The Idea Of A Second Coming

An early Christian hymn, which Paul incorporated into his letter to the Philippians, told of a man who had all of God's own completeness in him, who nonetheless put himself utterly and sacrificially at the disposal of others, ultimately at the cost of his own very human life. He humbled himself, even to the point of placing himself in bondage to others' needs, hopes, and animosities. And he died because his commitment to obey God's will left him no room for compromises.

Possibly in Aramaic, more likely in Greek, the hymn sang of God's exaltation of Jesus, his raising Jesus "to the heights," and bestowing upon him the name before which "every knee should bow" because and precisely because he did not count equality with God something either to be held onto or grasped for. It was because he made himself nothing in comparison with God that he became the Jews' Messiah and the world's Savior. Although this consideration may be the most important in all of Christian moral theology, it seems to be the one most often missed by Jesus' followers. It was not easy to tolerate juxtaposing the humiliation of Jesus' death with the humility of Jesus' life.

Even though Jesus' life and ministry made plain from the beginning that his servanthood and his humiliation would be inextricably bound for all eternity, hardly anyone from his time and thereafter have shown much by way of gratitude to Jesus' God for arranging his son's life this way. The way things were supposed to go, according to theology at least --- Jewish and Christian theology alike --- was that when he finally gets here, the Messiah/Savior will hardly be the bearer of a divinely-embodied weakness. Rather, he will be a conduit only for God's power and righteousness, and he will employ both to overcome all worldly powers and all human sinfulness, and to bring about a final separation of good and evil, either for the sake of a kingdom of the godly on earth or as part of earth's annihilation and the raising of God's chosen to eternal life beyond time and history altogether.

To say the least, a good bit seems to have gone wrong with the idea of bringing all of this off with the help of Jesus of Nazareth. As a deliverer of his people, David's track record was better, as was Moses'. The Jews expected either a David revividus or a Son of Man coming on the clouds, and got instead an entombed criminal. The Gentiles expected a Savior from highest heaven, and got instead the lowliest of the low on the rungs of status and success. Not even the resurrection of Jesus seems to have helped all that much in assuaging his earliest followers' sense of bewilderment and defeat. After all, the risen Lord soon left them all behind for heaven.

For a while at least, Pentecost proved promising. With Peter's help, many began to understand their renewed energy as a sign of Jesus' very presence in their midst. Soon, though, energy flagged, a sign of presence became a sign of absence, and the idea took root that it was going to take a second coming to overcome the failure of the first. Then, in between killing time by putting together the kind of church organization that held zero interest for Jesus himself, his followers fixed their attention not so much on helping people find their lives by losing them but on figuring out when Jesus would make it back and who other than themselves would be left behind this time.

It used to be that Christmas sales and TV commercials before Thanksgiving were the chief obstacles I had to face in opening my heart to Jesus before Santa Claus could make it down our chimney. More recently, what has gotten most in the way of my remembering Jesus' first coming is the obsessiveness with which people who should know better are preaching his second. I get what the first Advent was all about: sacrificial love. And I really have been trying to make it the theme of my own life, as I know it was the theme of Jesus'. The big difference between the two of us is that my successes are few, and his were total.

Or maybe that I brag on all of mine, and he bragged on none of his. Pretty obviously, I and most of the rest of us have a long way to go in coming to terms with Jesus' first coming. It may be, of course, that God has been holding off an already decided upon second coming until we get the first one right. I kind of think, though, that when we finally do get our response to the first Advent right, there will be no need of a second at all.