The Seventh Article – The Second Coming

The second Article of the Christian Creed is, in the version of the Creed we call the Apostles’, “and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord”.   The next five Articles after this one, comprise a lengthy clarifying statement of Who this Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, in Whom we confess our faith, is.   Together these make up six of the twelve Articles, or half the Creed.   The seventh Article, which is our subject today, is the last of these.

 

The seventh Article pertains to a matter which has proven very controversial and divisive among Christians especially in the last century and a half.   The controversy and division is not usually over the content of the Article, which is a fairly simple assertion, but about the very complex systems of interpretation that theologians have built up around it.

 

The Article in the Apostles’ Creed is inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.   Our Book of Common Prayer renders this in English as “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”   The inde or “From thence” points back to the previous Article in which Jesus is confessed to have ascended to Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God.   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan version of this Article is καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος.   In the Book of Common Prayer this is translated as “and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”   As you can see, the Article is quite simple in both Creeds.   In most cases the extra words in the conciliar Creed simply make explicit what would already be understood in confessing the material common to both Creeds, i.e., that the predicting coming is πάλιν –again – and μετὰ δόξης  - with glory.   The longest piece of additional material in the conciliar Creed - οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος – whose kingdom shall have no end – is an assertion implicit in calling the Son of God by the title “Christ” for this is precisely what “Messiah” or “Christ” means, the predicted “Anointed One” who would arise from David’s seed to rule as king over Israel and all the earth forever.

 

This is about as basic as a confession of faith in the Second Coming gets.   The First Coming of Christ was in humility, to submit to arrest, false accusations, unjust condemnation, torture, and death on the Cross, to accomplish our salvation.   The Second Coming will be in judgement on both those living at the time – it just doesn’t sound right to refer to these in English in any other way than the expression used in the Book of Common Prayer here and in the Authorized Bible “the quick” – and the dead.   This is precisely what the New Testament says about the Second Coming and so we find in this Article about the Second Coming the entire Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things) – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell – encapsulated.

 

It is when eschatology goes beyond a simple assertion of belief in the Second Coming, the Final Judgement and by implication the Four Last Things, and the eternal Kingdom of Christ that matters get controversial.

 

The writers of the New Testament speak of the Second Coming as an event they expect to live to see.   This is not because they had been misled about the timing of the event, as liberals who reject the infallibility of the Scriptures claim, much less because they were right about the timing and it took place two millennia ago as preterism, a deadly heresy of our own day claims.   It is because they paid heed to what Jesus Himself had said about this event – that the timing was a total mystery, unknown to anyone but the Father,  and that rather than unprofitably looking into this, they should maintain an attitude of watchfulness, expecting His Coming at any moment, because it will come like a thief in the night.   These instructions, clearly, were not just for the Apostles, or even for all of Jesus’ first generation disciples, but the entire faith society that Christ would establish through the Apostles, the Church.   The instructions were intended to show us how to avoid the opposite errors we were most likely in our fallen human nature to fall into the further away we got from the Ascension without the Second Coming having occurred, the error of abandoning our watchfulness on the assumption that it having been so long it will be still longer until He comes if He does at all, and the error of thinking that the closer we get to the Second Coming the less the warnings against date-setting apply.

 

Attempts to develop a more detailed eschatology than what we find in the Creed inevitably involve attempts to decipher and interpret the Book of Revelation, the last book in the published order of the New Testament, taken by nearly everybody to be the last book of the Bible to have been written – it is usually dated to the 90’s of the first century – and the last book of the New Testament to be accepted as canonical by the Church.   It is also the hardest book of the New Testament to interpret or rather the easiest book to misinterpret.   It is written in vivid allegorical imagery, the meaning of some of which is explained in the text, for example, that the dragon refers to Satan, while much of it is left without such explanation, and all or nearly all of it, makes allusion in one way or another to something in the Old Testament.   There has never been a true consensus as to its meaning.   The terms premillennialism, a-millennialism, and postmillennialism, denoting the three major competing systems of eschatology, pertain to the interpretation of the thousand years of the twentieth chapter of the Book of Revelation.   None of these can truly claim to be the small-o orthodox, or small-c catholic view, if we use the Vincentian canon as the standard of what is small-o orthodox and small-c catholic.   The tests of the Vincentian canon are antiquity, universality, and consent.   Premillenialism passes the test of antiquity.  It was the view held by the Apostolic Fathers or at least the Apostolic Fathers whose views on the matter can be determined from their extent writings – St. Justin Martyr, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Papias of Hierapolis, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas – and by many of the most important second century Fathers, including St. Irenaeus, St. Hippolytus of Rome and the apologist Tertullian.   It fails the test of universality, however, having virtually disappeared for most of Church history.   If any of these views passes the test of universality it is a-millennialism, but it arguably fails the test of antiquity, for while very old, there is no evidence of it prior to the second century, and the earliest evidence for it is among heretics like Marcion of Synope.   The version of a-millennialism that grew to become near universal arguably owes its influence in the orthodox ancient Churches to St Clement of Alexandria and especially his protégé Origen.   Origen’s reputation as a doctor of the ancient Church – he was her first real systematic theologian – helped a-millennialism to overcome the bad reputation of its early heretical associations around the time that the premillennialism of the Apostolic Fathers and the succeeding generation fell into disrepute through association with the Montanist sect.   Postmillennialism passes none of the tests, none of the three interpretations pass all three.   In this, perhaps, we see the wisdom of the Lutheran tradition in taking the same position with regards to the antilegomena – the books of the New Testament whose canonicity was disputed in the early centuries – that all orthodox Protestants take with regards to the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books of the Old Testament, i.e., leave them in the Bible instead of removing them like hyper-Protestants, but do not apply to them to establish a doctrine. (1)  Nothing in the Creed requires support from the antilegomena for its establishment.   Neither premillennialism nor a-millennialism nor postmillennialism can be established without interpreting the most difficult of the New Testament antilegomena.

