Realized Eschatology and the Apocalyptic without Contradiction

 1 Advent C  December 1, 2024
Jer. 33: 14-16 Psalm 50:1-6
1 Thes. 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-31

Lectionary Link

Can we allow Jesus to be Jesus in his own time?  Or are we so temporally provincial that we cannot help but make him palatable to versions colored with the cultural biases of our own time?  In some ways, we are always prisoners of our own times.

We often try to make Jesus contemporary to us by updating him by answering the question, "What would Jesus do now?  For example, we probably don't think Jesus in our time would tell parables about slaves and speak so nonchalantly about slavery as an acceptable part of life.  And we don't judge him by saying if he were an all-knowing super person, wouldn't he have known in his time that slavery would be regarded some day to be deeply inhumane?  And Jesus did not seem to predict space travel or automobiles in his time.

We have to allow Jesus to be Jesus expressing all the limitations of his contemporary cultural milieu.  In Pauline theology, this might be called the kenotic Jesus, the one who was the divine being emptied of divinity into mere human life with all of its limitations in the particular period of time when he lived for around thirty years.

Letting Jesus be himself in his own time is complicated by the fact that the records that we have about Jesus in the Gospels, though significant, are still written decades after he lived and in a language which was not the native Aramaic which he spoke in his Galilean region.  The Gospels are the filtered traces of Jesus into a lingua franca for his followers who were spread throughout cities of the Roman Empire after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.  So, in fact the Gospel writers were already asking the question, "what would Jesus do and think and say in the four to six decades after he lived, and how would Jesus be presented in a way that was specifically relevant to the church situations in the various locations where the Gospel accounts were being generated?"  The present tense of the Gospel writers would influence how the past life of Jesus would be presented by the writers and preachers who were generating, collating, and redacting the traces of Jesus as derived from the followers of Jesus and their string of continuous editors.

What were the experiences of the early Gospel communities?  Sometimes they lived suffering free, but other times they experienced suffering and persecution and even to the point of martyrdom.  Jesus became presented under the guise of the Risen Christ for the Gospel communities.  This means that he is presented as sufficient to what the coping situation required.  People suffer persecution and people live suffering free lives; the two can happen without being contradictory, and presentations of Jesus as the Risen Christ can be given to provide coping ministry to people in both situations.

The Gospel writers present Jesus as both an end-of-the-world apocalyptic prophet, but also as one who proclaimed a realized eschatology, in such sayings as "the kingdom of God is within you or among you," with already being implied.

Jesus as the Risen Christ for the Gospel writers within their writing contexts is presented as both a wisdom teacher proclaiming his presence as proof of God's realm being always already, but also being an apocalyptic prophet in the mode of John the Baptist.  In the Gospel communities, without contradiction, Jesus is able to be an affirming wisdom teacher of the current reality of the realm of God as being from creation; but Jesus is also able to be the one who bears the visualization of the end of suffering and injustice as a future apocalyptic Son of Man who comes in the clouds to be the expediter of justice.

There are people in our world who currently are suffering harm, war, injustice, terminable illness, who need the coping mechanism of the visualizations of a hero who can interdict and end the suffering and the injustice.  The apocalyptic is the truth of coping visualization of pain and suffering ending as an affirmation that health and salvation and justice are what is poignantly normal, in the face of situations to the contrary.  These visualizations function in meaningful ways even while the actual free probable conditions of life arise on a continuum of weal to woe in the experiences of people.  We live on this continuum and the Gospels were written to be a support to us as we live with the experiences weal and woe, and everything between.

Let us be thankful that the Gospel writers found through the Risen Christ various presentations of Jesus relevant to the various conditions of life.

On this first Sunday of Advent, we find a vision of Jesus as the future Son of Man to be one who interdicts time to end suffering and injustice.  How many people in our world need this vision of the interdiction of suffering and injustice now?

May the Risen Christ help us to live with the truth of freedom and time in applied and poignant coping ways today, especially as we use our freedom to promote what justice, health, and salvation means for people even while we live.  Amen.