All Saints’, Dorval
December 1, 2024
At the end of my three-week trip aboard Dragonfly with Dave Robinson this past summer, I was able to spend my last night in Prince Edward Island with my friend Victoria Goddard. Victoria has a PhD from U of T, where she studied Dante and Boethius, and she successfully supports herself by writing and self-publishing novels and short stories set in a fantasy realm called the Nine Worlds.
For reasons that would be too complicated to explain, time in the Nine Worlds is broken. In one place, a dozen years might pass, while in another, it’s been a thousand. On one occasion, a character learns that in the homeland of another character, he’s a hero of legend who lived centuries ago. If you try to make it make sense, it will break your brain. In the online forum where fans of Victoria’s work discuss it, someone designed a whole new emoji of an hourglass covered with the red “do not enter” symbol, which means, “don’t think about time.”
That’s kind of what Advent feels like. We are living in layers of time: the time before Christ, both before and after the destruction of Solomon’s temple, when the people fear their enemies, lament their fate, and hope for a Messiah; the time of Mary’s pregnancy, awaiting the birth of the Saviour; the time just before Jesus’ death, as he makes predictions about the future; the present time, in which we tell these stories and hope for deliverance from whatever our own predicaments may be; the time when Jesus will return to earth and usher in the new creation; and eternity, when that new creation is a reality and we all live in the direct presence of God.
References to time are scattered through our scriptures for today: “The days are surely coming,” announces the prophet Jeremiah, and then repeats, “In those days” and “at that time”. “In you have I trusted all the day long,” says the psalmist, begging god to “remember not the sins of my youth.” Paul invokes “the coming of our Lord Jesus.”
And, perhaps most interestingly – and most confusingly – Jesus himself, unlike in some of the other gospels where he strictly warns his followers not to try to guess when the end of the age that he is prophesying will come, seems almost eager to pin down a timeframe in this morning’s reading from Luke. He compares the knowledge of a farmer knowing when her trees will bloom and bear fruit, to his disciples being able to read the signs of the times and know that the kingdom of God, their redemption, is drawing near. And it is clearly the thinking behind these kinds of passages that led the apostle Paul to be so convinced that the day of the Lord was so imminent that there wasn’t much point getting married or having children, because the new creation was going to arrive any minute.
But one sentence in this passage from Luke has made most of its readers over the past couple of millennia wonder whether Jesus – or Luke writing about Jesus – overplayed his hand. “Truly I tell you,” says Jesus, “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.”
On the surface, this seems to imply that the listeners who hear Jesus make this assertion will not die before they have seen the Kingdom come. The fact that some believers had died before Jesus came back was already clearly bothering Christians at the time that Paul wrote the letters to the Thessalonians – the very earliest surviving pieces of Christian literature, composed less than two decades after the Crucifixion. Figuring out how to live as a settled religion, rather than a sect expecting the world to be destroyed and remade at any moment, was a major preoccupation of the first century or so of Christian history.
And here we are, approximately sixty generations later, and while every generation has seen signs of the apocalypse, life continues to carry on within the same basic parameters as before.
“Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
Two things will not pass away: this generation, and Jesus’ words. Heaven and earth will pass away before these things.
It’s possible that Jesus was misremembered or misquoted somewhere along the chain of transmission from his actual words until Luke put them on a page 30 or 40 years later. It’s also possible that he was being deliberately obscure; that seems to have happened sometimes.
But what if he meant exactly what he said?
The question of resurrection and the afterlife was a very live theological debate in the Judaism of the first half of the first century. Different sects had different beliefs; the Sadducees, the traditionalists, denied the possibility of a resurrection or a meaningful afterlife; other groups, such as the Pharisees and Essenes, believed that people did live on after death and would be “raised up” in some form, whether physical or spiritual.
Jesus was very clearly in the latter camp. In just the previous chapter of Luke’s gospel, he has delivered one of the clearest verbal smackdowns of his ministry to some Sadducees who tried to catch him out on the matter of the resurrection. He says of those who are considered worthy of a place in the age to come, “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are … children of the resurrection.” Invoking Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jesus insists, “God is God not of the dead, but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”
So in a very real way, when Jesus says to his audience, “this generation will not pass away,” he is telling the plain truth: those who hear his teaching and follow it, becoming worthy of a place in the age to come, “will not pass away” before that age is ushered in – because their physical death has become irrelevant, and they are alive forever with God. Heaven and earth will pass away, but God’s word will not pass away, and neither will those whose lives that word has changed.
It’s a bit mindbending to really get your head around the idea that you, the individual, with your personality and quirks and history, will outlast the physical universe itself. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
So perhaps one of the things to take away from this very rich Gospel passage is the reminder that everything we do – including the way we wait for Jesus to return – we should do in the consciousness that when Jesus does return, we will still be here. And I say this not to threaten anyone with fire and brimstone, but more as a reminder that we will all have to live with ourselves for a very long time, and it is certainly worth doing the work while we are in this mortal life, to make ourselves as good company, and our memories as wholesome and worthwhile, as possible, as we can, because we will have all eternity to reflect on them.
In Advent, we live in layers of time. The time before Christ; the time of Mary’s pregnancy; the time of today’s Gospel passage; the present time; the time of Jesus’ return. But all these are enfolded within eternity, God’s eternal present, and because we love and follow Jesus, we too exist in eternity. The resurrection is real, and heaven and earth may pass away, but we will not pass away before the time is accomplished. So let’s live as though we believed it.
Happy Advent!
Amen.
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