 

Contrary to a claim that is often heard, chiefly among Eastern Orthodox theologians, the phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end” was not added to the conciliar Creed to condemn chiliasm, as premillennialism was called in the early Church.   The phrase was added to the Creed by the Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and one of the heretics condemned at that Council was Appollinaris of Laodicea, but Appollinaris was condemned for denying the full humanity of Jesus Christ, not for his eschatology.   It was the third Article of the Creed, not the seventh, that was expanded to counter Appollinaris.   The phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end”, taken from the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary in the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke was added to counter a different heretic, Marcellus, who taught that the Trinity was a temporary arrangement, that Christ’s Kingdom would end when the Son handed the Kingdom back to His Father, and dissolved His Personhood into that of the Father.   (2) By the time the Second Ecumenical Council rolled around, chiliasm had become a minority viewpoint, but it was certainly not condemned by the Council.   It was still taught by the leading Western theologian of the day, St. Augustine of Hippo, who did not renounce it for a-millennialism until early in the next century amidst the events that led him to write The City of God.  

 

Indeed, the beauty of the simplicity of the seventh Article of the Creed is precisely that it does not speak to matters such as these one way or another but simply affirms what is essential to the Christian Faith with regards to the Second Coming.

 

One of the reasons for the shift away from chiliasm and towards a-millennialism in the centuries leading up to the first Ecumenical Councils was the growing idea that the premillennialists were repeating the mistake of the first century Jews.   The first century Jews were looking for the Messiah to come as a Conqueror Who would deliver them from the rule of Gentile empires like the Roman, restore David’s Kingdom, and establish that Kingdom over all the earth so that the tables were turned and the Gentile nations would come pay homage to the Son of David in Jerusalem.   Those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, did so because His Coming was very different from that, He came and submitted to the injustice of being tortured and crucified, to offer Himself up as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.   Those who held to chiliasm believed that the mistake of these Jews was to fail to recognize that Christ would come twice and to miss Him because they were looking for Him as He would appear at His Second Coming.   The a-millennialists came to believe that the mistake of the Jews was deeper than this, that they were wrong to look for a political deliverer rather than a spiritual Saviour, and that the chiliasts were wrong to borrow Jewish apocalyptic millenarianism and apply it to the Second Coming of Christ.

 

In our day that reasoning has been pressed to an extreme that goes much further than the a-millennialists would allow for into a denial not just of premillennialism but of the Second Coming as we confess it in the seventh Article of the Creed.   The origins of this heresy go back to the Counter Reformation in which Jesuit theologians in response to certain Protestants who misapplied various negative characters in the Book of Revelation to the Roman Communion and its leadership argued that the passages these Protestants were misapplying referred to first century individuals and institutions and so were long-fulfilled.  Later, this sort of argument would catch on in response to the revival of premillennialism in the nineteenth century.   The revival of premillennialism was itself a response to the spread of the apostasy of liberalism throughout Protestantism.  Many conservative Protestants looked to premillennialism to help understand this apostasy and in the hopes that it would provide them with a means of combatting it.   While some turned to premillennialism in basically the same form that it had in the early centuries of the Church, newer forms of premillennialism were also developed.   The one that gained the most influence among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants is the dispensationalist premillennialism taught by John Nelson Darby, the Church of Ireland curate who became one of the founders of the hyper-separatist sect the Plymouth Brethren and popularized among other Protestants by the Scofield Reference Bible.   This form of premillennialism is characterized by a hermeneutic that makes hair-splitting distinctions and consequently multiplies events – it divides the Second Coming in two, His Coming for the Church then at a later date His Coming in Judgement, it divides the Final Judgement into at least two Judgements, usually more,  and so on.   The most important flaw in its theology, however, is that it interprets the present period – the Church Age or the Age of Grace, between Pentecost and The Rapture – as a parenthesis in the Age of Law, which will be resumed and wrapped up after the Rapture.  One of the implications of this, that has become more explicit in dispensationalist theology over time, is that it treats the God of the Bible as being basically a tribal deity, Who only really cares about national Israel, and Who has allowed other nations to worship Him in the present for the purpose of making national Israel jealous.   This contrasts heavily with the strong Old Testament emphasis that the God Who made a Covenant with Israel was the God of the whole world Who made His Covenant with Abraham and his descendants in order to bless all the nations of the world.   Similarly, the idea of the Age of Grace as a parenthesis in the Age of Law is a direct contradiction of St. Paul’s third chapter in his epistle to the Galatians in which the Law is the parenthesis in God’s program of salvation based on Promise and Grace.   One error breeds its opposite, and in response to this departure from historic, traditional, and Scriptural orthodoxy, several theologians adopted the old Jesuit preterism and flushed it out into the claim that all Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, that the Second Coming and the Final Judgement and the Resurrection all took place in the first century, in the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70.  Dispensationalism thought up multiple versions of the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, the Final Judgement, and every other simple eschatological concept, needlessly complicating it all, in order to fit everything into its idea of a Divine Program of History that is ultimately all about national Israel.   The preterists, by contrast, collapsed every prophesied event – the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Final Judgement – into a single event, the divine Judgement on national Israel in the destruction of the Temple, also making everything about the national Israel.  It is quite obvious from the standpoint of historical, traditional, orthodoxy that dispensationalism and preterism share the same unhealthy obsessed fixation on national Israel, albeit approaching it from opposite perspectives.   Preterism, however, takes it to the point of denying an Article of the Creed.   For all the flaws of the dispensationalist version of premillennialism, it does not do this.   Saying that there will be a temporary earthly version of the Kingdom of Christ on this earth before it is translated to the New Earth is not a denial that the Kingdom of Christ will have no end.

