| Advent 2 | | Date Created: Dec 03, 2005, 05:13 PM |
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The Epistle reading for this coming Sunday is 2 Peter 3:8-15a.
During the lead-up to Advent and Christmas, one of the difficulties of trying to blog on the Lectionary is just how relentlessly the readings follow the them of Jesus' second coming and judgement. We get it in the Gospel readings where the Church from the Apostles until a few years ago always regarded Jesus as predicting his 'second coming' to the writings of the apostles themselves, Paul writing to the Thessalonians and now 2 Peter writing about the creation and coming destruction of the world (both authors making use of the Jesus traditions about the theif in the night and so on).
I know it's trendy to think that we're supposed to be totally living in the now, but the biblical authors saw a real problem with that in some ways. We're to be living and acting in the now, certainly, but we're to do it because we are, in the words of 2 Peter, 'waiting for and hastening the day of the Lord'.
But how are we to 'hasten' it? What control do we have over it? I'm sure that I've been taught that this is a reference to verses like the saying of the Jesus as he sent out the 12 that they would not go to every town before the Lord comes, as if that meant that the Lord was going to hold back until all the foreign mission work is done and then *pop* there he'd be. I find this a little hard to believe. I think it's more likely to relate to Peter's Judaism and the idea that the Lord would come to work with his people when his people were already doing his work faithfully. Maybe that amounts to the same thing for some people.
Hastening the day of the Lord. That's quite a challenge. |
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