If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
2 November. Matthew chapters 23-24
Much of the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom has, until this point, been positive: stories and examples of how living his way, loving one’s neighbour and being generous, will bring peace and joy. But now it suddenly takes a much darker tone.
Following the conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees in chapter 21 (yesterday’s reading) Jesus knows that his time is short and they are set against him. So he drops all restraint and, in chapter 23, lets loose a series of devastating public criticisms, labelling them hypocrites, fools, blind guides and “whitewashed tombs” (clean looking on the outside but with untouchable death within). Their teaching was supposed to draw people into the covenant relationship with God, but instead only drew them into their own brand of legalism.
Following that confrontation, Jesus leaves the Temple – surely in a mood of anger, not peace – and starts telling his disciples just how bad the early years of the Church would be for them. Not only would there be ongoing persecution right from the start, but wars, revolutions, famines and earthquakes – all the events that make societies unstable and life uncertain. Before long these would usher in the “last day”. Jesus describes this in apocalyptic terms of darkness, fear, fleeing quickly with few possessions, when “the desolating sacrilege stands in the holy place” (24:15). This latter reference is usually taken to refer to the destruction of the Temple in AD70, a generation after the Resurrection of Jesus, when the Jewish people would be forced out of the Promised Land for a second time, for what would turn out to be nearly two thousand years. Christians, though, have always had a parallel understanding of an eventual “second coming”, or “rapture”, when the followers of Christ would be saved from the final destruction that will come upon humanity. This is too big a subject to explore in depth here.
The one glimmer of light in all this is that during this time of persecution and war, “this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations” (24:14). So the purpose of the church is not to being about peace on earth, which we will never have more than fleetingly among what is generally a violent society and a dangerous world, but to proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven as the good news that there is an alternative to earthly suffering and certain death, and Jesus is the key to it. No wonder the refrain of Advent is “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”