 

Preterism in its denial of the seventh Article of the Creed is heresy.   While all heresy is serious this is a particularly deadly one.  Every heresy contains a germ of truth for that is the nature of heresy, to take a truth and twist it and distort it until it becomes a denial of other truth.   In this case, the truth is that Jesus spoke prophetically about the destruction of the Temple and the events of AD 70 in general.   Several of His parables refer to these events and a plainer prediction of the destruction of the Temple was what promoted His disciples to ask Him about when this would occur and when His Coming would be.   He answered both questions in the Olivet Discourse.   Preterism takes this truth, and twists it to claim that the judgement upon Israel for rejecting Christ in the destruction of the Temple was the Final Judgement and fulfilled all prophecy of the Second Coming including the prophecy of the Final Resurrection which nothing that took place on AD 70 even remotely resembles.  (3)   This repeats the error of Hymeneaus and Philetus that St. Paul warned St. Timothy against: “whom concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some”. (II Tim. 2:18).   It tells Christians not to take the attitude of watchfulness that Jesus Christ enjoined upon His followers.   By telling Christians that there is no future Second Coming to look for they tell them to disregard what St. Paul wrote to St. Titus that the “grace of God that bringeth salvation” and which hath “appeared to all men” i.e., in the First Coming of Christ, teaches us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works”. (Tit. 2:12-14).   By denying to Christians what St. Paul calls our “blessed hope” preterism leaves Christians with no hope.  Hope is essential to Christianity, being linked forever by St. Paul with the faith by which we trust in the grace of God and the charity, or Christian love, from which all good works must flow, in the final verse of his much beloved chapter on that love (1 Cor. 13).  Preterism, however, essentially takes the words Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate (Abandon all hope, ye that enter here) that Dante inscribed on the entrance to hell in his Inferno, and writes them over the door of the Church.

 

Against the preterist heresy small o-orthodox Christians profess our faith that the same Jesus Christ Who visibly ascended to Heaven forty days after His bodily Resurrection will just as visibly return from Heaven in the same Resurrected body.   The first time He came, He came to be the Saviour of the world.   In His Second Coming He comes as Judge of the world.  The Final Judgement is a Judgement of the whole world – not just of the generation of Israel that rejected Him- but of everybody, “the quick” – those living at the time - and “the dead” – everybody who had ever lived and died (2 Tim. 2:1).   The dead will be raised for this Judgement, as prophesied, both in the Old Testament (Dan. 12:2) and the New (Jn. 5:28-29).   The Judgement will be of everyone’s works, everything they had done including their thoughts and words (Matt. 12:36), because that is the nature of judgement.   Since the Judge of the whole world is Perfect in His Justice, we know that this Judgement will not be as depicted in some pagan mythologies, where one’s good deeds are weighed against one’s bad deeds, with the outcome determined by which side is heavier.   Imagine if earthly temporal human courts dispensed judgement in this manner, and murderers were let off the hook because all the people they didn’t kill outweighed the few that they did.  It would not resemble justice at all.   While the idea of a Final Judgement where we are held to account for our every thought, word, and deed, and where whatever good we have done does not offset whatever evil we have done, is a sobering one, especially since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) it is not something the believer need look forward to with dread and trepidation because the One Who will be the Judge on that Day is the One “that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:34) and from His love we can never be separated (Rom. 8:38-39). (4)  Trusting that He Who is the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” has saved us by His grace, we look forward to His Coming and the Judgement, knowing that after this comes the ultimate manifestation of His Kingdom, the life of which we have begun to live even now in this life in the Church, and that His Kingdom shall have no end.    As John Newton put it:

 

When we've been here ten thousand years
Bright, shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we first begun

 

 

 

 

 (1)   See the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion for this position with regards to the ecclesiastical books.   “Ecclesiastical books” is the designation the Church Fathers gave to the books and portions of books found in the Greek Septuagint, the Christian Old Testament, that were not found or at least were not extent at the time in the Hebrew Tanakh of the Jews.   The Roman Church calls these “deuterocanonical”, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not give them a separate designation.   They are called “the Apocrypha” in the sixth of the Anglican Articles of Religion and in orthodox Protestant Bibles like the original Authorized Version and Luther’s Bible in which they are placed in their own section between the Testaments.   This is an unfortunate designation because this term was used by the Church Fathers to designate a completely different set of writings.   Dr. Luther, Martin Chemnitz, and other Lutheran Reformers, thought that the seven New Testament books designated as antilegomena should similarly not be applied to in order to establish doctrine – and Dr. Luther similarly segregated them from the homolegoumena, the undisputed books of the New Testament, in his German Bible – but this position was never articulated in the Lutheran Confessions of the Book of Concord.

(2)   See Francis X. Gumerlock, “Millennialism and the Early Church Councils: Was Chiliasm Condemned at Constantinople?” Fides et Historia, 36:2 (Summer/Fall 2004), 83-95.

(3)   What I just call “preterism” in the text of this essay is sometimes called “full preterism” or “hyper-preterism” to distinguish it from what is sometimes called “partial preterism” which interprets much of the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Revelation as having been fulfilled in AD 70 but affirms a future literal Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement.   Since “partial preterism” does not deny an Article of the Faith it is not a heresy and in my opinion it is best not to call it by the same name as the heresy that denies a literal future Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement.

(4)   In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus talks about the Final Judgement when the world will be divided into “sheep” and “goats”, each judged by their works, the “sheep” being rewarded for the works of mercy they did to others which the Judge takes as having been done to Himself, the “goats” being punished for their neglect of such works.   Real people, of course, are not divided into people who consistently do good at every opportunity and people who never do good.   In the goats part of Jesus’ parable we find people who are punished for the evil they have done with the good not being brought in to offset the evil, demonstrating God’s Justice, that He is not like some insane judge who lets a murderer off because of all the people he did not kill.   In the sheep part of the parable we find people who are rewarded for the good they have done, with none of the evil they have done being held against them.   Both are judged for what they had done, because nobody can be judged for anything other than what they have done.  The radical difference in the way in which the works of the one are judged from the manner in which  the works of the other are judged is due to the one being “sheep” and the other being “goats”.   While it is not spelled out what the basis of the distinction is there is a hint of it in the parable.  The Judge accepts the good works the sheep did to others as unto Himself, and takes the goats’ neglect of good works to others as a neglect of Himself.   He Who comes at the end of time as Judge, had already come before as Saviour.   Those who accept Him as He came in His First Coming are the sheep who will be accepted by Him at His Second Coming.  Those who reject Him as He came in His First Coming  are the goats who will be rejected by Him at His Second Coming as Judge.

