Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30
For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night=
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Before I sat down to plan my sermon for this morning, I thought I would want to say something optimistic and cheerful at a time when we were locked down for a second time, and locked out of our church for a second time. Then I looked at the readings for the day and found I had to preach on texts about the Second Coming, and about a worthless slave being thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Oh dear, I thought to myself.
So I had a wee pray about it and I realised that I didn’t want to be cheerful and optimistic at all. I wanted to be hopeful in this new lockdown, which is something quite different. Hope is not optimism; it does not depend on taking a positive spin on the facts; nor is hope good cheer, for hope is the most powerful tool we have for carrying us through the times when we are at our bleakest. Real hope doesn’t come from talking about posies and fluffy bunny rabbits. One of the things that most often renews our hope is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well. Real hope must be capable of enduring the worst that the world and humankind can throw at it, for the worst will inevitably be thrown at it at some point. Hope outlasts optimism and good cheer, global depressions and planetary pandemics; along with faith and love it will endure unto eternity. Hope will survive the end of the world.
We associate the Second Coming with the end of the world. We hear and read a lot about the end of the world a lot at the moment, or at least the end of the world we knew on New Year’s Day 2020. At moments we must all have lapsed into depression that this new abnormal will never end, that we will never again share the peace in church, that we’ll never again have a large group of friends round for a drink, that we’ll never lose the terror that we’ll wake up one morning not being able to smell the coffee, with a high temperature and a dry persistent cough. We lock down full of fear as the November days grow rapidly shorter and darker, and fear that the world has indeed ended, and we’re in a sort of hell. Then we learn the news about the vaccine trial and we wonder if we dare hope that there will again come a time when we sing hymns together and find ourselves chatting to a stranger in a pub who becomes a new friend and hug our loved ones without fear.
This morning’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, however, does not write about the end of the world, but the coming of the day of the Lord. This passage is often associated in the popular Christian imagination with the end times thanks to some very shaky theology from as recently as the 19th Century. Later there was a 1970s American film called A Thief in The Night, a second rate B-movie with a bit of Jesus thrown in, which was very influential in fundamentalist Protestant circles. In it, a lady wakes up to find that her husband and millions of other real Christians have been taken to heaven, leaving her and other fake Christians behind with the unbelievers under the jackboot of an oppressive world government run by the UN which wants to force her to have the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and damn her for all eternity! All of this got a high budget, Internet-era, makeover with the Left Behind series of books and films which were, if anything, even worse: a living reminder that while good taste can’t be bought, bad taste can.
In not wanting to be associated with this sort of crackpottery, there is a temptation to domesticate this passage and make it nice and cosy for a forward-thinking, open-minded, rational group of people like us at St John’s. Too often it can be reduced to a metaphorical meditation on the inevitable and repeated passing of the things that we had previously taken for granted in life, the crushing of our certainties. And as Scripture is too holy and too glorious to be reduced to simple single meanings, perhaps that is part of why God inspired it to be written. But let us not pretend that St Paul was enduring beatings, imprisonment, riots, and mobs for what he believed to be a metaphor, a metaphor that in any case has the perfume of late-20th California rather than mid-1st Century Macedonia. Let us also not be hasty to reduce its powerful affirmation of the right Christ holds, given to Him by the Father, to judge our world; to judge its greed and its wars and its environmental despoliation. Christ also holds the right to judge us, and the darkness that each of us knows lurks in the corners of our hearts and our lives, where we’d prefer to forget about it. This is a difficult and judging passage, prophesying a time when Jesus Christ will return to judge the world.
This has been so often presented to us as a moment of fear that we forget that the reign of Jesus Christ must be a time of hope, a time when justice is finally established. The contemporary Russian Orthodox theologian Hilarion Alfeyev writes that when he first travelled to Western countries as a postgraduate student in the 1990s, he was surprised at how the Second Coming was presented as a fearful event; for the Orthodox, I believe quite rightly, argue instead that it will be the moment when hope is finally consummated, when as promised in the Scriptures a truly just era for humanity will be fulfilled. Without judgement there can be no true justice; will God simply tell the persecuted and victimised to dry their eyes and get on with singing His praises? But God’s judgement will be both just and merciful beyond the human capacity for those virtues. As St Paul writes here, God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation through our Lord Jesus.
And what of our poor supposedly worthless slave with the one talent, thrown into the darkness? Where is hope here? Let us remember that his mistake in this parable wasn’t that he got things wrong but that he didn’t even try. There is no condemnation here for getting things wrong, and certainly none for having little talent in the first place. If we allow the Master to stand for God – the conventional reading although one sometimes challenged – we only need to fear God if we are so paralysed with fear that we don’t even try to serve Him as we ought. As you seek to serve Christ there is nothing to be lost, not in eternal terms, in having a go, taking a risk, sticking your neck out for your Lord and Saviour.
I wish the Parable of the Talents were more rationally defensible in terms of progressive early 21st Century values, that it didn’t have the least able slave, quite justified in his fear of the harsh master, being cast out at the end. But in our rather smug and self-satisfied culture, we do need to allow ourselves to be open to be judged by even the most difficult passages of Scripture. As I have already said this morning, it is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well that we renew our hope: that includes facing the problematic parts of Scripture. I think the hope here lies in this, that we can only lose if we don’t bother to try, and if we invest even the littlest and meanest talents we have for God, He will ensure that we are rewarded many times over.
In this time of plague and lockdown, but also of tentative and dizzying hope of a vaccine, stay safe, love and forgive both others and yourself, and stay firm in the hope that nothing lasts for ever except for faith, love, and hope itself.
Will you see the Lord coming again like a thief in the night? Probably not; the people who’ve claimed it was just around the corner have been wrong for two thousand years and could easily be for twenty thousand years more. But instead of fearing that you might, or dismissing the whole idea as primitive nonsense, pray instead that you might live to see that hopeful day when Our Lord returns to finally establish justice on this Earth.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
