End of the World? Keep Calm and Love your Neighbour

Advent Sunday Year A, 2025
Isaiah 2.1-5; Romans 13.11-14; Matthew 24.36-44

The advent or arrival of kings and emperors in the far-flung outposts of their domain was a recognisable feature of life back in the glory-days of Rome. Rulers who seldom strayed from their luxurious capitals (‘drinking wine and eating cheese and catching some rays, you know?’) would set off in splendour to less significant cities to impose order, dispense justice and levy taxes, all in a great flourish of pomp and military might. When the Church came to find an image for Christ’s anticipated return to earth in the End-Times, this same idea of an advent, though transposed to a very different sort of ruler, was still a helpful metaphor. Thus Christians are schooled in Scripture and in the Church to be continuously ready for Christ’s coming, ‘living in the light of God’, as the prophet Isaiah puts it; or, as Saint Paul instructs the Romans, putting on ‘the armour of light’ and avoiding the harmful passions (drunkenness, debauchery, jealous quarrels) that distract so easily from an individual’s focus on Christ.

This idea of a continuous alignment of one’s will to the things of God is very different from a sense of continually having to be on one’s best behaviour. Being committed to Christ and the Kingdom of God is to have made the firm and irrevocable decision (akin to a monastic profession) to fashion one’s whole life in accordance with the Gospel – to ‘live in the light, rather than be an occasional (or even frequent) visitor.

The doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming, and the conclusive establishment God’s Kingdom on earth, with judgement and the renewal of all things, is fundamental to Christian teaching for two main reasons. Firstly, we see the victory of injustice and the defeat of goodness so often that we are left asking, with the Psalmist, ‘How long, O Lord, will the enemy triumph? How long will you forget us? For ever?’ So vast is the gap between what is and what should surely be the case, that we conclude that only God can possibly put right all that has gone amiss.

Secondly, we focus on the coming Kingdom because Jesus does. The Bible refers to the ‘Kingdom of God’ 122 times, ninety-nine of them in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke; with ninety of these coming directly from the mouth of Jesus. The Kingdom is indelibly part of his teaching, so it is unavoidably part of our belief.

It is, furthermore, an outworking of all that we believe about the nature of God and the history of Jesus. As God is creator of all, so too we believe that God is re-creator of all, reviving, restoring and renewing all that becomes tarnished and distorted by our poor exercise of free will. This making of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ in the End-Times, keenly anticipated in Revelation 21, is consistent with all that we have learned about God. Christ’s own resurrection is a foreshadowing of the new life to be made available to us all; his ascension to the Father’s right hand prefigures the eternal reign inaugurated at the Second Coming; while the life of the Church today, fuelled by the Holy Spirit, wonderfully anticipates the Kingdom, showing us at its best a little of what heaven has in store.

The Second Coming, and the Judgement it brings, is a reminder that we humans – we creatures – are bound to one another with hoops of steel. It is this that gives us our theological bearings and our moral compass. Our Christian Communion in the Spirit, and in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, reminds us that we will remain united with each other as recipients of God’s eternal new life. We we are not like the followers of Plato, neatly individual souls looking to carry on immortally and alone in an ideal spiritual realm. But neither are we like the Marxists and Darwinians who believe only in the transformation of an entire society or species.

The Christian hope is that the resurrection of the body will be both corporate and individual, with each of us known to God by name, but forming part of the whole People of God, inhabiting the restored landscape of heaven-and-earth for all eternity.

It’s not something we can easily talk about. Luther reminds us that we know as much of the world-to-come as a unborn baby knows of this world, while St Paul finds analogies in the planting of seeds and the flowers that eventually grow from them (I Corinthians 15.35-40). Knowing only that we know nothing for sure, Matthew and Luke tell us that we are like the people in the days of Noah who partied on in blissful, even wilful ignorance of the coming Flood, until their soggy ending finally came.

Our obligation is to be prepared and to do better, not worrying about when all this might be, but by immersing ourselves in the eternal business of loving God and loving our neighbour. As the theologian David Fergusson has put it, ‘amidst the presence of injustice, suffering and death, Christian faith until the end of time must take the form of hope for the future. [Such hope is] properly expressed not in unwarranted speculation but in prayer, praise, and Christian service.’