Matthew 24:33-46
“But about that day and hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and they knew nothing about what was to come until Noah entered the ark and the flood came and swept them all away; so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
“Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on which day your Lord will come. But know this, if the owner of the house had known at what time the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake, and he would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
There’s a family of pranksters that shows up in my social media feeds pretty regularly. I guess that means I waste my time watching their ridiculous TikToks and reels often enough that the mysterious algorithms of the online universe keep pushing them in my direction. Anyway, here’s a clip of how they live:
Other than wondering how they can laugh and smile about that every. single. time. they get scared or surprised by a confetti gun, a balloon full of shaving cream, an explosion of colored powder – or all three – I wonder about what a pain in the butt it would be to clean that mess up every time. And I wonder, too, what it’s like to live knowing someone is ALWAYS trying to surprise you, scare you, and capture it on video for all the world to see.
And, maybe it’s a stretch, but it made me think about Jesus and this morning’s Gospel, too, and all of that talk about being ready; keeping awake; not knowing the day or the hour; and living like the unexpected is coming at any moment … all of the time. (And all of that made me think of the many billboards and Burma Shave signs you see between central Indiana and Northwest Ohio on Thanksgiving weekend warning you – in not so many words – to get right with God or get ready for your eternal damnation.)
Despite what some Christians do with passages like this, I don’t imagine it was Jesus’ intention to provoke our anxiety, to make us lose sleep, or to simply scare us away from Hell and into Heaven. I also don’t think we’re supposed to make predictions about how or when the world – or our lives in it – will end, as too many others do. I trust the fact that Jesus said neither he nor the angels knew when that would be. So I think that lets me off of that hook and anyone who suggests they know otherwise, is pretending they know more than they can or should or possibly could know – according to Jesus, himself.
Instead, I like to think a loving, compassionate Jesus could see people going through the motions of their lives in the world on auto-pilot; living unconsciously or unaware of or in denial about what was going on in the world around them. And I imagine Jesus wanted the people of his day – and you and me, too – to wake up and pay a different, more faithful kind of attention to how we live … to what surrounds us in this life … and to God’s place in the midst of it all.
See, the people Jesus refers to this morning weren’t necessarily doing anything WRONG or SINFUL when everything changed around them. The people of Noah’s day, at least according to Jesus, were just living their lives – eating, drinking, making merry and getting married. And the people in Jesus’ day would, presumably, be doing the same – just working – in the fields and in the kitchen; or getting a good night’s sleep, even, when the end of it all comes to pass.
So what if the invitation for us today isn’t to live with anxiety or fear or superstition or a sad kind of resignation, either, about how or when or that the end will come? (Like someone’s waiting around every corner or behind every door with some kind of cosmic surprise or prank or opportunity to finish us off.) What if the invitation for us today is to live, instead, with a holy kind of joy and vigilance, a faithful kind of hope and expectation about it all – and about how we might live differently, in the meantime?
What if, instead of running from or wringing our hands over whatever scares us most – we acknowledge that those fears exist and we trust God to be bigger and stronger than any of those fears could ever be?
What if, instead of rushing through our lives – keeping so busy and staying so distracted – we slowed down, stopped working … stopped grinding more often, stopped keeping up with the Joneses, stopped pleasing all of the people all of the time – and let God stop and surprise us more often?
What if, instead of being so bold and so brave in the face of our struggles… What if, instead of reaching for our bootstraps and demanding that others find theirs too, we let ourselves and each other be vulnerable? What if we shared the Truth and fullness of what burdens us? And what if we shared the load of it all together more often?
I have a hunch that the unexpected thing about the coming of the Son of Man, isn’t just going to be the day or the hour of the END of it all. I have a hunch that, no matter how much we preach and teach and try to practice the grace we proclaim as followers of Jesus, that the fullness of that grace … the complete, pure, utter, richness of God’s love … is what will still manage to catch us off-guard, unaware, unprepared, and thoroughly by surprise in the end. But I also think God wants us to keep our eyes and our hearts and our lives open to experiencing it, in the meantime, right where we live, too.
Because the promise and blessing and hope of Christmas is that God comes and joins us for every bit of our lives in this world – not just the ending, or on the other side of Heaven. Jesus is born. Heaven comes to earth. God, in Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, walks before and beside and behind us every step of the way – on this side of eternity, not just the next.
So, what if being ready for Jesus to show up wasn’t just about the end of time or even just the coming of another Christmas? What if waiting for Jesus – keeping awake, being prepared and making things ready for God to live and move and breathe among us – wasn’t just a special occasion, reserved for Advent and the 12 days of Christmas? What if all of this candle-lighting, gift giving, generous-living … what if all of this repenting and praying and hope-filled expectation was a way of life for us?
What if we lived - something like that family full of pranksters - as though God could surprise us with love and mercy and forgiveness at every turn? And what if we worked to surprise others with that kind of love and grace and mercy? And what if all of that was no joke?
Every day would be more faithful and righteous and filled with grace. Every day would include more love, joy and laughter. Every day would be filled with a greater peace of mind and might just lead to the kind of peace we pray for. And every day would be filled with the new life that was and is and is to come, in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen
