Christ Has Risen Christ Will Come Again
Along with oceans flooding over Himalayan peaks, the aircraft carrier UsaDue south. John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House, and the statue of Christ the Redeemer crumbling loftier above Rio de Janeiro, St. Peter'due south Basilica in Rome is one of the show-stopping sights of the just-released blockbuster movie 2012.
The cardinals in the Sistine Chapel barely get to gasp earlier the toppled dome of St. Peter's starts rolling right over the faithful masses assembled in St. Peter's Square to pray for God'due south protection-and direct on toward the curious masses assembled in their movie seats to be scared out of their wits. The $200-million ballsy by "master of disaster" managing director Roland Emmerich promises nothing less than "a global cataclysm that brings an cease of the world."
While the doomsday scenario behind 2012 is supposedly based on a Mayan prophecy, a bulk of Americans, according to a 2004 Newsweek poll, believe in a no less fanciful and scary stop-time scenario that claims to be based on the Bible. 50-v percent of Americans polled by the news magazine said they believe in the so-called Rapture, the trigger result in an elaborate stop-of-the-world scheme that is propagated by fundamentalist and evangelical churches.
The Rapture features born-again believers suddenly going airborne and getting snatched upward by Jesus, while the remainder of the globe is "left backside." Those poor souls-including the vast majority of Catholics-volition and so perish in a bloodbath during a subsequent 7-yr period called the Tribulation.
Stitching together snippets of Bible verses from diverse books of the Old and New Testament, Rapture believers see this whole scheme as preordained by a God who appears as the ultimate Primary of Disaster. Unfortunately, this and then-called dispensationalist end-of-the-world theology is at present accepted past an astonishing number of people to be "what the Bible says" most the end times (see sidebar on page).
In truth, notwithstanding, what Pope John Paul II one time dismissed as "millenarian fantasies" distort non only the biblical message only also the traditional Christian understanding of the 2d Coming of Christ and the end times. Information technology is, as Barbara Rossing, the author of The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Promise in the Book of Revelation (Basic Books), aptly puts information technology, a "racket."
Waiting in joyful hope
Appearance is a practiced time to reverberate on what Catholic belief in the 2d Coming of Christ is all most. For the expectant waiting that the church building celebrates during the Appearance season is not but the waiting and training for the feast of Jesus' birth at Bethlehem but besides the continued waiting and preparation for Christ's futurity coming in glory.
"Advent . . . distills into a few short weeks the church'south perennial longing for Christ's coming in the flesh, in the end-time, and in every present moment of our lives," writes Felician Sister Judith K. Kubicki, a liturgical theologian at Fordham University, in The Living Light.
This year's gospel on the Start Sunday of Advent (Luke 21:25-28, 34-36) is ane of the scarier end-fourth dimension scripture passages. It warns that "people will die of fearfulness in anticipation of what is coming upon the world" before "they will come across the Son of Human coming in a deject with power and bully glory." Notwithstanding, the reading's main bulletin is that Christians should live faithful lives and "be vigilant at all times," promising that "your redemption is at hand."
The liturgies for the Sundays of Advent include further references to "the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. ane:four-eleven) and the coming of "a mighty savior" (Zeph. three:14-18a), and selection up the theme with prayers such equally: "At present we lookout man for the twenty-four hours, hoping that the salvation promised us volition be ours, when Christ our Lord will come again in his glory."
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But the Advent flavor just reinforces what Catholics already repeatedly confess during every celebration of the Mass. "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again," the congregation proclaims, while the Lord's Prayer pleads, "Thy kingdom come," and the Nicene Creed promises that Christ "will come again in celebrity to estimate the living and the dead" and has the true-blue await frontward to the "life of the world to come up."
Even if many Mass-goers don't think much about the meaning of these words, the expectant hope for Christ's Second Coming and for the ultimate redemption and transformation of the world-what theologians call eschatology, the "talk well-nigh the last things"-is at the core of the Good News Christians proclaim.
According to Irish Jesuit theologian Male parent Dermot Lane, president of the Mater Dei Plant in Dublin, such Christian talk about the terminal things "is ultimately almost 'hope seeking agreement.' "
And the object of Christian promise, explains Lane, the author of Keeping Hope Alive: Stirrings in Christian Theology (Wipf & Stock), is "Christ crucified and risen. In the low-cal of the death and Resurrection of Jesus equally the Christ, the Christian is 1 who dares to hope for the triumph of good over evil, of justice over injustice, and love over hatred in this life and eternity."