 

Christ Has Died, Christ is Risen, Christ Will Come Again!

This past Sunday was the most important holy festival in the Christian calendar.   Set by the Council of Nicaea to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, (1) it celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour and is variously called Pascha (the Christian Passover), Easter and Resurrection Sunday.    The previous week was Holy Week, which began with Palm Sunday, the commemoration of Jesus’ formal triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey in fulfilment of prophecy, and which ended with the Great Paschal Triduum.   On the evening of Maundy Thursday we remembered the Last Supper, in which the Lord washed His disciples’ feet, instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and was betrayed by Judas leading directly to the event remembered on Good Friday, His Crucifixion at the hands of ungodly men in which He bore the sins of the world for which offered up His own shed blood and death as Atonement.    Good Friday was followed by Holy Saturday, the day of the Easter Vigil in memory of the period of His body’s entombment and His descent as Conqueror into the underworld where He smashed the gates of Hell to smithereens.  The Vigil, the Triduum, and all of Holy Week found their culmination in Easter itself and the new dawn of the Resurrection.

 

Did your church choose to mark this Easter by meeting at midnight, with the church draped in black and its air thick with sulfurous incense, and chanting obscenities within an inverted pentagram while raping and killing a naked virgin on an altar before a statue of Baphomet?

 

I very much suspect that for most of you – I would hope for all of you – that the answer is “no”.   Nevertheless, I ask this offensive question in order to make a point.

 

If your church turned people away from the celebration of the Resurrection, limited those who it permitted to attend its Easter services, told those that did come that they had to cover their faces, that they could not sing Alleluia in praise of the Risen One, at least without wearing a mask, forbade hugs and handshakes and any other form of normal human contact, and told the majority of its parishioners that they would have to watch the few allowed to meet on the internet and  pretend that they were participating by following along at home, this was no less odious a blasphemous mockery than the kind of despicable rite described above.

 

Churches that have enacted these so-called “safety protocols” have done so at the behest of public health officials.   In other words they have deemed, contrary to the Apostles, it better to obey man than to obey God.    They have chosen to walk not by faith but by fear – fear of the very enemy that Christ taught His disciples not to fear.

 

Of the enemies that assail mankind, body and soul, the last that shall be destroyed, St. Paul tells us, is death.   While it is the last enemy to be destroyed it is the also the first to have been defeated.   The chapter in which St. Paul declares death to be the last enemy to be destroyed is the fifteenth of his first epistle to the Corinthians, a chapter devoted to the connection between Christ’s defeat of death in His Own Resurrection and the final destruction of death in the Final Resurrection.   The Christian believer is promised repeatedly throughout the Scriptures that he will share in the resurrection life of His Saviour, both in the sense of spiritual regeneration in this life and in the sense of bodily resurrection on the Last Day.   The Christian’s hope of his own future resurrection is built upon his faith in Christ and His historical Resurrection.

 

Since Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His historical triumph over death, which we are to trust in as our own triumph over death and the foundation of our hope of future resurrection, to celebrate Easter while cowering behind a facemask is to deny by our actions the faith we profess with our lips and to make a grotesque mockery of it.    These masks are symbols of irrational fear generated by media hype over a new virus/respiratory disease and of how that fear has caused us to give medical doctors and public health officials the kind of trust and obedience which we owe to God alone.   Giving these medical doctors and public health officials our trust and obedience is tantamount to placing our faith in the spirit that motivates and energizes them.   Since they have declared commerce, including commerce in narcotics and liquor but excluding small, locally-owned, family retailers and restaurants, to be essential, while forbidding family gatherings and worship services for the larger part of a year as non-essential, and have been holding  our constitutional rights and freedoms and the resumption of normal, human, social existence hostage in order to blackmail us all into allowing them to inject us with an experimental new form of gene therapy developed from research using the cells of butchered babies, it is fairly obvious who that spirit is don’t you think?

 

The Christ Who rose from the grave on the first Easter ascended to the right hand of His Father.   One day He will return.   When He came the first time, He did so in humility, to be our Saviour.   The second time He will come in glory “to judge both the quick and the dead”.   On that day, when the blood of His enemies flows as high as the horses’ bridles, what can those who are now forbidding participation in His pubic worship, fellowship in His Church, and denying access to His Sacraments to all but those who register in advance and agree to cover their faces in fear, expect to receive from Him?    Shall they be welcomed to partake of the Wedding Supper of the Paschal Lamb?   Or shall they be forced to drink from the cup filled with the vintage of the winepress of God’s wrath?

 

Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter!

 

 (1)   The Resurrection occurred on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.   The Jewish Passover fell on the Ides (the full moon at the middle of a lunar month) of Nisan, also called Aviv, the spring month in the Jewish calendar.   Hence the method of calculating its anniversary.

 

 

The Coming(s) of Christ and Some Misconceptions Thereof

We are rapidly approaching Christmas which, as has often been observed, is now two distinct holidays occupying the same space on the civil calendar. One the one hand there is the secular Christmas – or X-mas, as it is known to people who are either politically correct, lazy spellers, or both. This holiday, sacred to the pervasive cult of Mammon, has long been a celebration of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice and Gluttony, and in more recent years has increasingly added Lust as well. It is preceded by an anticipatory period the length of which is decided by the engines of commerce and which begins when the first decorations and advertisements appear in the stores. While many have opined that it seems to get longer and longer each year, in reality All Saints’ Day is the earliest it can begin. Any earlier and the advertising campaign would clash with that of the secular version of All Hallows’ Eve.

