I wonder how you would respond if you came home and heard
this message on our answer machine.
Beep
“Hi it’s Rob Heist from Northland
Break Ins and Theft: your local friendly
neighbourhood burglars and I’m ringing to advise you we have booked to do your
house over at 2am on December 12th.
To save any unnecessary unpleasantness it would be good if
you were not home at that time. It would also make things a bit easier if you
would leave a ground story window or door open and any valuables out in the
open where we can see them.
We also recommend you check that your content insurance is
up to date. We personally recommend the insurance broker firm of fraud, Larcen
and associates.
If you have any enquires please contact me at 027478633…
that’s 02748633 or if it’s easier to remember that’s 02RIPUOFF…
Have a nice day.”
Click beep.
What would you do?
I think you’d be ready. Right… You’d install security lights
deadbolt everything including the cat flap, you’d have the neighbours rabid Pitbull
tethered in your front yard. Your shot gun filled with rock salt. You’d have
rung your cousins from Dargaville to come over, you know the shady ones who run
the kick boxing gym. Well maybe not… but
you’d definitely ring the police and be ready for when Rob Heist came to call. In the passage we are looking at today Jesus
uses that kind of metaphor of a thief in the night to speak of being ready for
his unexpected return. No one knows the day or the hour so don’t wait be Ready
now. Live Ready every day, be on watch.
We are working our way through the last of the five blocks
of Jesus teaching in Matthew’s gospel, we are on the home straight of our year long
journey to have a 2020 vision of the Kingdom of God: the manifesto, mission,
meaning and means of the much awaited kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s gospel. A
journey that not even COVID has been able to disrupt. We are looking at the
Olivet discourse in Matthew 24 and 25. Where Jesus deals with the much awaited
part.
Jesus had left the temple and talked of its destruction and
his disciples had privately come to him while they were on the Mount of Olives
and asked him for the signs of the coming of the destruction of the temple, Jesus
Parousia, being fully revealed as king and the end of the age. We tend to see
those things as uniquely different events but for Jesus disciples they were the
one and the same. In the passage we
looked at last week Jesus answered the signs part of that. All of which would
happen before that generation passed away. All of which could be seen to be
fulfilled with the destruction of the temple in 70ad. But also from our perspective can be seen as
what the church has dealt with down through history as it awaits the coming of
God’s kingdom in its fullness. In the midst of that Jesus words to his
disciples and to us are Don’t be deceived, don’t be alarmed and afraid, stand
firm to the end, be aware that we live in this time between the already and the
not yet of God’s kingdom. Looking forward in the midst of trouble and
difficulty with our hope in Christ.
In the passage we are looking at today Jesus turns to the
when, the timing of his Parousia, and if you are sitting there with your
dairies open waiting to write down when you can expect Jesus and pencilling his
return into your busy schedule, Then I’m sorry because Jesus leaves it pretty
vague. Events like a pandemic and historically things like the reestablishment
of Israel as a nation and the second millennium after Christ, and the time of
the most rapid changes in history have caused people to have a heightened
awareness of these end time things. But again Jesus is vague about the timing.
One of the big challenges for Matthew’s first readers would have been that the
end of the temple did not mean Christ returned. We don’t know when Matthew’s
gospel was written but there is a good possibility it was after the events of
70AD. It explains why in all the four
parables in the Olivet discourse the Christ figure has gone away and his return
is delayed. While Jesus is vague about
the timing there are certainties in what he says.
Firstly he says that, no one apart from God the Father knows
when that time will be. Not the angels, not even Jesus as God’s son. Which of course has caused some debate as to
the nature of the trinity. But for our purposes it says that the certainty is
that time is held in the sovereignty of God. This is the God who created the
world and all that is in it including time. This is God our father who ‘when
the time was right’ as Paul says in Galatians 4: 4-7,’sent his son born of a
women, subject to the law.” God’s plans and purposed are being worked out
beginning to end in human history.
It is that certainty that gives us hope, not that we have a
when but we know the who. The olivet discourse occurs in that week between
Jesus triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his death and resurrection, for Jesus
here to say God the father knows is a statement of absolute trust in the
character and the righteousness and sovereignty of God. On the cross Jesus will
say “into your hands I commit my spirit’ an ultimate expression of faith and
trust as Jesus, fully human, faces death. It’s a quote from my favourite psalm,
psalm 31:5 in the midst of lament over rejection, enmity, pain and suffering
the psalmist expresses his utmost trust in God. A psalm that goes on to say
“But I trust in you, My times are in your hands”. To say that the father knows
when the age will end, when the Parousia of Jesus as king will come is to trust
that God is in control, and can be trusted that it will be the right time, the
appropriate time. When God’s purposes and plans come to fruition. We are to
live with the same trust and faith that Jesus has in his father. Even amidst
the whirl and swirl, the churn and blurr, the tragedy and triumphs of history. The
certainty of Jesus Parousia is that it is in the hands of God the Father.
