Fulfillment

GN 17:3-9

PS 105:4-5, 6-7, 8-9

JN 8:51-59

In one of my favorite Terry Pratchett novels, Hogfather, which is a glorious send-up of Christmas in all of its cruelties as well as its hope and kindness, a character insists rather stridently that the hope of presents is better than presents themselves.  He makes a rather compelling case that, say, the polished toy horse in the store window will likely break into pieces with a little rough riding.  Or that the imagination of just a little bit better tastes sweeter than objectively more things.

Perhaps that's what Jesus is up against.

Think about it: how many people will be genuinely psyched about the Second Coming?  Not the least disappointed that their SXSW tickets are now invalid?  Or that the thing they've been imagining is about to appear -- and inevitably be different in ways both trivial and important from what you expected?

How many people are going to be furious when the Rapture (which isn't in the Bible, incidentally) is "skipped" and they didn't get to lord it over everyone not worthy yet?  Or when people are saved who once hurt them in the Final Judgment.

We humans build up fantasies about with the messiah will be or the Second Coming will be.  That's what makes us so ungrateful in the face of miracles.

There are lot of reasons that I think it's dangerous to sit around envisioning the apopcalypse as often as our society does.  And I'm certainly not immune.  I love the book World War Z  and I think that You, Me, and the Apocalypse is a gift to the television world from a very zany aunt.  And I've made drastically unrealistic collapse-of-society escape plans.

But setting aside the nihilistic, destructive tendencies that it encourages (why work hard to save the planet when we're going to blow ourselves up within the century anyway?) or the backwards religious motivations it provides (See my previous post) but on a both practical and politic level -- we don't see the whole picture.  We're going to get it wrong.  We're going to misunderstand very key elements.

We're going to dismiss the messiah when He appears, metaphorically.  In some new way.  We're going to miss Him and His message if we get too in our heads guessing -- deciding really, in all our finite wisdom -- what that message will be.  How He will look when He appears.

We're going to fall for the fake that's doing a better impression of how we thought things would go down.  Rather than staying open and waiting for God to reveal His actual plan.

And perhaps we'll even be mad enough about the fact that we were wrong to pick up stones again.