Second Comings

When there were more Dads in households than there are now, wayward children sometimes were successfully terrorized into submission by the apocalyptic warning, you just wait 'til your father gets home! I for one rejoiced greatly over what I believed was the happy demise of this awful threat and the culture that legitimized it, even though my own father was pretty much of a pussy cat when it came to whippings out on the back forty. As it has turned out, though, my belief was wrong, and my rejoicing naïve.

It now seems clear that whole megachurches of Christians have never given up on waiting for Daddy to come home and straighten things out. To be sure, the latest version of this wistful hope puts it all in the hands of a favorite son rather than of the father himself. Skimmed the most recent "Left Behind" volume yet? It's a by-intent heart-stopping vision of Christ's return to earth in power, glory --- and vindictiveness. If The Book of Revelation wasn't enough to whip you into shape, surely this one, the authors believe, will get the job done.

From Paul's time to the present, believing that Christ will come again is indeed a core affirmation of the Christian faith --- e.g., the "he will come again to judge the living and the dead" article of the Apostles' Creed. The basic point of the doctrine of the second coming has always been that, all appearances to the contrary, the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ were not invalidated by his crucifixion. God's raising him from the dead proved that, and it is from a position of enthronement that the risen Christ will come to us as our true judge, to annul all of the claims of earthly kings and judges to have final authority over us.

So far, so good. Two problems, however, always present themselves whenever the doctrine of the second coming comes at us like just one more version of "Pop is after you." One is that most articulations of the doctrine never get beyond screaming that the Judge is coming and to run for cover. The still more basic point of the New Testament as a whole --- that the Judge forgives --- is almost always lost in the gloating over what is about to happen to everybody else. (Have you ever heard anybody proclaim the final separation of the righteous from the unrighteous who had not already put himself or herself in the first group?)

The second problem --- and it is one for which Paul is just as accountable as everybody else who salivates for Jesus' return --- is that the earliest Christian preachers took the resurrection itself to be God's validation of Jesus' life and ours. Whenever the principalities and powers of this world begin to look too strong for the cause of Christ, what we are supposed to dwell on is that his cause has already triumphed, not that God is going to give him a second crack at his enemies. In this sense, Easter was the second coming. Sorry you missed it.

But it still may not be too late for you, at least if you'll just quit harping on how all of the rest of us are finally going to get what's coming to us when the eldest Son comes knocking at our doors on the Father's behalf. You might have missed Easter, but you can't miss Pentecost, because it keeps happening again and again, just like it did in that upper room on Easter afternoon. (John 20:22) What was, perhaps, a third coming, for sure becomes a fourth, and a fifth, and a …, forever. Why? Because the breath that the risen Christ breathed into his disciples that day was and is the breath of eternal life. And as if this were not enough, it was and is the power of forgiveness.

How in the world did the message about the coming of God's Son to reconcile and make new devolve so quickly into a missile setting off only more alienation and hopelessness? Most probably, it had to do with persecution, and with the malignant hopelessness that too much of it so easily engenders. Comforting ourselves with the notion that our persecutors will get theirs is understandable.

But Jesus suffered more than a fair share of persecution himself, and at its height, Luke reminds us, he promised a thief on the cross next to him Paradise that very day, and died with words of forgiveness and trust on his lips. Those are far better words to remember in times of persecution than words of hate and condemnation toward persecutors and unbelievers alike.