On the other hand there is the Christian Christmas – the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It too is introduced by a preparatory period, which in Western Christendom we call Advent, but this is much shorter than the season leading up to the secular holiday. It always begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew’s Day (November 30th), which is always the fourth Sunday prior to Christmas, and so is never longer than a lunar month. Like Lent, the season leading up to Easter, the liturgical season of Advent is supposed to be a period of sober reflection and repentance. This too is a sharp contrast with the hurly-burly of running around and shopping interspersed with party after party that characterizes the season’s secular counterpart.

While the contempt that such fictional curmudgeons as Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch displayed towards the commercial holiday before their changes of heart is, perhaps, understandable, it is much harder to comprehend the problem that many soi disant Bible-believing Christians seem to have with the religious holiday. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan dictator of the 1650s, was the spiritual ancestor of these types, as he was of political liberalism and all the various hues and shades of Mrs. Grundyism. You have probably encountered their arguments. The most familiar of them are that December 25th was originally a pagan holiday, that Jesus was not born on December 25th, and that we ought to be keeping the holy days God established in the Bible rather than man made ones. I have dealt with this matter in depth previously and so will provide only a short answer to each of these here.

First of all, yes the date on which the Church chose to celebrate Christmas coincides with a pagan festival. It also coincides with a Jewish festival and while that Jewish festival is also “man made” in that it is not instituted by God anywhere in the Bible, even in the Books of Maccabees that relate the events it commemorates, it was kept by Jesus in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. The fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Genesis gives, as God’s stated reason for creating the sun, moon, and stars in addition to dividing day from night and lighting the earth that they might be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” so it should come as no surprise that different religions would have important festivals at approximately the same time, in this case around the winter solstice.

Secondly, since the Scriptures do not tell us the day on which Jesus was born, they neither tell us that He was born on December 25th nor that He was not born on December 25th. The absence of a positive assertion does not constitute a denial. The same principle applies to the argument that because the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Paul did not write it, an argument that a Judaizing acquaintance recently made in a bizarre attempt to bolster his argument that we ought to keep the Old Testament feasts rather than man-made ones like Christmas. (1) At any rate, the question of the actual date on which Jesus was born is moot. Christmas is not necessarily Christ’s “birthday” but a liturgical feast day commemorating His birth. It occurs at the beginning of the liturgical year because that year is organized to take us through the most important events of Christ’s life chronologically. (2)

Finally, the position that Christians ought to be keeping the Old Testament holy days rather than Christmas, Easter, and other feasts appointed by the Church can only be maintained by disregarding the authority of Christ’s Apostles and the New Testament Scriptures. For the New Testament is absolutely clear on this matter. Christians are neither required to keep the feasts, rituals, and ceremonies of the Old Covenant nor forbidden from doing so. The first Christians were Jews who believed in Jesus. When God sent St. Peter to preach the Gospel to a Gentile, Cornelius the centurion, He gave Him a vision in which the dietary laws of the Old Covenant were abrogated. When Gentiles came to be converted in large numbers, a controversy arose as to whether or not they should be circumcised and made to follow all the rituals of the Old Covenant. The Apostles convened a church council in Jerusalem to settle the controversy which ruled against placing these obligations on the Gentile converts. The Book of Acts records that while the original Jewish Christians continued to participate in worship at the Temple and in the synagogues until they were driven out, the Church was already developing its own worship, meeting, for example, on the first day of the week. St. Paul in his epistles encourages these trends and reserves his harshest words for those who would impose the Old Testament rituals on the Church. (3)

This attitude of looking down one’s nose at ordinary Christians for keeping Christmas rather than the Old Testament feasts bears a resemblance in some ways to both of two opposite errors regarding the Second Coming of Christ that have plagued the Church from time to time and which have undergone significant revivals in the last century. For traditional Christian believers the Second Coming is as much in view at this time of year as His first coming. Indeed, while the emphasis of Christmas itself is on the events of His First Coming at Bethlehem a little over two thousand years ago, the emphasis in Advent is on the Second Coming. Whereas the focus of penitent reflection in Lent begins with contemplation of our own mortality on Ash Wednesday and ends with the vicarious suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday, in Advent the focus could be summed up in the words of St. Peter “But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer” (I Pet. 4:7) and of his Master and ours “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” (Matt. 24:42) For this reason, lectionaries traditionally assign readings that pertain to the Second Coming to this period and the two comings are joined in the Collect for Advent Sunday (4) which is repeated with the other Collects for the duration of Advent.

In their disregard towards the ruling of the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the clear teachings of St. Paul, and Apostolic authority in general, the legalistic Judaizers who would deny to Christians the freedom to celebrate, as they have traditionally done, the Person and events of the New Covenant of eternal redemption and bind them back in chains to Mt. Sinai, resemble the date-setters, who have a very similar approach to such statements of Christ as “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” and “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” and “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.” (Matt. 24: 36, 42, 44). Despite these clear warnings, every time a society collapses, a significant period of time such as a millennium passes, or some other such momentous event occurs, out trot the date-setters with their arguments for why Jesus will return on such-and-such a date. Those among them who are wise guys, despite lacking wisdom, rely on an ultra-literal interpretation of the above verses (only the “day” and “hour” are not mentioned, not the “year” or “decade”) to justify their obvious evasion of the spirit of the text. Needless to say our own era in which Western civilization as a whole has been giving every sign of being on the verge of imminent collapse for a century (5) and the second millennium AD came to an end has had more than its fair share of date-setters.

In their arrogant attitude of superiority towards other Christians, however, the Judaizers more closely resemble the preterists, the hubris of whom make the ancient Gnostics look humble in comparison. Preterism derives its name from the Latin proposition praeter. Praeter means “besides, except for”, “contrary to” and “beyond” but it can also mean “before” in both its spatial and temporal senses. It is in the temporal sense of the meaning “before”, i.e., “in the past”, that the preterists use this word to identify their views. For their doctrine is that all Biblical prophecies – including the prophecies of the Second Coming and the last three of the Quattuor Novissima (6) have all been fulfilled in the past. It is an ancient heresy, having been first taught by Hymenaeus and Philetus in Ephesus towards the end of the sixth decade of the first century AD, and rebuked by St. Paul in his Second Epistle to Timothy:

But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. (II Tim 2:16-18)

Contemporary preterists attempt to elude the obvious application of these verses to their own doctrine by arguing that at the time St. Paul wrote those words – early in the seventh decade – the resurrection was not yet past but that it happened shortly thereafter, at the very end of that decade, a couple of years after St. Paul’s martyrdom. For contemporary preterists teach that the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Last Judgment all took place in the year AD 70.

