It
Ain’t Gonna Happen
November 26, 2024
There simply is no doubt about it. The Christians who wrote
the texts that became the New Testament believed that Jesus would come to earth
again. Likewise, there is no doubt that they believed that this posited “Second
Coming” hadn’t happened yet. The oldest Christian text is 1 Thessalonians. It
is a letter from Paul to a church he had founded in the Greek city of
Thessalonica. Paul wrote it in the year 50 CE give or take a couple of years.
The letter speaks of different things, but it appears that the main concern of
the Thessalonians, and Paul’s main concern in writing to them, was that though
Jesus had been gone for something like twenty years, he hadn’t come back yet.
That was a big problem because these earliest Christians believed that no
Christians would die before he came back. Yet of course Christians did die
before he came back. The Thessalonians apparently feared that they would not be
saved by being raised when Jesus finally did come back because Jesus would come
only for those who were still alive when he came.
Paul writes to assure them that that is not the case. He
writes: “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.” 1 Thessalonians 4:15. He the goes on to describe his
posited Second Coming: “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 4:16. Paul assures the
Christians of Thessalonia that Christ will indeed come back and would do it
with a great albeit earthly flourish. Paul tells the Thessalonians that when
this happens, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds
together with them to meet the Lord in the air….” 1 Thessalonians 17.[1]
Paul, the earliest Christian writer we have, believed that Jesus would come
again.
He’s not the only New Testament author who believed that
Christ would indeed return. There is in the Gospel of Mark something called
“the little apocalypse of Mark.” It’s at Mark 13:3-37. There Mark’s Jesus says:
“Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and
glory.” Mark 13:26. Matthew has Jesus also refers to the “coming of the Son of
Man” at Matthew 24:27. The book of Acts refers to a Second Coming. Acts 1:11. Then,
of course, there is the book of Revelation. A great many Christians have
thought, wrongly, that Christ’s return is what that book is all about and that
they could discern from it exactly where and when Christ would return. I’ll quote
the next to last verse of the book to make the point: “The one who testifies to
these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.’” Revelation 22:20. Many other New
Testament verses also refer to a Second Coming of Christ. The early Christians
thought Christ would return during their lifetime. He didn’t, and that he
didn’t shook the faith of many of those Christians, so strong was their
conviction that he would return soon.
Christ didn’t return then, and Christ has not returned now,
at least not in the way those early Christians expected. So I think we have to
ask: What was that erroneous belief in a speedy return of Christ to earth all
about? We explain it, I think, by looking at the context in which early
Christians expressed that belief. These Christians believed in a Second Coming
for one reason and one reason only. Jesus Christ had been here. He had preached
and healed. He was crucified, then rose from the grave and ascended to heaven.
But it hadn’t worked! The world was still as unjust and violent as it had ever
been, and those God-damned Romans were still doing a lot of the injustice and
violence. It seems they believed that the first coming of Christ hadn’t done
them much good, or at least that it had not done them the kind of good they
wanted.
Surely, these people thought, God wouldn’t let the world’s
evil go on indefinitely. Surely God would send Jesus back to finish the job he
left unfinished when he left the first time. And, they believed, Jesus would be
very different upon his Second Coming than he had been during his first coming.
They believed that this time Jesus would come in power and glory. See the quote
of Mark 13:26 above. They knew that during his human life on earth Jesus of
Nazareth had neither power nor glory, at least not in the earthly sense of
those words. He had the power to cure illness and calm storms, but he didn’t
even try to get rid of the Romans by using power against them. That, however is
exactly what these people said Christ would do when he came back. He’d have
power, worldly power, and he'd use it to kill off of the bad guys and set the
world aright.
So here’s what I hear these early coreligionists of mine
saying. They’re saying: “Hey Jesus! All that stuff about love, acceptance, inclusion,
and forgiveness that you gave us when you were here before was nice enough.
Sure, those words probably came from God. But they didn’t work! So now, come
back and do it our way! Do it with violence. Smite the bad guys. Destroy
Rome. Get rid of everyone and everything that is violent and oppressive. Yeah.
