Matthew 24 - A Thrill of Hope
/Matthew 24: 36-44
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
The church calendar sometimes feels like it’s in open conflict with our actual calendars. This first Sunday of the new liturgical year is technically a new beginning, but most of us are in the midst of the all-out mad dash between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. We aren’t ready for new beginnings; we’re still trying to finish this year. We’re squeezing in final doctor’s appointments once we’ve hit our deductibles, planning, throwing, and attending Christmas parties, keeping track of all the presents we have to buy, while also being bombarded with requests for year-end giving, all while trying to remember “the reason for the season.” This feels no time for liturgical new year’s resolutions.
Yet God’s timing moves along anyway. Our worship space different than it did just a week ago. The green of ordinary time has been replaced with Advent’s deep purple. As we begin Year A of the 3-year lectionary cycle, we begin with the Gospel of Matthew, after a year of reading Luke. Although I’m usually partial to Luke, there is something about Matthew that draws us in to pay close attention. The gospel of Matthew plays a particularly important role in the canon of scripture. It’s the hinge that connects the Old and New Testaments. It is a deeply Jewish gospel, written by Matthew, the former tax collector and disciple, to a Jewish audience. I explained to the youth group that reading the gospel of Matthew without knowing the Old Testament is like watching Avengers: Endgame without watching any of the twenty Marvel movies that preceded it. You might still enjoy it, but you would miss the inside jokes and the feeling of excitement when Cap picks up Thor’s hammer. The emotions that Marvel geeks like me felt when watching that movie were ones we earned. We spent countless hours in movie theatres with Earth’s greatest defenders and were thrilled at the payoff.
So too, can the book of Matthew be thrilling to read when you are intimately familiar with the Old Testament. The gospel is filled with references big and small to the only scripture Jesus ever read. When I was a Bible major in college, the more I learned, the more exciting the Bible became. After taking a class on the Torah, I started reading Matthew and exclaiming, “I know what he’s talking about there!” I felt an insider, like this letter was written to me. Today’s scripture reading has one of these many references, this time to Genesis 6 and a man named Noah, who walked with God.
The beginning of Matthew 24 describes Jesus walking out of the temple saying, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” He then goes up to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples come to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus tells them of birth pangs, persecutions, “desolating sacrilege,” and the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and glory.
This may seem like a strange way to begin Advent. Why do we start the year at the end of the gospel? Isn’t this supposed to be the beginning? In a season of many firsts, this is my first time preaching in Advent and it led me to ask these questions, too. What is Advent anyway? Is it merely colored candles and meditations on the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love? Is it a countdown to Christmas and the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, Immanuel, God with us? The answer I have learned is “Yes, and…” Yes, it is about the long wait until the celebration of Christ’s birth, and it is also about the even longer wait until Christ returns in glory, in power, and peace.
Matthew 24 is near the very end of Jesus’ ministry and it seems clear that he knows it. He tells them that the Temple, the structure of power and worship, will be thrown down and sure enough, not even 70 years later, it is destroyed in the horrific Jewish-Roman war known as the Great Revolt. It’s not hard to imagine Jesus sensing the coming war and it’s not just because he is divine. It’s because God-with-us has been paying attention as he and his disciples crisscrossed the region, eating meals and listening to Pharisees, Centurions, and prostitutes alike. He can see the fear rippling under the surface, the tension that is building toward a breaking point. God-with-us won’t be with us in this way forever. Christ’s body will be gone, and the temple will be destroyed. Where will his followers turn to?
But as we know, death and devastation will not be the end of Christ’s story or of ours. Like the temple, Christ’s body will be destroyed. But it will be resurrected. For half of each year, the church calendar takes us through Christ’s life— his birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. Then we spend the rest of the year in ordinary time, in the church’s season after Christ has ascended to Heaven. Jesus is very much alive, but he doesn’t walk the Earth with us. It’s an absence we can feel, even though we have never known this world with his full presence. Still, we long for it. We long for it as we sing, “O come, o come, Emmanuel.” We long for it as we pray each Sunday, “may your kingdom come. Your will be done. On Earth, as it is in Heaven.”
Matthew’s depiction of the coming Christ is apocalyptic—two people standing side by side, one taken and the other left behind. But when is it coming? Jesus says no one knows but God the Father. How is it, that God can be one God in three persons, and two of those three can not know something? The trinity is a complicated theological topic and no matter how hard we try to distill or explain it, it never stops being a mystery. Every well-intentioned analogy results in heresy.
It reminds me of a character from one of my favorite TV shows, The Good Place. There’s a character named Janet who contains all the knowledge in the universe and can make any request possible. The writers had a difficult time describing what she is, so instead, they describe her by what she isn’t—"Not a girl.” “Not a robot.” “Not a computer.” Sometimes, that can be the best way to describe the trinity, “not 3 different parts.” “Not 3 different modes.” “Not one with 2 sub-gods.” Or just take it from the Scots Confession, “We confess and acknowledge one God alone… who is eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible; one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Why don’t other persons of the Trinity, Son, and Spirit, know when the coming of the Son of Man will be? I do not know, exactly. But I do know that even if they don’t know the exact day, they will still be ready because they are paying attention. It the hard work of paying attention that causes Jesus to reference the Noah and flood.
