Monday, December 18, 2006
Looking forward
When I was at school our RE teacher was always late to lessons and often never turned up at all. The longer we waited for him to come, the wilder behaviour in the classroom became. (Ideal preparation for being a vicar!)
Two thousand years ago, Jesus said that he was going to return one day to establish perfect order in the world. Unsurprisingly, by now behaviour in the classroom is pretty wild.
How can we take this seriously today? And if not this, why should we believe anything that Jesus says?
As you read this there are barely three weeks until Christmas Day and there is an enormous amount still to do to get ready. Those three weeks are going to disappear in a flash. But for any children you may know, every hour is going to seem like an eternity as they wait for the great day. The experience of time is very different depending on your perspective. Rather like children waiting for Christmas, the first Christians were already beginning to get impatient before the end of the first century, and others were giving them a hard time for it, saying, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?”
But God’s perspective on the timing of Jesus’ return is somewhat different: ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.’ So perhaps a better question is not ‘When will it be?’ but ‘Am I ready for it?’ How do we know if we are ready for that day?
The first step is by asking ourselves, ‘Am I looking forward to standing in front of the One who knows everything I have ever done or said or thought?’ And, if not, ‘Have I thought much about why He came the first time?’
Advent is a great time to reflect on these things: to think about what there is to do to get ready, all there is to enjoy as we wait, and all there is to look forward to when the Great Day comes.
With best wishes for Advent and Christmas,
Tim Ling Vicar, St. Swithun’s Church Bathford
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.