This was the year in which Titus, the son of the newly elevated Roman emperor Vespasian, after a seven month siege of Jerusalem, lay waste to the rebellious city, destroying the Second Temple and apart from the handful of leftover zealots who would be wiped out at Masada three years later, essentially crushed the revolt. The truth in preterism – for heresy is not pure error but begins with a truth being twisted out of shape – is that these events were frequently predicted in the New Testament, sometimes in passages that also discuss the Second Coming. The Olivet Discourse contained in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew is the obvious example. The discourse begins when Jesus tells His disciples that the Temple will be destroyed and they ask Him “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” Orthodox Christianity has always taken the position that the disciples had mistakenly associated the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ and the end of time and thus asked Jesus two questions, thinking they were asking one. Jesus answered both questions without directly correcting their mistake, knowing that just as the disciples would not be able to grasp that there would be a Second Coming separate and distinct from the First until after His Resurrection and Ascension so the unfolding of events would eventually make obvious the distinction between the destruction of the Temple and His Second Coming. Accordingly the three ancient Creeds which express the consensus of the early, undivided, Apostolic Church as to fundamentals of the orthodox, Scriptural, kerygma all include an affirmation that Christ will “come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” (7)

Orthodox Christians have disagreed on other aspects of eschatology, both in the early centuries and down through the years. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all taught a form of what is now called pre-millennialism, while the Alexandrian Fathers and St. Augustine taught the a-millennialism that became the dominant view down until modern times. Regardless of where they stood on these matters, however, orthodox Christians joined in the Creedal affirmation of the Second Coming as a literal, future, event that will involve the judgement of the entire world, including both the living and the dead. The preterist teaching that the sack of Jerusalem fulfilled completely the prophecies of the Second Coming and the Final Resurrection and Judgement obviously requires an interpretation of these prophecies that exceeds in its non-literalism what was allowed for by even the most allegorical of the orthodox Fathers. It also requires that the events prophesied be reduced from a global scale and made to pertain only to national Israel. Ironically, since the recent spread of preterism can be partially attributed to a reaction against dispensationalism, preterism shares dispensationalism’s obsession with national Israel, giving it, of course, the opposite negative spin. (8) To both alike, all Bible prophecy is about God wrapping up His dealings with national Israel. To the dispensationalists, this is a future wrapping up that will involve the total restoration of the nation. To the preterists, it is a past wrapping up that involved the total rejection of the nation in judgement for its unbelief. The dispensationalists, at least, affirm the passages in which Christ comes back for His faithful believers, albeit by making it a prelude to the main event. (9) Consistent preterists must insist that passages which speak of the believer’s hope in the coming of the Lord were all fulfilled by the judgement of national Israel. This fact alone ought, in itself, to be sufficient to refute this obviously false doctrine.

The late Lutheran theologian John M. Drickamer once remarked that responding to preterism is like taking out the trash – it is an unpleasant, smelly, task but one that needs to be done from time to time. What better time to do it than Advent, the time in which we traditionally look forward in penitent reflection to Christ’s Second Coming, was we prepare to celebrate His First Coming?

Merry Christmas, every one, and Maranatha (the Lord is coming)!



(1) Actually this case may not be an exact parallel. While the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Peter may very well have identified St. Paul as its author in II Peter 3:15. In this verse he reminds his original readers, who are the same as those of his first epistle (3:1), that St Paul had written to them something to the effect of “the longsuffering of the Lord is salvation.” All of the “signed” Pauline epistles are addressed to particular churches which were predominantly Gentile. St. Peter’s epistles, on the other hand, are “catholic” or “general” epistles (I Peter 1:1), and his original readers seems to have largely consisted of believers of Jewish ancestry (2:12). Since St. Peter goes on to identify St. Paul’s words as Scripture, Hebrews is the only epistle that seems to qualify as the one to which he is referring. It is part of the New Testament canon, written to the same addressees, with content that matches the allusion by St. Peter (see the ninth and tenth chapters of Hebrews).

(2) See, however, William J. Tighe’s arguments in Touchstone Magazine, that the early Church calculated December 25th and January 6th (Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, celebrated in Western Christendom as the Feast of the Magi, in the East as the eve of Christmas itself) as the dates of Christ’s birth by adding nine months to March 25th and April 6th respectively. According to Tighe there was a widespread belief at the time that Israel’s prophets died on the same date as their conception, and so March 25th and April 6th were identified as the dates of conception through attempts to calculate the calendar date of Christ’s death. Tighe also maintains that the Church had done these calculations and started celebrating Christmas on December 25th prior to AD 274 when Emperor Marcus Aureleus declared the same date to be the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun.”

(3) He develops a theological argument for this doctrine of Christian liberty throughout his corpus, but especially in the epistles of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Hebrews. The Old Testament Law in its ceremonial aspect pointed to and foreshadowed Christ, now that Christ has appeared and instituted the New Covenant with His blood we, having the substance, ought not to cling to the shadow. Under the Old Covenant, Israel was to be a holy nation. She was supposed to remain untainted with the paganism and idolatry of the tribes and nations surrounding her, and the ceremonial aspects of the Law, including the dietary and clothing restrictions, contributed to her distinct and separate identity. Under the New Covenant, however, believers of all nations are united spiritually in the Church, and this unity is symbolized by the Church’s standing under grace rather than Law.

(4) “ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” Collect for First Sunday in Advent, Book of Common Prayer.

