Why talk of the Return of Jesus Christ is so annoying…

Out there, in the pubs, at work, in the crowd cheering on Lionesses, or firefighters extinguishing a blaze, or politicians trying to extract some respect from the general population, or nurses knee-deep in people’s suffering and black humour…there is a faint echo, a ‘knowing’, still, that the Bible says something about Jesus coming back, the end of the world, judgement and so on.

In some churches, believers spend an inordinate amount of time with intricate calculus, trigonometry and guess work wondering if the wars and rumours of wars herald His return, or Climate change, or whether Putin, Trump, Macron, Trudeau, or the church down the road, is the Antichrist. (It’s a certain bet…Trudeau is my front runner!)

It’s a joke.

Firstly, because any talk about the return of Jesus to the vast majority who are really not sure about the first-century accounts of Jesus of Nazareth has to be a joke. Most of the population even in ‘Christian’ England are held in the dark, with few - including ordained priests and ministers - who can argue the case that the historical evidence for his first coming is more solid than for the existence of Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar.

But really, it’s also a joke in church. And annoying. In church, because Jesus said ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’, we can, with our Western mindset…which works, amongst other things, on a linear timescale and tends towards the analytical, verifiable, and rational, and dismisses subjective, intuitive, romantic thinking…go completely off-beam.

My friend Chris Welch has got a little closer, I feel, with his statement below.

A little preamble would help before the quote. ‘Church’ should be the place of communion – to use the Song of Solomon analogy – between the Beloved (Jesus) and His bride-to-be (the Church). It’s a romance. As David Pawson once said, ‘The whole of the Bible is the story of a Father looking for a bride for his Son’.

That’s why walking into a church service where there’s a musty feeling of life having departed is so utterly wrong and, rightly, the butt of jokes from Dave Allen (to show my age), Monty Python, and many others. When church meets, it’s a ‘date’. Or should be. The worship is personal. Whether people are waving their hands, dancing, shouting or sitting quietly and reverently – if it’s genuine – there’s stuff going on at the heart level that is invisible, private, and collective at the same time. It’s communion. Not the symbols of bread and wine, but the real ‘communion’ between the ‘Beloved’ and ‘His bride to be’ that, occasionally, we sometimes experience when we’re truly in tune with someone else.

The whole Bible is the story of a Father looking for a bride for his Son

Here's Chris’s quote.

“One day Jesus (enjoying church, His bride-to-be) forgets He’s not in heaven – our fellowship gets so glorious. There He is…in our midst…and forgets to go home”

That’s more like it. If we tend to go where we’re invited, made to feel welcome, longed for even…how much more must the Father be hanging on, waiting for the bride to make herself ready, as the bible says, before the day has come.

In the meantime, we are baptised in a strange society that turns out in droves to watch Jesus blockbusters. Millions, it seems, still want it to be true. There is high regard, love even, for Jesus and the way he welcomed the crowds and opposed the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But in England, despite its 60,000 CofE church buildings and countless other churches, such longings mixed with an endemic ignorance concerning the strong evidence for the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, continue to leave the same millions in the dark.

I know. I was brought up to go to church. But no one, including the Vicar, offered any evidence for the existence of Jesus or the accuracy of the New Testament, or even perceived that this was required. By the time I reached my teens, Jesus had been relegated, in my mind, to join the ranks of other wonderful fictional characters such as Santa Claus, the Pied Piper of Hamlin, or Mary Poppins. And yet a residual fascination with the claims of the New Testament remained. However, once I had met a few people who could show me extensive evidence for the existence of Jesus, the accuracy of the New Testament, and compelling contemporary evidence of miracles, I was forced to re-evaluate. Eventually, I capitulated and moved house, from agnosticism to belief.

One day Jesus (enjoying church, His bride-to-be) forgets He’s not in heaven – our fellowship gets so glorious. There He is…in our midst…and forgets to go home

Yes, Jesus is coming back to judge the living and the dead as the Creed goes. But look again at Jesus, as written in the New Testament, and how he was with people. How he loved. How he enjoyed being amongst the people. Hardly austere. It may seem strange to think of Jesus as the Beloved and the church as his bride-to-be, but that’s what the bible tells us.

The whole of history is heading towards a Wedding; the ‘wedding feast of the Lamb’ to fully indulge in the mixed metaphors the bible itself uses to describe the consummation of all things.

Really, the big question is whether we want to be there. We’re all invited. All loved. But, like the early disciples, we have to ‘leave our nets’ and follow Him, and will if we love Him in return. We have to abandon ourselves, how we define ourselves, how we think the world is run, or how we run our lives, and lay it all down. All of it. Like brides in many Christian cultures, we give up our names, to be included in His name. Christians. Little Christs. That’s what it means.

To be one with Christ. To be in eternal, perpetual communion with Him. That’s church. And that’s what the second coming of Christ is about, He’s coming for His bride.