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The Lord of History

Advent 1 : 1 December 2013  : Matthew 24: 37-44

My maternal Grandparents were hard working, austerely living, working class folk who saved hard all their lives for the great post retirement trip to Britain, or "home" as they called it. I can remember waving them off with streamers as the ship pulled away the wharf. The year was 1962, and as luck would have it their cruise liner steamed into the Caribbean as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. For my mother, an anxious person at the best of times, these were difficult days.

We forget now the atmosphere of crisis that the nuclear arms race generated. People built bomb shelters in their back yards; the French nuclear tests at Mururoa had us sending a frigate into the area, and bombers patrolled at their fail safe points just outside their enemies air defence zones night and day. Novels and films speculated on what could accidentally set a nuclear war off, particularly the dark humoured, "Dr Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb." My mother cashed in on all this anxiety by telling us to eat our greens because they would help to build up our resistance to radiation sickness.

We now know as a result of recent historical research that there were several incidents when the world came close to an accidental nuclear exchange. But all of that now seems a distant memory with the end of the cold war. But of course another – the global warming and ecological catastrophe one, has immediately succeeded that crisis.

This one has considerable local significance because the combination of the Antarctic ice pack melting, which apparently it definitely is doing, and the high water table of south Dunedin, means that we could be particularly vulnerable to a flood of biblical proportions.

Behind each of these crises is a note of judgement on human affairs. Keeping the peace in the cold war meant preserving the balance of terror, bluffing your opponent that you really were prepared to use the bomb, and so fulfil the apparently lunatic doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Rowan Williams has always insisted that no Christian can morally justify nuclear deterrence. And unless you are a human responsibility climate change denier, then there appears to be a direct link between our present economic activity and life style choices, and the imminent probability of ecological catastrophe.

I mention all this because the readings leading up to Advent, and through the first part of the season echo this theme of catastrophe and judgment. We are to be in no doubt that God is the Lord of history, shaping the unfolding the human story, active in the events of the world, and dare I say it, pouring out his wrath in judgment on human rejection of his designs and purposes. This is not a popular theme in Christian discourse these days. But it is an inescapable part of the Bible’s message, and the Advent theme.

The children of Israel knew what it was to be on the receiving end of God’s judgment when they went after other Gods, and were then conquered and deported. The Old Testament makes it clear that this was God’s doing and his response.

But judgement had another dimension to it, one they rather welcomed. For it meant that God would act against human injustice, would sort out the good from the bad in the end, would vindicate the victims of history. In a world short of human justice, with few reliable Kings or magistrates to enforce the laws fairly and to render reasonable justice, God would step in to do the job himself.

This worked in several ways. God was present in many of the world’s crises and catastrophes, rendering a partial judgment on what human beings got up to. But the judgement can only be partial because in this world the good and the bad are often closely intertwined, most human beings act out of mixed motives, and the mystery of human freedom and human iniquity must be permitted to continue until the end of time. It is rare for evil to come out into the open in such a clear and unmistakable way that God can move against it directly.

But at the end of time God will be there in all of his power, and mercy, and cleansing judgment to have the last word on the human story. The final sorting out will occur, and this too brings peace and comfort to the people of God, particularly to those who experienced persecution, martyrdom or humiliation at the hands of the cruel, the arrogant, and the malignant. A final rebalancing will occur, and will in fact be necessary because evil and injustice twists and distorts the very structures of existence.

Today’s gospel reading uses an almost shocking image for this final day of the Lord. The Son of Man is like a burglar who uses all his skill and cunning to break through the wall of the house, and to plunder its contents. Preparing for the day of the Lord requires all the vigilance and patient observation and continual alertness of a successful police stake out. The one thing you dare not do is complacently assume that after 2,000 years it is business as usual, with life going on as normal, and God off the scene for good.

The effect of all this is to put tension in the human story. The God of the unexpected will break in to the human story, is breaking in at various points, but you need to be alert and discriminating to know which are God’s genuine interventions. It is important not to be panicked into premature and mistaken responses.

But there is another and more immediately useful dimension to all this. We live in a time when the Church in the western world is facing strong head winds. Numbers are down, the faithful generation that stuck by the Church through thick and thin are being whittled away by illness and death, and we appear to be surrounded by an increasingly secular culture, which alternates between indifference to, or active opposition to the Christian faith.

This is a call for the endurance of the Saints. We are to attend to our spiritual responsibilities with renewed determination and fervour. We must not give in to discouragement or slacken off in our faithful observance of worship and prayer, for thereby we wait on the Lord until he comes again. Indeed, each time we celebrate the Mass we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.

God is in charge, he is the Lord of history, and he is also Lord of the Church, constantly and invisibly working to renew it, and refresh it, and revive it, even if we cant immediately see his operations at work in our immediate vicinity. And his purposes cannot fail. He will be there at the end, and he has an end in mind for the world and its inhabitants. Sometimes, it is just when things seem at their worst, when it seems that everything has gone wrong, as indeed it did appear at the crucifixion, that the vital event has happened that changes everything, that floors and flummoxes an unbelieving world, and completely re-agendas the plot lines of the human story. Our God is a God of surprises, and Advent reminds us that we can never take him for granted, or assume that he has forgotten us.