(5) It is one hundred years since the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline – more accurately “Downfall” of the West – was published.

(6) Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell.

(7) This is the wording of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as translated in the BCP. The Apostles’ Creed and the Quicumque Vult both introduce the Second Coming by saying that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father after which the Apostles’ Creed adds “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” and the Athanasian Creed adds “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

(8) Interestingly there are other parallels. Both doctrines in their contemporary forms can be traced back to sixteenth century Jesuits (Luis de Alcasar in the case of preterism, Francisco Ribera in the case of dispensationalism) through nineteenth century Protestant popularizers (James Stuart Russell’s The Parousia: a Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord's Second Coming in the case of preterism, John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield in the case of dispensationalism).

(9) The main problem with dispensationalism, from the standpoint of orthodox theology, is not their elaborate eschatological scheme but the significance attached to certain of the events. The rapture (from the Latin equivalent of the Greek ἁρπάζω used by St. Paul to mean “caught up” in I Thess. 4:17) is said by dispensationalists to the be the end of the Church Age which began at Pentecost, and the entire Church Age is described by dispensationalists as a parenthesis in the Age of the Law. This is the opposite of inspired Apostolic doctrine in which the Law is the parenthesis in the unfolding of God’s promises of grace (Gal. 3:6-29, NB especially vv. 17, 19, 23-25).

The Kingdom of Christ

This is the text of a homily given at Evensong in the Anglican parish of St. Aidan in Winnipeg on Sunday November, 24th, 2013, the Feast of the Reign of Christ The King. The Scripture readings were Zechariah 9: 9-16 and Luke 19: 11-27

We who belong to countries that share in the culture and civilization that is commonly called Western have a very linear way of thinking about time. We conceive of time as a current which flows from a source in the past, through the present, towards a destination in the future. Philosophers have posited various destinations towards which they have suggested history is moving. Karl Marx said that history was moving towards a state of universal communism. More recently Francis Fukuyama argued that a universal, American-style, democratic capitalism was the “end of history”. What these philosophies do not acknowledge is that the Western way of thinking about time and history that made their ideas possible is due to the influence of the Christian faith. Christianity teaches that history began with Creation, was diverted from its original end by the Fall, was redeemed by the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and is moving towards a final destination, the Kingdom of God.

Apart from Christian divine revelation the idea of time and history as moving in a straight line would not make much sense. The natural world suggests that time has a circular shape. Think of the basic units by which we measure time. A day, in the language of the ancients, is the time it takes for the sun to complete its journey through the sky from the east to the west. In the less picturesque language of the modern scientific worldview it is the period of time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis. It amounts to the same thing and in both cases it is a circular motion. Likewise a month is the time it takes for the moon to complete its cycle of waxing and waning – or to revolve around the earth. Similar remarks could be made about the year. The seasons are a cycle to which man has attached great significance from earliest times, seeing in them a picture of the cycle of life, from birth in spring, through growth in summer, to maturity in fall, and finally culminating in death in winter, from which the cycle begins again with the rebirth of life in the next spring.

The spiritual conclusions that pagan faiths, enlightened only by natural revelation and not by special revelation, drew from what they observed in nature, were often false, such as the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul through reincarnation. Sir James Frazer, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Scottish anthropologist, in his notorious The Golden Bough, compared the various myths in which a god dies and is reborn in some way. This myth appears in one form or another throughout Mediterranean and indeed world mythology. It is ordinarily associated with fertility rituals and mysteries. It is clearly a symbolic representation of the natural cycle, of life, death, and rebirth. Frazer tried to explain away the gospel account of the death and resurrection of Christ as yet another version of this meme. C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist whose death, fifty years ago, was overshadowed by the somewhat more spectacular death of a less interesting persona of whom we have all heard a great deal this weekend, that occurred on the same day, demolished Frazer’s argument by pointing out that Christ’s death and resurrection, unlike that of Osiris or Dionysus, took place not in some “other place” outside of time, but in actual history, in an identifiable place, at an identifiable time. Since the natural cycle of which the pagan mythology was a symbol, was itself used by Christ in the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel as a picture of His own redemptive work, Lewis argued, the Gospel was true myth. Jesus was and is the reality, of which the earlier myths were mere shadows.

The Christian Church, in developing its liturgical calendar, harmonized the Christian faith’s teleological history, with the cyclical time observed in nature. The Christian year, like any other calendar, is built around the seasons of the cycle of life. Its major festivals take place around the winter and the spring solstices. Its seasons ebb and flow with the rhythms of life. The significance, however that it assigns to days in the calendar is drawn from events of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, which are arranged in the order of linear time so as to reenact and remember these events each year. It begins with Advent, a four week period of anticipation that leads up to Christmas, the festival of the birth of Jesus Christ, the celebration of which continues until Epiphany, the feast of the visit of the magi. In Lent we have a period of penitent reflection leading up to Holy Week, which starts on Palm Sunday with the reenactment of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends in the celebration and remembrance of the Last Supper, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, respectively. Ascension Day and Pentecost, commemorate the anniversaries of the ascension of Christ and the sending of the Holy Ghost.

Today is the last Sunday in the Christian calendar. It is the feast day of the Reign of Christ the King. This is a very new addition to the Christian calendar. The feast day was created by Pope Pius XI in 1925, at a time when the nations of the world were falling prey to the personality cults of Mussolini and Lenin, to remind the world of Him Who is king of kings, and lord of lords. It was originally assigned to the last Sunday before All Saints Day, i.e., the last Sunday in October. The Roman Catholic Church reassigned it to the final Sunday of the Christian Year in 1970, after which it was adopted by other liturgical denominations, including our own.

I am not ordinarily a fan of innovations, particularly those of the twentieth century, but in this case I think this was appropriate and unusually well thought out. For this addition to the calendar makes the liturgical cycle culminate in a celebration of the kingdom of Christ – the end towards which Christianity says history is moving, thus completing the harmonization of linear and cyclical time, in the Christian year.

