Here we are with Thanksgiving gone past in a flash. November is ending and the December holiday craze has begun. Are you ready? I know I’m not. I don’t do Black Friday and haven’t purchased a single gift. I have my mind elsewhere, with only two weeks left in fall semester. That’s fifteen hundred minutes of class time until finals. Six classes and I still have some month-old papers to get graded. And don’t get me started on Christmas plans. On second thought, maybe you should get me started, because I might just be ready in 25 days.
I tried to warn my students about this when we first looked the syllabus back in August. I told them there would come a day when they look at the list of course work and papers and test they would have come the end of the semester and wonder how they ever got to that place. Well, both those students and their professor have landed in that spot. Who in the world plans to fall behind? Who puts together a to-do list that will be completed two weeks after a deadline? And yet we all wind up there, unprepared for what comes next and the world bears down on you with an accusing finger, saying you haven’t done enough.
This week the church year began anew with the season of Advent. While the consumer world entrenched in the economy of buying and selling has already begun its version of the Christmas season, in the church we’re a little better at delayed gratification. Christmas carols and gifts and dancing around the tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care, these things can wait, because we need to do Advent in a way that Christmas goes deeper, and we’re actually ready to receive Immanuel, God With Us. So we dress things up in blue, the color of hope and expectation. Like the expecting Mary who’s always portrayed in that color, we wait for God to deliver himself to us.
He’s already come to us in the flesh once in the manger in Bethlehem. And after his crucifixion and death, he came back yet again in his resurrected body that first Easter. If Advent is about waiting and preparation and readiness, the people for whom Matthew wrote his Gospel were right there with us. They’d been told about all Jesus had done, and they’d been promised that Jesus would come back for them. But it wasn’t happening. Where was the glorious victory over sin, death, and the devil? Where was the day when mourning and crying would be over?
So Matthew gave his people Jesus’ words about when the grand and golden end would come breaking into their world. Christ bids us to hang on, for the resolution of it all is on its way. Hang on. It’s coming. It’s going to break in like the sun creeping up over the horizon. Bit by bit. Ray by ray. For now it may be that it’s still too dark to tell what’s going on. That’s no surprise. Only God has night vision to see it. Before Noah’s flood, no one knew the deluge was coming.
Who knows what the future will hold in our day? When I got the call about my father’s death a few years ago, it wasn’t something I’d planned for, and neither had he. A sudden hole had opened up where he should have been. But I wasn’t broken up over it. As Paul says, I can’t grieve like those who have no hope. What’s more, I wasn’t sorrowful about our relationship. We had all kinds of past hurts and heartaches between us, but they’d been resolved. Nothing had gone unspoken. I’d decided not to visit him when I had a slender opening in my calendar ten days before, because I knew that if he died our relationship stood on solid, loving ground. So while it was sudden, it also wasn’t unexpected or devastating. We were ready.
Martin Luther in his “Sermon on Preparing to Die” talked about being ready. He says make sure your family is taken care of. It’s the equivalent of not making your heirs spend days amazed that your home has become an episode of Hoarders because you literally haven’t gotten your house in order. Being prepared means not burdening them because you’d never signed a medical power of attorney or a living will. That’s the worldly stuff you need to have in place to be ready to meet your Maker. But that’s not the ultimate readiness. Luther says you also need to have your spiritual eyeglasses prescription up-to-date so you can see exactly what kind of God you have.
In that sense, being ready to meet God when God comes means getting the basics down. It means listening carefully to Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus says that he has come to fulfill all righteousness, rather than you. It means hearing Paul declare that you’re saved not by your works but by trusting that Christ has taken care of it all on the cross. Being ready for the Son of Man’s arrival is to take seriously the early petitions of the Lord’s Prayer in which you ask for God’s name to be hallowed, God’s kingdom to come, God’s will to be done, all the while praying that God would take your name, kingdom, and will out of the mix. To be ready and prepared means to have the same certainty as Paul in Romans that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
So many preachers take that apocalyptic passage from Matthew as a dire warning to make a decision for Christ in order that, when his unexpected arrival happens, you won’t be left behind in the rapture to spend time in tribulation. But that’s not the kind of Lord we find in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus doesn’t threaten you with the fear of being abandoned behind the plow or left grinding meal or emptying bedpans, cooking supper, or cooking the books. Instead, Jesus is the one who wants to give you confidence and faith. He wants to be so good and so true that you can’t help but trust him while you’re slogging through life waiting for him to come. And while Jesus says the hour of his arrival will be unknown, God is keen for you to know not when but where he’s going to arrive.
If Jesus is the word made flesh, then God comes unexpectedly wherever Christ’s promise breaks in from the future on sinners’ lives today, including right now when the Last Day becomes This Day. Ready or not, you haven’t been left behind. You’ve been chosen, elected, hand-picked. If you’re dead in sin, full of foibles, or done with your own damned self, you are as ready and prepared as you ever need to be, because Jesus has been prepared from the foundation of the world to take you on, sins and all.
There’s no telling what’s coming around the bend for you. It might be falling in love and becoming a hopeless romantic. It might be the hard road of cancer or dementia or a stroke. It might be a Powerball win or merely a three-storm winter with less shoveling. It might be your lingering death or your sudden demise. It might be the same-old same-old of family fault-lines and workplace drudgery. It might be the hoped-for invention of a weight-loss pill that actually works.
Who knows? You can never tell. But you can go up to the house of the Lord with confidence and hope, for you can tell who it is who has come before you could ever expect him. You can know who died for you while you were still a sinner. You can be confident that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Just think about what the passage in Romans 8 says: Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate you from your Lord. That means nothing at all that you can face can be the thing that leaves you in the lurch. Not even the vast powers of heavenly creatures like angels can slice you away or leave you hanging, for they cannot go against God’s will and God’s word.
You see, he’s already come for you (and me). And that means that whatever you or I face in this life — in field work and grinding of meal (Mt 24:40-41), in season and out, in joy and in sorrow — he has already swooped us up, and our lives are hid in him. God hasn’t come with a rule book, legal code, or accountant’s ledger. He doesn’t come with a measuring rod, balancing scales, ledger, or lap timer. This unexpected Lord comes instead with a word for you: It is finished. You’re in. Fear not. Come what may. He’s ready for you now.
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5 responses to “Ready or Not, Here He Comes”
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This! SO terrific. Thank You!
[…] appreciate this article on “Ready or Not, Here He Comes” as “You haven’t been left behind. You have been chosen, elected, […]
Excellent!!!!!!!
Thank you for the reassurance of God’s promise through Jesus!
[…] Ready or Not, Here He Comes: Ken Sundet Jones’ reflects on what it actually means to “get ready” for Jesus’ coming. Hint: It’s nothing you do, but what has already been done for you. […]