Maybe They Were Just
Wrong
November 25, 2020
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
Time and again we see the New Testament authors wrestling
with what for them was a big problem. They had believed that Christ would
return in glory and power to judge the earth and set things right. Thus as Mark
13:32 we see the text just assuming a second coming of Christ: “But about that
day or hour no one knows….” They just knew, or thought they knew, that there
would be a day and an hour when Christ would return. Matthew 25:31 assumes a
second coming too: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory….” St. Paul promises
a second coming of Christ in the oldest Christian document we have: “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….” 1 Thessalonians 4:16. From
the earliest years of the Christian faith Christians believed that Christ would
return. His second coming would not be like his first coming. This time there’d
be no manger, no shepherds, no magi, no panicked flight to Egypt to escape a
murderous king. There’d be nothing humble about Christ’s anticipated second
coming. No, this time Christ would come in glory and power to punish the
evildoers and establish the kingdom of God on earth.
They thought it would happen soon. Indeed, there was the
notion that no Christian would die before it happened. Thus the author of the
Gospel of Mark has Jesus say “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass
away…” until the end times had come. Mark 13:30. The issue behind Paul’s first
letter to the church in Thessalonica is that Christ’s return was supposed to
have happened, but it hadn’t. That why Paul says, “But I do not want you to be
uninformed…about those who have died….” 1 Thessalonians 4:13a. The early Christians
of that church were afraid that their people who had died before the second
coming of Christ would not benefit from that second coming because they had
died too soon, that they would not get the everlasting life that they thought
the second coming would bring them. Just why the early Christians believed in a
second coming that would happen soon is something about which I will offer an
opinion anon. For now just know that they did believe in such an imminent
second coming of Christ.
Several New Testament authors wrote in response to the people’s
concern that the second coming hadn’t happened yet. We see two basic responses
that they gave. One was essentially to say that we weren’t wrong about a second
coming, we were just wrong about the timing. Thus at Mark 13:32, part of which
I have already quoted, we read that we just don’t know when the second coming
will happen. Then Mark’s Jesus uses an analogy to explain how we don’t know.
Mark has Jesus say,
It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and
puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to
be on watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the
house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or
else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say
to all: Keep awake. Mark 13:34-37.
It will
happen, this text says. He will return. We just don’t know when.
The other response we see to the concern that Christ hadn’t
returned amounts essentially to just don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter.
That’s what Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians. He wrote to them:
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 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…will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then
we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with
them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. 1
Thessalonians 4:14-17.[1]
Paul is
saying yes, they died before he returned, but it’s cool. They won’t be left out
at the second coming. That they died before he came just doesn’t matter.
Now, do you notice what these New Testament authors don’t say
in response to the people’s concern that the second coming they had been
promised hadn’t happened? They don’t say oops, I guess we were wrong about his
coming again. We’ll just have to live with what he gave us when he was here the
first time. No, they keep insisting that he really is coming back and that what
they had told the people to expect from that second coming really would happen.
It didn’t happen, but their leaders kept insisting that it would.
Why? Why were these early Christian writers so convinced that
Christ would return in power and glory? Why were they so convinced not only
that he would return but that his second coming would be so radically different
from his first coming? I can think of only one possible reason, and it isn’t
that Jesus told them he would come again in that way. I can’t imagine Jesus of
Nazareth ever having said anything like that. No, the only reason I can think
of why they kept looking for a second coming was that they were deeply
disappointed with the results of his first coming. Had conditions in their
world changed because of Jesus’ first coming? No, not really. Christians may
have experienced a spiritual change because of their commitment to him, but
almost everyone was still poor and exploited by the rich. The Romans still
taxed them and brutally suppressed any opposition. They still experienced
injustice and violence in their lives. No one except Jesus had been taken up
into heaven to live forever. Sure, Jesus was a great guy and all. He did
miraculous things. He talked a good game about peace and justice as God’s way,
but where were the peace and justice? Nowhere that they could see. So they
thought he’ll have to come again and do it right this time. He’ll return and do
it our way, the way of power not the way of love. He has to. What he did the
first time didn’t work, so he has to come and try it again, this time in glory
and power so that it will work. That at least is how I imagine them thinking.
That they thought that way at least explains why they thought he would return
as well as their concern that he hadn’t done it yet.
We have nearly two thousand years of experience that they didn’t
have. He hasn’t come back yet, at least not in the way those early Christians
thought he would.[2] He
certainly hadn’t come with a great display of power and glory that transformed
the world overnight. Will he come that way some day? Who knows? Here’s what we
do know. He came once. He taught us a great many things about God and God’s
ways. Yes, he spoke a divine vision of a world of peace and justice, but he
sure didn’t try to establish one by force. Two thousand years is a long time to
wait for him to do it. Yes, perhaps as 2 Peter says “with the Lord one day is
like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” 2 Peter 3:8. That
however is not how it is for us. We’ve waited so long for Christ to come again
in power and glory that perhaps it’s time for us to rethink the whole second
coming thing.
Surely God calls us to something other than an interminable
wait for something that may well never happen. God hasn’t given us a second
coming of Christ of the kind for which those early Christians longed. God did
give us a first coming of Christ. Surely our call is to live with and into what
we have rather than sit around pining for what we don’t have. I sure wish those
early Christian writers whose words ended up in the New Testament had said
something different than they did about a second coming. What they said has
misled people ever since. Time and again Christians have predicted that the
second coming would happen at a particular time, and they’ve always been wrong.
I wish those writers had said well, I guess we were wrong about that second
coming thing or at least we were wrong about when and how it would happen. I
wish they had drawn conclusions from their error about the timing that they
didn’t draw. I wish they’d said he came once, and that’s what matters. Let’s
learn what he came to teach us when he was here the first time. Let’s
understand that creating a world of justice and peace is our work with God’s
help. It’s not Christ’s work to come again and do it for us. That’s what’s
true. That’s our call from God. Live into the first coming, don’t sit around
waiting for a first coming. The New Testament writers who predicted a second
coming of Christ appear just to have been wrong. So let’s get on with living
into the first coming, shall we?
[1] Believers
in the eschatological nonsense of the Rapture point to the line here about
meeting the Lord in the air as biblical support for their belief. Why anyone
would build a whole theology on one phrase from a letter written nearly two
thousand years ago about something that never happened escapes me, but never
mind.
[2] I
have heard the idea that there actually has been a second coming. It is either
that his Resurrection appearances are a second coming or, more likely, that the
coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost was. I quite like
that notion, but clearly the New Testament writers didn’t think there had been
a second coming as they wrote.
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