In striking contrast to the dispensationalist Rapture scenario-which is preoccupied with the question "What must we fearfulness?"-the expectation of the Second Coming is actually about the Christian response to the question, "What may we hope?"
Despite the inroads Rapture theology has made among American Catholics, most instinctively sympathize this hopeful orientation.
Asked how he imagines the 2d Coming, Father Al Humbrecht, pastor of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Knoxville, Tennessee, turns to what "we say in that little prayer between the 2 parts of the Our Father at Mass: 'We wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.' I expect the 2d Coming to be a joyful experience, not this horrendous thing that many of our fundamentalists are looking for."
That'southward why Teresa Ocampo, a parishioner at St. Frances of Rome Parish in Cicero, Illinois, says she fervently wishes that Jesus would come up soon: "I know I'm not a very skilful person sometimes, and so [in some ways] I don't really experience ready for his coming. But I really want the 2d Coming as soon as possible."
Every bit for what she imagines that would be like, Ocampo says she believes that she has experienced a foretaste of that ultimate happiness in the peace that washes over her sometimes when she spends a long time in prayer and adoration.
"It's like you lot experience God'south presence, and all of your body warms upwards, and you lot may even be crying because . . . it's something so wonderful," she says. "You lot feel just honey for your brothers and sisters. . . . There are no words to express information technology, it'due south just happiness."
The reason why the expectation for the 2nd Coming is essentially about hope and not fright is that Christians view it as the full realization of the promise of the kingdom of God that has already taken root with Jesus' first coming. This connexion is disquisitional to a proper understanding of Christian expectations for the end-fourth dimension.
"In Christ," Pope Benedict Xvi says in Spe Salvi, his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, "God has revealed himself. He has already communicated to us the 'substance' of things to come, and thus the expectation of God acquires a new certainty."
Attempting to draw that substance of things to come, the pope writes: "Information technology would be like plunging into the bounding main of infinite beloved, … life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of existence in which nosotros are but overwhelmed with joy."
The relationship between the first and Second Coming, explains Father Brian Daley, S.J., a theologian at the Academy of Notre Dame, "is one of promise and fulfillment. We believe that in Jesus the Word of God became mankind and lived in our human world and that that makes a permanent deviation to history."
Or, equally Lane puts information technology: "The finish of the world has appeared in embryo in the life and destiny of Jesus as the Christ."
Already and non yet
What and so does belief in the Second Coming mean for Christians living their religion in the 21st century?
One often-cited principle is that Christians continue to live in the tension between the "already" and the "not yet." Living in the "already" recognizes that because in Christ "the kingdom of God has come to you" already (Matt. 12:28, Luke 11:20), Christians are called to actively participate in building information technology, while living in the "not nonetheless" recognizes that its completion or fulfillment is beyond human capability.
It'south a kind of paradox, says Brian Robinette, a theologian at St. Louis Academy, that Christians anticipate the Second Coming as both a "gift from God" that has not withal come and a "summons" to already contribute to the edifice of the kingdom of God.
He adds that information technology is "something that comes from across ourselves, from God, and therefore is utterly gift, while on the other hand information technology is something that we actively participate in through liturgical do, ethical practice, through the living of a Christian life, and helping to bring healing to this world. And if one of those two poles is missing, and so you have a major baloney."
Honoring what theologians call the "eschatological reservation"-that ultimately the kingdom of God requires an human activity of God-prevents Christians from falling for radical political ideologies and utopian movements that want to establish a perfect gild only oftentimes end upwardly deteriorating into dehumanizing violence and oppression.
"Certainly," says Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi, "we cannot 'build' the kingdom of God by our own efforts. . . . The kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely because of this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to our hope."
On the other finish of the spectrum, Robinette says, beingness actively engaged in furthering the kingdom prevents Christians from falling for dispensationalist and other end-fourth dimension schemes in which all that's left to do is wait for a mid-air rescue operation before the world goes to hell in a handbasket.
Living in the tension betwixt the "already" and the "not yet" thus ways to pursue what German theologian Medard Kehl has described every bit the essence of Christian hope: to combine the "serenity of one who has been given a gift" with the "passion for the possible."
