In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit +
In the meantime. What a wonderful little phrase – in the meantime. You want to be doing something, but you can't right now, you've got to wait. It's not ready yet, so you get to do something else. In the meantime. In our Gospel lesson today, our Lord Jesus warns us that there will be quite a lot of our life spent in the spiritual meantime. We indeed wait for Jesus to come again, we look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come, we want Jesus to return and put and end to wickedness and bring us to our eternal home... but it's not yet. The Father, in His wisdom and love, has not yet sent Jesus to return (though if He chooses to interrupt this sermon and bring us all to the feast, well, who am I to argue). And so Jesus tells his followers, tells us, that we must be prepared for life in the meantime.
And it won't always be pretty. The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. Think about this. The disciples were used to hanging around with Jesus. With just chatting with Him, bouncing ideas off of Him. After the Ascension, they don't have that anymore – not in the meantime at least. And the problems that Jesus would have directly handled, well, they are called to handle them. So there will be times, rough times, when they will wish Jesus handled things directly like He used to. Most of us who have faced responsibility can understand – there are times where we think, “Grandpa would have handled this better” or “how would mom have done this”. I'm not knocking our earthly family here, but they've got nothing on Jesus. And even then, we ourselves as Christians, we face challenges, and we pray, we ask Jesus for strength (which He does give), and we can wish He would just show up and fix things... and we have to wait for that. And that's lousy.
And the temptation, when we are faced with the difficulty of waiting, the difficulty of facing the responsibilities that Jesus hands to us, is that we can become impatient. And we can start being tempted to follow off after foolish, false rumors and tales. And they will say to you, “Look, there!” or “Look, here!” Do not go out or follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in His day.” In the first century, there were a lot of false messiahs, people claiming to be Jesus come back, Jesus reincarnated. We still get them on occasion today, but they were really common then. And Jesus warns the disciples, no, don't go running off after rumors about My return – when I return, it will be sudden – as sudden as lightning, and it will be obvious to everyone – you aren't going to miss it. And this warning still holds, still applies to us. There are a lot of false teachers out there who will dangle secret, hidden information about Jesus, about the second coming, about the end of days in front of you. And those types of lines are so appealing because we want Jesus to come back, we want to know how things will play out... we even want to be able to make them play out. And Jesus says no, you're just going to have to wait. And anyone who says otherwise isn't just selling something; they're also calling Jesus a liar and saying that they know better than Him. If Jesus says, “No man knoweth the hour” then the guy who says he's figured out when Jesus is coming back is a snake oil salesman at best.
No, we must wait. And it won't always be a comfortable waiting. But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. The disciples thought that since they were following Jesus, they were going to literally get to run the world. That following Jesus would mean they would be ruling Israel and it would be earthly glory days, because Jesus is the Messiah and doesn't that mean glory? Well, yes... but... Jesus is going to go to the Cross. The point isn't merely glory, the point is winning life and salvation for you by taking up your Sin and crucifying it on the Cross. Jesus suffers. And also, Jesus is rejected. Jesus gets denigrated. Jesus gets spat upon. It's not all lifestyles of the Rich and Famous for Jesus in this world... and disciples, it never becomes that in this world. That's heaven, that's the life of the world to come. You'll have to wait for that.
And my dear Christian friends, well, I've got to say, you'll face the same sort of things. Jesus has told us that no servant is above his master. In this world, you won't always be celebrated for being a Christian. You won't always be encouraged in your faith by the people around you. In fact, many people you know, people you love, even people you respect, will throw up obstacles to your faith. They'll try to pull you away from Church, from worship, from the faith. And you'll even face disdain, mockery, and rejection. That's all part of this meantime that we are in. And yet, in this meantime, in the face of rejection, we're called to bear witness to Jesus, to proclaim that He has died and risen for the forgiveness of sins, that what Jesus did on the Cross and the forgiveness which He gives is the most important thing in the world. And why?
Because Jesus is coming back. And we need to be ready, and those people who reject us, God grant that they come to faith even though our witness so that they will be ready too. For Jesus says – Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Noah was rejected. His friends, his neighbors saw the ark, and I'm willing to guess Noah told them why he was building it, that there even was room. And then the flood came, and it was their end. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot – they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all – so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. Another example with Sodom and Gamorah. Abraham couldn't believe how few faithful people there were left in Sodom when God delivered Lot and his daughters from that wicked place. Abraham had taught them of God; Lot had taught them of God. Then the destruction. We've seen the pattern – and it will play out one last time when Jesus comes again. And so in the meantime, we remain faithful, we tell others, we hope. And we wait.
However, I want you to note something about this waiting that we have. We are not waiting for an absent, distant Jesus to return after having left us alone for thousands of years. Did you not the last word? When the Son of Man is... revealed. It's the same word for the book of Revelation (note, Revelation, singular, one Revelation – the revelation of Jesus). That word for revealed is the word Apocalypse, and it literally means to pull the cover off of something – it's ta-da. This thing was here, but now the veil is pulled back so you can see it. And that's the thing – while we wait for Jesus to return, it's not that Jesus has been absent or gone, it's that He is present with us in His Church, with us – but not in an open and obvious way. And theologians will use different images to describe this wonder, this mystery – Paul will talk about how we are buried with Christ by baptism – we're joined to Him in a way that is hidden and not obvious, but it's real, and we are united with Him. And the end, it's really just when all these truths of Scripture that are real and present are shown publicly and fully to be real – when the meantime, when the “now we see through a mirror dimly” becomes the “then we see face to face.”
And this is where Jesus in fact started off our lesson. Don't expect everything about God and Jesus and the faith to be open and obvious all the time. The Church is invisible, is hidden (I like hidden a little bit better), the realities are deeper than our mere observation. And we aren't to go chasing off after wild obvious displays of God's power in the meantime. Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, [Jesus] answered them, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'There,' for behold, the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” When's the kingdom coming, Pharisees? Well, I'm right here – Christ Jesus, the Lord, is right here in your midst, and even though you might not see it, the Kingdom of God is right here. And this remains true for us – right here, right now, among us, Jesus is here. God Himself is Present. Where two or three are gathered in My name – you know, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit – there I will be. Take and Eat, Take and Drink, lo I will be with you always, even until the end of the age – even until the revealing of the Son of Man. In the meantime we are called by the Holy Spirit, we are gathered by the Holy Spirit to live in the Gospel of Christ Jesus, to live in His Word, in His Sacraments. These simple things which the world disdans and scoffs at, preaching, baptism, the Supper, the Word of God – God is present and active for you in them, to forgive you, to strengthen you, to guide you, to preserve you, to enlighten you. To keep you in His Kingdom, His Power even until the last day.
And there are so many temptation, temptations away from the Word, temptations away from the Church. Temptations dangling pleasures, temptations threatening us, even temptations telling us that we don't need to wait. Oh, this is a sore one for us 21st Century Americans, because we hate waiting for anything, and we have so little patience. Oh well, Jesus has spoken, and He has told us the truth, the reality. He is with us now in His Church, in His Word and Sacraments, and He will come again – and whether His second coming is in our lifetimes or not, we are called to wait, we are called actually to rest in Him, to have our Sabbath rest in Him, to hear Him, and thus be in His kingdom now and forever. The meantime is the time of the Church, and while it is difficult, in the Church, even the Church militant here on earth, it still is all good in Jesus. Amen. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit +
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