The kingdom of Christ is what the Jews called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. It was a Jewish concept before it was a Christian concept. It is the kingdom God promised to Israel through the Old Testament prophets. It was to break another cycle, a less healthy one, the cycle of sin, repentance, restoration, and apostasy told in Old Testament history. The gospel that Jesus preached was that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, and the kingdom was the subject, in one way or another, of virtually every sermon He preached, and every parable He told. There are many aspects to the kingdom. It is the reign of Christ from Heaven after His Ascension to sit on the right hand of His Father. It is the Reign of Christ in the heart of the believer and collectively in His earthly body the Church. It is also the coming future kingdom that will be manifested upon earth after the Second Coming.

Some today are skeptical of the latter aspect of the kingdom. They think that the spiritual and invisible aspects are all that there is and that the prophesies of the kingdom were all fulfilled in the first century.

This brings us to the parable told in the reading from Luke’s gospel today. According to Dr. Luke this parable was told by Jesus immediately after His encounter with Zaccheus the tax collector in Jericho and just before His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This timing, as we are about to see, is crucial to understanding the parable.

This parable is unusual in that it joins two separate stories in one. One of those stories is quite familiar because it is very similar to another parable that Jesus told only a few days later in the Olivet Discourse as recorded by St. Matthew in the twenty-fifth chapter of his gospel. This is the story about the man who goes away, entrusts his money to his servants, then comes back to see how they had used the money.

The stories are not absolutely identical in each telling. A different monetary unit is used in each. In the Luke parable it is minas, in the Matthew parable it is talents. The Matthew parable is the source of our English use of the word “talent” to refer to a gift or ability, based upon the common interpretation of the parable as meaning that at the Last Judgement, men will be held accountable for how they have used the abilities with which they have been entrusted in this life. This interpretation comes from the fact that in Matthew’s parable, the talents are divided unevenly among the servants in accordance with their abilities as judged by their master. This is not the case in the parable recorded by Luke, where the minas are divided evenly among the servants. In Matthew’s parable, the unfaithful servant buries his talent, in Luke’s he hides it away in a napkin. In Luke’s gospel, the other servants respond in shock when the nobleman takes the coin away from the unfaithful servant and gives it to the servant who had made the largest profit, and make a kind of mildly worded protest at this taking from the poor to give to the rich. This is not found in the parable in Matthew, although the nobleman’s response, which could be paraphrased into current idiom as “the rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer”, is. Needless to say, neither parable is likely to be the favourite parable of those of our brethren who have been deceived by socialism. Otherwise it is basically the same story.

It is the other story, that is joined to this one in the Gospel of Luke, that I wish to focus on. It is a very interesting story, given as the reason for the journey the rich man takes into the far country. He goes there to receive a kingdom. Those, over whom he is to be made king, reject his authority and send representatives after him saying, in the language of the old King James, “we will not have this man to rule over us”. So when he returns, in addition to sorting out the financial doings and misdoings of his servants, he has to respond to this rebellion, which he does by rounding them up, and having them executed for their treason.

What makes this part of the parable so interesting is that Jesus was telling His audience a story that, with one crucial difference, is identical to an episode of history with which his audience would have been well familiar. King Herod the Great, the king who had ordered the slaughter of the innocents after the visit of the magi, had himself died shortly thereafter, naming his son Herod Archelaus his successor in his will. The throne did not automatically go to Archelaus, however, he had to journey to Rome to receive it from Augustus Caesar. As brutal a man as his father, he was not popular, and there was widespread opposition to his rule. He had 3000 of his opponents slaughtered at Passover, before departing for Rome, and when he arrived, Josephus tells us that a delegation of about 50 Jews and Samaritans arrived at approximately the same time, to plead with Caesar not to appoint Archelaus. Caesar did appoint Archelaus the ethnarch over Judea but ten years later removed him from office for his misrule.

The crucial difference between the story Jesus told, and the history to which He was alluding, is that Archelaus was a wicked and brutal king, whereas the king in Jesus’ story, who represents Jesus Himself, was a just king, hated by wicked subjects. Flipping the story around like that was not likely to endear Him to the crowd – especially after He had just befriended Zaccheus, a despised tax collector. So why did He do it?

Dr. Luke provides us with the answer, in verse eleven. They were getting close to Jerusalem, and His disciples thought that the kingdom would immediately appear. Indeed, His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday takes place immediately after this. The point of this parable was to tell His disciples that when they saw prophesy being fulfilled before their eyes, the prophesy we heard in the earlier reading from Zechariah about His riding into town on a donkey, that they should not think that He would establish the kingdom then and there. Rather He would be going away to be crowned king, to return later to judge the works of His servants, and to put down opposition to His reign.

The full significance of this only gradually dawned on His disciples. Soon after telling this parable, He rode into Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna. When, a few days later, in response to His prophecy that “not one stone of this temple will be left unturned”, they asked Him “when shall this be, and what shall be the sign of thy coming”, they showed by so asking that they recognized that despite His triumphal entry on Palm Sunday, His coming as king was yet to come. They assumed that the prophesy of the destruction of the Temple was referring to His Second Coming. After His Ascension into Heaven, they expected that His Second Coming to put down His enemies and establish His kingdom would happen immediately, within their lifetimes. Only after the destruction of the Temple forty years later, did the Church realize that what the disciples had thought to be a single question was actually two, concerning two distinct events, and that they would have to wait yet further for the Second Coming of Christ. Today, the Church is waiting still.

We should not allow the passing of two thousand years cause us to doubt the Second Coming and the future full manifestation of the kingdom. It is still an article of orthodox faith that “He will come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end”. It is appropriate, therefore, that as we prepare to begin again the Christian cycle of worship again with the season of anticipation of the coming of Christ, that we end the old cycle with a celebration of that kingdom to which all of sacred history leads. May our reflections upon the reign of Christ, this final Sunday of the old Christian year, inspire us to wait with the watchful anticipation enjoined upon us by Scripture, for the coming of the King.