In his Tennessee parish, Humbrecht sees this as a call to "continue working to improve found the kingdom of God, to get it where it'south supposed to be. . . . We've got a lot of work to do to get it correct, and we need to keep working with the Lord and the grace that'southward been given us to be putting the world dorsum in order."
Urgent call
Peculiarly in the Bible Chugalug, where they are a distinct minority, Catholics frequently get fatigued into conversations near the Rapture.
Humbrecht, who gives presentations on fundamentalism, says such conversations more often than not follow the same design. "It starts out with that unproblematic question, 'Are you saved?' Pregnant, 'Practise yous believe literally in the Bible equally we practise?' That confuses a lot of Catholics. . . . It so goes on to the questioner'southward conclusion that yous are not saved and to the statement that the terminate time is soon and that you don't want to exist one of those people who will get punished at the end."
That kind of talk just makes Joy Hoelscher, an lxxx-twelvemonth-old parishioner at Holy Angels Parish in San Angelo, Texas, shake her head. "When people predict, 'Oh my, this and that is happening, that means that the finish of the world is coming,' I say, 'You don't know what you're talking almost.'
"You know Jesus said that no one knows the twenty-four hour period or the hour," Hoelscher says. "I don't worry most a cataclysmic thing happening. I just paddle along here, live each day in organized religion, practice the best I can, instruct other people along the way, and that'south simply how I live."
Daley of Notre Matriarch confirms that "the Cosmic Church building has always been hesitant . . . to read in scriptures clues that would help united states calculate when [the end of the world] would come."
Only while firmly rejecting the dispensationalist trend to read current events as signs of the stop times and predict that the finish is nearly, Catholics and mainline Protestants could withal acquire something from the urgency of the dispensationalist expectation of the Second Coming.
While "at that place is something wonderful" about the fashion Christians in liturgical churches celebrate sacramental worship in cycles, Rossing, who teaches New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, thinks that this cyclical nature at times hasn't created plenty of a sense of it leading somewhere.
"Nosotros need to reclaim an urgency about our mission," she says, "non in the sense of an urgency for Jesus to come back and kill all the bad guys, just an urgency to be sowing seeds of the kingdom of God, like in the New Testament communities. It's an urgency to love our neighbor, to feed the hungry, and to obey Jesus' commandments.
"Sometimes," she adds, "at that place is non enough burn down in us." Taking the Second Coming seriously in our own lives means, "Time is short, and we have to be nearly something of import."
That sense of the shortness of fourth dimension has been reinforced in recent decades by the appearance of the nuclear historic period and an sensation of the growing environmental crisis that threatens the very survival of planet Earth. Christians have been forced to reflect on the question whether human intervention could mayhap thwart God'south plans for the transformation and fulfillment of human history and all of creation.
"Eschatology in a nuclear age," says Robinette, "is unlike because at present nosotros can see very concretely the ways by which we tin can bring about our own demise." Then rather than speculating about the identity of the Antichrist alive today-every bit dispensationalists practice-he believes Christians ought to come to grips with the reality that "the enemy is within our own beating hearts, that we tin destroy ourselves through some catastrophic war with nuclear and biological weapons or through the slow strangling of our planet through ecological degradation."
According to Lane, the Irish theologian, that new situation requires a "new cosmic consciousness," which comes with a new responsibility. He explains, "One way of putting information technology-and it is quite accurate, theologically speaking-is this: Nix happens between heaven and earth without human cooperation.
"If you wait at the history of salvation, even down to the Incarnation, it would non have happened without the collaboration of Mary. And the ministry of Jesus would not accept taken off in the manner it did without the response of the disciples."
One way for humans to "cooperate" with the history of conservancy today is to safeguard the Christian hope for the Second Coming and for the life of the world to come up by doing everything possible to go along humanity from bringing virtually a premature and catastrophic end of the earth.
If Christians manage to practice that and participate in other means in building the kingdom of God, they can, in God's own time, look forward to seeing the promise of the Book of Revelation fulfilled:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new world. . . . And I heard a loud vocalisation from the throne saying, . . . 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more. . . .' And the one seated on the throne said, 'Meet I am making all things new' (Rev. 21:1-five).
Related:
Rapturing books: Read more on the end times
Debunking end-times myths
This article appeared in the December 2009 result of U.Due south. Catholic (Vol. 74, No. 12, page xx).
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Source: https://uscatholic.org/articles/200911/ready-or-not-here-i-come-again-catholics-on-the-second-coming/