That’s what we need. So, Lord Jesus, come on back down here and get on with it.
Come back and do it our way this time!”
The great Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan characterizes
this belief brilliantly. I have heard him say that “belief in the Second Coming
is the great denial of the first coming.” Here’s what I understand Crossan to
mean. What was the first coming all about? It was about Jesus bringing a word
from God about how the world should be and would be if it lived by God’s rules
not by human rules. Jesus wanted the world to change, but he didn’t want anyone
to use violence to make it change, and he certainly didn’t use violence to make
it change. Instead, he wanted to change the world by freeing people’s minds and
spirits from the ways of the world so they could be open to the ways of God. See,
for example, the story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac at Mark 5:1-13,
in which Jesus exorcizes a demon named Legion who was actually a great many
separate demons all possessing one unfortunate man. He got Legion out of the
man, and the man returned to his right mind. A legion was an organizing unit of
the Roman army. So, symbolically, Jesus got Rome out of the possessed man, and
the possessed man became sane. Jesus wants us to get truly sane by getting the
world out of our minds and souls too. Our scripture tells us that Jesus had
power over demons, but it wasn’t the power of physical force. It wasn’t the
power of violence. Jesus was all about love and nonviolent transformation of
the world through transformation of individual people.
The early Christians who believed in the Second Coming did
not want Jesus to come back and do more of that. After all, it hadn’t
worked! Sure. Some people experienced the inner transformation that Jesus
said was the way to transform the world, but the world most definitely hadn’t
been transformed. It looked very much the same as it had when Jesus was here
the first time. The early Christians desperately wanted the world transformed,
but Jesus hadn’t done it the first time he had a chance. So they said he’d get
a second chance. He’d come back and do it right this time. He’d do it our way.
He’d employ the world’s ways of hatred and violence not God’s ways of love and
peace. nd this time he’d get the job done.
See how all of that denies Jesus’ first coming? It doesn’t
focus on divine teachings of love, forgiveness, inclusivity, and nonviolence.
It focuses on the world’s ways not on God’s ways. It really does amount to no
more than calling on Jesus to come back and do it our way this time. And it ain’t
gonna happen. Jesus is not going to come back sometime in the future to scourge
the earth with violence. That’s not Jesus’ way. It’s not God’s way.
So we have to ask ourselves: What are we to do with all of
this blasphemous nonsense about a Second Coming. One way I’ve heard of dealing
with it is to say that the Second Coming has already happened. It happened a
very long time ago. The book of Acts tells of when it gives the account we know
as Pentecost. Pentecost is the story of the Holy Spirit coming upon the
disciple community forty days after Jesus’ Resurrection. The Spirit comes upon
them with a sound like the sound of a mighty wind and with tongues as of fire. See
Acts 2:1-4. And what does the Spirit do with the disciples? It doesn’t turn
them into an army. It inspires them to get on with God’s work in the world.
That’s quite a model for us, don’t you think?
In Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit is both the same as
the Son and not the same as the Son at the same time.[2]
But since one of the attributes of the Holy Spirit is that she is identical
with the Son, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples is the same
thing as the Son, that is, Jesus Christ, coming upon the disciples.[3]
The Christian tradition has never thought of Pentecost as the Second Coming; but
then, the Christian tradition has gotten a awful lot of things wrong over the
centuries. It makes sense for us to look our Christian tradition in the eye and
say, “You got this one wrong too.” Which may or may not work for you. It sort
of works for me although it goes so against the tradition and the ways I and
the tradition have always thought of Pentecost that I don’t really find this
solution to the problem of the supposed Second Coming completely satisfying.
The other way to deal with the problem of the Second Coming
is simply to reject the whole notion. To say to our forbears in the faith who
believed so firmly in it, “Sorry. You were just wrong.” Indeed, I cannot doubt
that they were wrong. Even if we overlook the part of their belief that said
that Jesus would return during their lifetimes, perhaps even before any
Christians died, the belief in the Second Coming remains simply untenable.
