It’s easy to get caught up in the rhetoric which surrounds us…easy to invest in social and political positions which don’t entirely mesh with our religious commitments. It’s easy, too, to place our daily needs above the needs of our spirits, to make concessions which we wouldn’t make standing before Christ, to choose a compromised position which makes all momentarily feel simpler.
The manifestations of choosing the easy way are many, and we’re certainly all guilty of it at points. Perhaps we sit on the sidelines of fights for social and economic justice, finding the actions which activists take too idealistic, too stringent to fold easily into our own lives. Perhaps we participate in political polemics which villainize some in ways which claim to protect the rights of others. Perhaps we stand silently by while others are hurt, or face derision, or tread through “dark nights of the soul.”
After all, what does it matter if some face temporary tribulations, or if systems are unfair, or if some are still marginalized, or if skirmishes occur in distant corners of the globe; what ultimate significance do such things carry if we’re all promised heaven in the end? What more can be asked of us than that we do our best to behave well in an imperfect world?
This week’s readings shun such middling positions. They all hold precious the notion of a coming, perfected kingdom of God, in which injustices will surely be done away with, in which people will live in peace and harmony, but they far from suggest that we should pencil that unknown date into our calendars as, simultaneously, the day on which we ought to begin behaving in a godly manner.
Heaven doesn’t abrogate now; it doesn’t render all of the ills of this age insignificant. And we’re assured that sitting back and waiting to be delivered, rather than doing the work of preparing God’s way now, would prove a mistake in the end: we leave our spiritual “homes” unlocked to moral intrusion if we opt to anticipate forever rather than involving ourselves with improving now. This is articulated best in Matthew’s famous verses, which inform us that “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into; therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Matthew 24:43-44).
What does Matthew mean by the imagery of the thief in the night? The parallel to Jesus, coming as the Son of Man, seems to be that we can’t anticipate a “when” for his arrival, so safeguarding selectively doesn’t work. What’s required is moral diligence—not even anticipating Jesus’s return as imminent and therefore something we should bend our lives to, but anticipating it as a reality, as something that began to be realized at the moment of his assumption. The imperatives of the gospels aren’t distant imperatives; they’re required of us now. We already have to gird ourselves against invaders who would tell us that our immediate needs are more important. Our primary “immediate need” is to be Christ-like, to work toward realizing improved situations now.
We can derive suggestions from our readings for living in a way that mimics the heavenly realm. Isaiah tells us that when God’s house is built, all nations will stream towards it; that globally, all peoples will bend their ears toward God and let the divine dictates become their own, and that they’ll “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” so that all instruments which aided discord among them will become instruments of peace and mutual flourishing (Isaiah 2:4). If this is NOT simply an ideal to be waited for, we can assume the work of realizing it now. We can stop pretending nationality is a definitive human quality; we can treat people as people, and forego anger in favor of fidelity, mutual care and kindness, even intimacy. In the States, doing so would have immediate implications upon how we treat our immigrant communities; abroad, it would require of us greater vocality when people are oppressed by other people. Difficult work, certainly, but if we read the Bible as truth: godly work.
The 122nd Psalm speaks of the whole community—by which we can presume the psalmist means Israelites alone, or read Christianity into that grouping, or, more pertinently, read “our” as inclusive of all—standing at the city gates and doing good. This may be intentionally vague; good encompasses so much in God’s law. But what is certain is that all are involved, the work does not fall upon a select few, and the anticipated kingdom isn’t considered complete without the full participation of this enigmatic community. They should “give thanks to the name of God,” they should “pray for peace” and seek justice—and that ‘they’ is Jerusalem, and if we take ourselves to participate in Jerusalem, that ‘they’ becomes ‘us’ (Psalm 122:4, 6, 5). We are they who must “seek [God’s] good” (Psalm 122:9); by doing so, we begin to realize the eventual participation of all.
Romans speaks of coming into godly living in metaphors of arising from a deep sleep—as if we’re only fully conscious, only fully alive and active, when we do the work which God requires, love in the ways God asks us to love, work in the ways God asks us to work: “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (Romans 13:13). Paul requires, in this letter, that we abandon fleshly notions. This would require shelving and forgetting all preoccupations which tell us that we don’t have to do what is right YET—that we don’t have to fight for the rights of others today, that working on behalf of peace and justice is not work we have to do right now. Romans assures us that “salvation is nearer to us” when we forget the things which we allow to become more important than God, and God’s word, and instead put God first (Romans 13:11).
We don’t want to risk sleeping through the realization of all of God’s dreams and anticipations for us; we don’t want to fail to become the people God formed us to be because we’re too busy doing our stuff, and are not quite ready, in the meantime, to do the hard work of being Christians, of being fully “Christ-like.” If we wait, we leave the door untended; we invite thievery into our hearts without, maybe, being conscious of the invitation. We risk losing access to, or perspective of, what is good by choosing to put off “good” until a later date.
The work we have to do, then, is that of diligently watching the “door”—of making sure that sin isn’t allowed to permeate the world we hope to make God’s home. Sin cannot enter in if we refuse to sit idly by while things are widely done which we know to defy God’s will. We’re to clothe and feed the needy—let’s begin by doing that now. We’re to welcome foreigners among us—let’s extend that invitation immediately. We’re to view “us” as a term which excludes none—let’s stop pretending that Christianity is exclusive, that it can be isolated either among pockets of people or in select activities (at designated times) in our lives. Being Christian means assuming tremendous responsibilities—let’s not wait to do that work.
We should be ready for heaven when it comes, and not because we’ve spent our lives dreaming of it. Rather, we should be ready for heaven when it comes because we’ve spent our whole lives making heaven real among us, bringing it to light by the deeds that we do and through the love that we offer to all. Heaven should feel like home because we’ve lived it.
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