Matt 24

At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.

Is it possible for the great historical mainline of Christianity to reclaim the apocalypse? We have so de-mythologised the content of the Gospels that it now seems to belong to the fundamentalists and right wing nut jobs. We are so educated and wed to modern historiography that we consign the apocalypse, and indeed most unmediated revelation, to the bin of crackpots and idiots. Bugger me, we can be arrogant sometimes!

I wonder whether the Church’s centrality in Christendom for so many centuries has contributed to our failure to embrace the rough edges of the Gospel? Having elegant, systematic notions of God, where consistency and beauty are paramount means that the urgency and immediacy and inelegance of the good news has been pared away. The existentialists (perhaps beginning as early as Kierkegaard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard?) began to show that forever seeking the ‘essence’ of reality could only ever be an ivory tower enterprise.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we sit with our numeracy tables and timelines calculating the day or the hour or the order of things come judgement time. I think Tim LaHaye (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Lahaye) is a bit of a dick. Yet there is an unsubtle, urgent, chaotic, unsettling, disturbing and amazingly hopeful thing about the second coming. There is something humbling and uplifting about the fact that the future of history has been placed in Christ’s hands. As my brother Murray quotes, “Jesus is coming, look busy!”