There are at least a few reasons why it is untenable. First,
the texts that speak of it are nearly two thousand years old; and unless we
accept Pentecost as the Second Coming, the Second Coming hasn’t happened yet. If
God hasn’t caused it to happen for nearly two thousand years, how can we think
that God is still going to do it sometime in the future? I, for one, cannot
think that; and I think a great many people today can’t think it either.
Believing that it is still going to happen is nonsense. The people who believe
it are mostly biblical literalists, but they aren’t perfect biblical
literalists because they ignore or somehow try to explain away the part of the
story that says the Second Coming would happen in the first century CE. I’m not
a biblical literalist, and I am convinced that biblical literalism is killing
the Christian faith. Be that as it may, there is no denying that the Second
Coming as our forbears expected it hasn’t happened. It is nonsense to believe
that it still will.
A second reason for us to reject the notion of a Second
Coming of Christ is the harm that notion has caused over the centuries. Time
and time again people, well intentioned or not, have claimed to have determined
when and where the Second Coming will happen. They usually ground their
prediction in an amateur reading of the book of Revelation, believing that it
is something that it is not, namely, really a prediction of the future.[4]
Time and time again gullible but good-faith people have accepted someone’s prediction
of the Second Coming. Sometimes they have done extreme things like quit their
jobs and sell their homes because they believed they wouldn’t be needing them
anymore. Even worse, the failure of the prediction in which they had put so
much faith surely has shaken or even destroyed their Christian faith
altogether. Belief in the Second Coming has caused a lot of harm. We really do
need to get rid of it.
And there is a perhaps even more compelling reason to reject
the idea of a Second Coming of Christ. It calls for God and Jesus Christ to do
things neither God nor Jesus Christ would ever do. It calls on God to send
Jesus Christ this time not as a poor boy from a backwater part of a backwater province
of the Roman Empire but in power and glory as the world understands those
terms. It calls on God to appear with trumpets and angels proclaiming his
coming. It calls on Christ to descend from the heavens through the air not to
be born to a virgin mother the way he was the first time around. To come in
some way even more unnatural than his virgin birth was.
Worse, it calls it calls for violence. It calls for God and
Jesus Christ to rid the world of its bad guys basically by slaying them. That
may well be what most of us humans (though not your humble author) would do
with them if we could. It is not, however, something Jesus would ever do. He
said, “Love your enemies.” A bumper sticker the Church of the Brethren once put
out read: “When Jesus said love you enemies, I think he probably meant don’t
kill them.” Duh! Because it contradicts one of God’s basic characteristics, the
characteristic of love, belief in the Second Coming is indeed blasphemous.
And finally, belief in the Second Coming calls us away
from that which God calls us to. We know from Christ’s first coming that
the work of transforming the world is humanity’s work to do. It is our work to
do. God calls us to go into the world to care for people in need and to
confront the powers of violence and oppression with God’s word of love. The
historical Jesus surely never called anyone to just sit around and wait for God
to come to solve the world’s problems. That, however, is exactly what belief in
the Second Coming calls us to do. It says to us, “You don’t have to do kingdom
work in the world. Just be patient. Someday Jesus will come back and do it for
you.”
That notion is simply un-Christian. It is un-Christian
because, as Crossan says, it denies Jesus’ first coming. It denies what he came
to do. It denies the essence of what he taught us. We really do need to
jettison it. It was wrong when the first Christians latched onto it in the
first century CE. It is wrong today. So let’s move beyond it, shall we? Let’s
get on with transforming the world ourselves. Christ isn’t going to return to
do it for us. Folks, it ain’t gonna happen, and that’s all there is to it.
Amen.
[1]
This is the sole biblical passage that sounds anything like the absurd notion
of “the Rapture,” a word that appears nowhere in the Bible in the sense our fundamentalist
Christians who believe in it give it.
[2]
Yes. I know. That’s not possible. It is indeed not possible, it’s just true.
[3]
And at the same time not that at all, but don’t worry about it. Trinitarian
theology is valuable precisely because it makes no sense.
[4] It’s
really a condemnation of empire, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.
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