If you remember, Noah was surrounded by friends and neighbors for many decades as he built a gigantic ark in the middle of a desert. Perhaps they asked him what he was doing, but they didn’t really pay attention. They wrote off his experience, his concerns, and his actions as irrelevant and meaningless. Noah built a boat, and still, they went on with their lives. He gathered his animals and family, and still they did not pay close attention. So, when the rains came, they were not ready. They missed the boat. And if we don’t know that story well enough, Jesus’ words in Matthew sound like we might miss the next one. The widely popular Left Behind series certainly left many with that fear. But that fear comes from not remembering the end of Noah’s story. God promises to never destroy the earth in such a way again. Violence cannot wipe out violence. There is no missing the boat.
But we can miss God’s presence in our midst. We can fail to pay attention. We can be like the people in the days of Noah—eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. All good things, but the wrong setting, they are distractions; coping mechanisms for a world that feels too painful to pay full attention to. Coping mechanisms have their place, but coping is not the same thing as fully living. To live a life fully alive requires paying attention.
Have you been paying attention to the world around you? Have you been unceremoniously awoken to a world you did not recognize? Were you one of the many white people who woke up on November 9th, 2016 and thought, “I didn’t know racism was still this bad in this country?” Had you been coping instead of paying attention until it was too late? I know the feeling. My awakening came in August of 2014. I had just graduated from college and took a backpacking trip with my mom to the Olympic Peninsula. After 3 days of Washington rain, we decided to forgo our campsite for a night at a motel instead. Eager to get back to Wi-Fi, I hopped on Twitter and was confused with what I read. What is Ferguson? What happened? Who is Michael Brown? Oh. Who was Michael Brown? Although I remember the murder of Trayvon Martin two years earlier, it took the deaths of Eric Garner and Mike Brown to finally wake me up. Although I had learned about systematic racism, the school to prison pipeline, and mass incarceration in college, I was still coping rather than paying attention. I didn’t see the crisis rippling under the waters of unarmed black men being murdered by the ones tasked to protect them.
I was the woman grinding meal at the millstone, going about my life and trying to live it with joy, intelligence, and integrity, but not seeing the fear and suffering of my neighbor because of the color of her skin. And so, I did not see my neighbor. And when I did not see my neighbor, I missed out on seeing the face of God in my midst.
It is so easy to miss God’s nearness as wait, for centuries and generations, for Christ’s return. How can we stay ready for our entire lives? How can we be like the owner of the house, awaiting the thief in the night? We do so by seeing our neighbors clearly.
We must resist the temptation to simply go on “eating, drinking, and marrying”, coping instead of living. This is a particularly difficult task in the holiday season filled with parties and celebrations. Will we the like Noah’s friends and neighbors, too busy with our happy lives to see the floodwaters rising around us? The metaphor feels almost too on the nose as a report came out this week saying if the nations of the world don’t dramatically change course, the climate will warm by a shocking 4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. And still, we eat and drink with our single-use plastics, drive home in our cars run on fossil fuels, and merrily celebrate as if the problems of this world do not affect us.
In 2014, I was introduced to the term “get woke.” It means, “wake up. Pay attention to the injustice in the world around you, even when it hurts.” This world is full of systems that will have us do anything but pay attention. We are encouraged to numb ourselves with substances, food, and entertainment. We are made exhausted with work. We are turned against one another as marginalized populations. We are overwhelmed by the saturation of media. Paying attention is exhausting and eventually, everyone gets tired of being the buzzkill at the party or the worship service.
At the end of this decade, many people are sharing photos or stories of who they were at the start of the decade compared to who they are today. I wish I had pictures that adequately portrayed who I was then to who I am now. In this past decade, I learned how to pay attention to the struggles of my black brothers and sisters. Since then, I have awoken again and again to see the faces, the pain, and realties of my neighbors that I hadn’t been paying attention to before. I have so much more to learn and it is hard work. I often say that college ruined me in the best way. Life feels harder and heavier than it did 10 or even 5 years ago. But here’s the thing—when you start to notice the true pain in the world, you also notice the true joy. Paying attention doesn’t produce a life trembling in fear of being forgotten and left behind at Christ’s return. It produces a life that is free to live abundantly and to find hope and joy even in the midst of death.
What thrill it is to have hope in this life. The world will tell us “stay numb. Enjoy what you have because if you open yourself to the world, you will be crushed.” But that is exactly the opposite of what happens. When we open ourselves up to the pain of our neighbors, we open ourselves up to the courage to hope for the day that the prophet Isaiah promises. There will be a day when God’s house shall be raised above the hills and all the nations will stream to it. God will be our judge and we will beat our sword into plowshares, for there will no need for weapons of war. We will learn the names of our brothers and sisters not because they have been turned into hashtags in grief and mourning, but because we will sit together at the great feast at God’s table.
As we enter into this Advent season, let us pay attention. The Kingdom of God is coming.
