovely really. But those damn Romans are still here, so send him back to do it our way this time. Cure him of his naive belief in nonviolence and send him back to smite the Romans the way we want them smitten, with massive violence.
And all of that adds up to what Crossan so aptly calls a denial of the first coming. Early Christians viewed the longed for second coming as essentially the opposite of the first coming. No baby born and laid in a manger. No teaching of nonviolence. No love your enemy. No turn the other cheek. Never mind inner personal transformation. What we want is outer world transformation, and we want it done fast. So, God, use violence to do it please. Belief in a second coming of Jesus Christ advocated the opposite from what Jesus advocated. It was, and is, indeed the great denial of the first coming.
In this Advent season as I write this essay we are preparing to celebrate that first coming. We talk about our anticipated joy at the birth of the Christ child. We say we are preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. We say we are preparing to revel in the love of God revealed in baby Jesus. We say all that, then some of us still say to him come a second time and do it our way.
That is not what God calls us to do. Maybe Jesus will come again some day. We can’t know for sure that he won’t; but it’s been nearly two thousand years since he left the first time, and he hasn’t come back yet. We can’t really know if he ever will come back, but we do know that he came once. He came as a Jewish man living under the Roman Empire. He came bringing a new way of understanding who God is and what God wants from us. The Romans killed him, but his followers experienced him as still present with them. He taught love. He taught nonviolence. He taught care for people in need, compassion and help for the least and lost. He taught that the way you free yourself from imperial oppression is to start by transforming your inner self from living the ways of empire to living the ways of God. We don’t know if he’ll ever come again, but we know those things about him.
So let me ask: If God simply wanted us to sit around waiting for Jesus to come again why did Jesus bother teaching us about God and revealing God to us the way he did? Christians have been so good at ignoring his teaching. We ignore it when we say that all he was about was believing in him so our souls will go to heaven when we die. We ignore him too when we say we needn’t be concerned about this world because he’s going to come back and change it (or maybe end it). Why would God have sent Jesus with all his teaching about and demonstrating a new understanding of God (albeit one solidly grounded in Jewish tradition) if God didn’t want us listening to him and then striving to live as he called us to live? I sure can’t think of any reason why God would do that.
So let’s be done with this nonsense about a second coming. Let’s be done with demanding that God come and clean up the world our way. Let’s realize that God has already shown us in Christ Jesus how God wants to clean up the world, by cleaning up human hearts and minds one person at a time. Then let’s get on with living into Christ’s first coming instead of sitting around fretting about some supposed second coming. If we will do that we’ll finally be following Jesus the way God wants us to follow Jesus; and if we can do that we may actually transform the world.