Sep 10, 2010 -- 11:33AM, Xapisma wrote:

May 24, 2010 -- 10:49AM, KatherineOrthodixie wrote:

May 22, 2010 -- 9:04AM, tawonda wrote:

I don't presume to understand what it means, but I suspect that it won't be what anyone is expecting. And frankly I don't think about it very much.

"Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again."

I leave all the details up to Him, since presumably He knows best.

That works for me, too.

 

Or,

Dying, you destroyed our death.

Rising, you restored our life.

Lord Jesus, come in glory.

(Either this, or "Christ has died...." is used by the congregation as the sentence of remembrance during the Eucharistic Prayer.)

For some, the second coming of Christ can act as an excuse to defer dealing with our problems and our neighbors' problems on a systemic level, for surely Christ will take care of them when Christ comes. All that's important is that we hang in there, following God's commandments until either we die or the Rapture happens, whichever comes first. If we succeed at that, we win the game, and if the rest of the world goes to hell in a handbasket, well so be it, as long as we faithfully executed our own duties to spread the Gospel and save souls, as long as we've spent that time doing our works of mercy, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, as Jesus directed us. "Politics," the desire to engage power and wrestle it out of the hands of the oppressors, can become a dirty word. 

This type of worldview has the ability to produce powerful saints: the Dorothy Days and Mother Teresas of the world, the St. Clares and the St. Francises, those who trust in God to take care of the big picture and go about living out their vocation by performing one small service after one small service, feeding the hungry one person at a time. "How the final solution will be brought about is in God's hands," wrote Day in 1959. "The immediate solution will always be the works of mercy." 

These types of women and men are called to an important vocation, and their example is one which should inspire and uplift us, and thus holds in it the power to change the world. But it is naive, I think, to think that it can change this sick and fallen world all on its own, and to wait for Christ to have wrought these changes is to put God to the test over what can be performed by human hands. 

Where would the Catholic Worker movement be without its newspaper, its attempt to remake the world, to shake it up even beyond the streets of New York City, to change society as a whole radically and fundamentally? We cannot forget that even as the fight for social justice is personal, so too is it political. It requires--as Day and Teresa and Clare and Francis all knew full well--an engagement with the world: rewriting laws, shifting cultural norms, changing the way we as a society use language by coming up with new vocabularies. Setting the example as Christians who love one another and care for our neighbors is an absolutely necessary prerequisite, but it is a beginning, not an end. We cannot rest on the laurels of our works of mercy. We must lobby; we must demonstrate; we must protest; we must agitate; we must vote and encourage others to vote; we must educate. We must not only feed the hungry, but also work to end hunger. Not only visit those in prison, but reform the prison system. 

We must, as Mahatma Ghandhi said, be the change we want to see in the world. We must make social justice happen. 

There's another way of telling the end to the story of Christ's involvement in the world, a way of telling it in which it is not a mere deus ex machina where the benign God arrives and sets everything right because we are too depraved to do it ourselves. It is an eschatology that's focused not on messianic expectations in a distant future, but an ongoing rebirth in the here and now: not a realized eschatology nor an unrealized eschatology, but an eschatology continually in the process of being realized. And we're the ones who are doing the realizing. The story of Christ's return, the lesson of the fig tree (Luke 21), the promises made to the Hebrews, these stories are important because they fill us with joyful optimism in telling us that a redeemed world is possible, to allow us to be a forward-looking people, but it falls to us to be active agents in the world's redemption. 

It is not only Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, not only Christ, of one Being with the Parent God, who is called to "execute justice and righteousness in the land" in the apocalyptic vision of the Christian Church, to be the "righteous branch" risen up for David (Jer. 33:14-16). It is the Church itself, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It is all of us. We are called to change the world. 

The coming of Christ is not an event which exists solely in the past, in a Christmas night millenia past, or in the future, in a triumphant, rapturous return. The coming of Christ is, instead, a constant process which is always going on, a continual revelation of God through Christ and Christ's Spirit as God works in and through the world. The liturgical calendar recognizes this fact as each year we wait anew for Christ's coming in the season of Advent, and celebrate it anew in the season of Christmas. And we, the followers of Christ throughout the world, we the Church, we who are the Body of Christ, we are the agents, the vehicle of that coming. 

I don't know what the events will be preceding the return of Jesus, nor if he will return in any kind of physical sort of way.

The one thing I am convinced of is that it is a very big mistake trying to apply a literal reading or understanding of the bible to world events.

So He kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea.    - Luke 4:44, NASB

...you see how many thousands of Jews have become believers, and all of them keep the Law passionately.   - Acts 21:20, Common English Bible (CEB)

So God’s word spread. The number of believers in Jerusalem grew quickly. Also, a large number of priests began to obey Jesus’ teachings.   - Acts 6:7, NIRV