The second certainty is that just like with the time of
Noah, life will go on as normal. People will live their lives with no real
understanding of the coming future, of God’s judgment and salvation. They will
eat, and be married with no thought to the future. One of the challenges of the
ecological issues we face as a planet today is the difficulty of asking people
to modify their behaviour now for future generations. We are not good at
delayed gratification, which lead to such tragedies as instant coffee, the rise
of pornography rather than finding fulfilment through commitment to loving long
term relationships. The convenience of things that look good but we use once
and throw away and didn’t think of the consequences. Here Jesus says people
will simply get on with life and not really consider what is to come. Just like
in the time of Noah, until there was that resounding boom and God, in his
sovereignty, at the right time, closed the door and the rains came. As we’ll
see later Jesus tells us we are not to be like that, rather we are to be on
watch. Living with our eyes fixed on the kingdom come, with it’s soon and
coming king.
The third certainty is that it will come suddenly. Like two
people in a field and one disappears and
one is left standing still, two women grinding flour, one is gone the other
remains.
Now many people have seen this as Jesus speaking literally
and from this passage some theologians have seen it as pointing to something
they call the rapture. Where God will take his people out of the earth to be
with him. The best-selling ‘left behind’ fiction series is based on that, what
is called dispensationalist theology. Other books like the late great planet
earth by Hal Lyndsey, and films like ‘like a thief in the night’ that when I
was a teenager was used to scare people into the kingdom… are an expression of that.
For decades in the united states churches were divided between whether they
believed that the rapture would happen before what was called the tribulation,
when it got really bad, or after it. What it boiled down to was that while
Jesus used the thief in the night as a metaphor, then goes on to use four
parables to speak of what we should do as we await the coming kingdom, here
with this one going one staying verse he was talking about a literal factual
event. Also there is no implication that it is God’s people who are taken away
and the unrighteous who are left behind… to assert these things, I think, is doing
some very difficult and dubious biblical interpretive gymnastics…
When I read this passage I can’t help but read it through
the lens of something that happened to a school acquaintance of mine. I hadn’t
seen him for years and my mum told me that he had died in a car accident. He
had been the passenger in a car with his friend and they had been driving in
the country, when a rock came away from a bank rolled down and smashed into the
car they were driving. Crushing and Killing my friend, the driver escaped
without a scratch. Christ’ return will be sudden.
The fourth certainty is that the time to be ready is now,
and we should live filled with the hope of Christs return and being on watch.
Because while if you knew when a thief was coming, if you got a phone call from
Rob Heist, your friendly considerate neighbourhood burglar you’d be ready… But we don’t know, be ready live ready and on
watch now.
Be ready because you know the kingdom of God is always
breaking into the realms of humanity, in how we live and ‘what we say and
through what the spirit is doing in the world. Our lives should be focused on
putting first the kingdom of God and his righteousness first. As followers of Jesus who pray ‘thy kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ we should be watching for
it as it breaks into that everydayness that we live in. we should be living it
now until it becomes a reality.
To be on watch is to be prepared to live our lives like a
watch man on a wall. Jesus had been in Jerusalem all day and I wonder as they
were making their way back over the Mount of Olives in the late afternoon, that
they could see the watchmen being posted as the evening came along the walls of
Jerusalem. A watch man looks off to the horizon and then lets people know what
he sees there so they can be safe. They dedicate themselves to that. Be ready
living with our eyes fixed not on the last things and the last days but as the
author of Hebrews says our eyes fixed on Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter
of our faith. The one who in his life death and resurrection inaugurated his
kingdom and will come again to consummate it and make all things right.
I could finish by drilling down and talk about telling
people who are oblivious to Jesus and his all ready but not yet kingdom that
they need to get ready and even give an altar call to say are you ready. I
could do that. I’m not because over the next four weeks we are going to look in
depth at what Jesus says to watch and be ready and to wait means. How we should
live in light of what Jesus says about the ‘what and when’ of his coming. Those
four Sundays are traditional known as advent when we ready ourselves for Christ’s
coming, celebrated at Christmas and looked for all year.
So I just simply want to finish with a question…
I wonder how we would respond if you came home and you heard
this message on our answer machine…
Beep
Keep watch because you do not know on what day your Lord
will come. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known at what
time the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his
house be broken into. So you must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at
an hour when you do not expect him”.
Click Beeep that is
the message from the scripture today… amen
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