Jesus’s alternative to fear
Advent 1A  |  Matthew 24:36-44

Noah, Rapture, “But about that day and hour no one knows” . . . apocalyptic talk of flooding and separating, the Lord coming here and a thief breaking in . . . there is a lot hitting us today and we should take a breath and consider for a second what is all happening here.

Jesus was leaving the Temple. Holy Week. His disciples were oohing and ahhing over the grandeur of this incredible human achievement to glorify God. And Jesus tells them that it will be destroyed. That a time will come when all things will change. It must be a terrifying moment for them. And one of the things he does here, too, is tell them to notice what is happening. In the verses right before this one, he says: “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near” (Matthew 24:32). Just like a farmer can smell the rain coming, you can tell when junk is about to get real.

Pay attention, in other words. Keep your wits about you. This is a kind of urgency Jesus evokes. A sort of necessary attention. But this isn’t the whole lesson. In fact, he seems to shift here and take it in the opposite direction. “But about that day and hour no one knows”. So . . . predict the unpredictable? 

Live Life

Notice what is happening, see how things are changing, and prepare for it. But what that preparation looks like is different. This isn’t survivalist stuff. We aren’t doomsday prepping here and planning for the worst, thinking the worst, building up the worst with our selfish hoarding and defeatist attitudes. This isn’t about isolation and canned goods, friends. 

Jesus offers an odd comparison. Noah. Be like him. And this comparison is odd enough to confuse some people right out of the point. Which we’ll get into in a second. But first, stick with me. Preparation, seeing the signs, take it all seriously. Like Noah. Who listened to God, built the arc, did the work, protected the animals, his family, and kept a righteous mind through the end of the world. He lived.

The throughline is living. Living as we are called to live while others are losing their minds. While the world has gone crazy. Live a life of love. 

Hear it? The message to keep at it. You know the way. Jesus has taught you. Keep following when the world goes crazy.

The Mistake

Where some have gone wrong with this passage is losing touch with the throughline. Letting go, drifting away, the current takes them in a different direction. They start thinking about Noah, the deluge, the destruction of the world and are drawn to seeing this as God saving Noah from destruction — separation. Which it is. And like Jesus will speak of in chapter 25, the judgement and separation of sheep and goats, of those who serve and those who don’t.

This different line of thinking led to a nineteenth century theological development we know as the rapture: the belief that God will bring the good people from the earth and sweep them up to heaven for all eternity. And the rest will be left on the earth to be annihilated in a total destruction of reality. This is a great mistake — it reads the text completely backwards.

Noah is not swept away from the earth, he is preserved on the earth. And those that are taken up, separated in this moment that these folk call the rapture, are the proverbial goats removed from the sheep. We want to be left behind, folks. God’s setting things right is a restoration of justice here.

Back to the Future

Let’s bring our original calling back in: we live through the apocalypse. We keep at it. Even when we’re scared. When things look bleak. The darkness grows. We keep loving our neighbors. Proclaiming the Good News of Christ crucified and risen. And meeting Jesus on the streets, in the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. 

The dark motifs are unsettling and confuse us. They distract us. But this is why we read the gospels over and over and learn the story they tell together. 

One of my favorite throughlines in the gospel is this: Jesus calls these ordinary people, fishermen, a doctor, a tax collector, people from all walks of life. Just not the Torah scholars — the ones trained from adolescence. The ones born into the sect that is expected to go to school, to train, to become this thing they might not be any good at. Jesus wanted to make regular people into disciples. 

He drew these people close and he shared his power with them: to heal and exorcize demons. They proclaimed the Good News and did wondrous deeds. And everything is amazing. For a time. When everything felt good. When everything felt easy. That’s when Jesus raised the stakes. When Jesus was challenged by the Pharisees. And Jesus told them that he was going to be crucified. He disappeared up a mountain for a day with three disciples.

When things were easy, the disciples followed Jesus easily. When things got hard, they fell apart. The gospel story shows us that they knew how to do it. They just lost their heads. That’s why it fell apart. Not because it got hard, but because they stopped doing the work when it got hard.

Now, Jesus is giving his disciples a chance to see their own experience differently. To not be taken up by the destruction of everything they hold dear and separated from the love of God by hatred and fear and rejection of the core tenants of Jesus’s Way of Love. These are the stakes. What’s on offer.

We can choose to live.

This is the story of Jesus’s apocalyptic talk. This is where he will go over the next chapter, offering dark parables which twist our expectations. We need to protect the most precious part of our lives: the will to love. It is more precious than anything we own. More precious than our homes, our culture, our ways of life. It is the thing we are commanded to do and is the heart of the gospel and God’s very substance: love. If we don’t do that, then what are we even doing here?

It feels like an alternative, like a different path from the rest of the world. It is, of course. And why Jesus tells us that others will fear it and families will divide over it. Because they would rather preserve life than preserve love. They would sacrifice the Way of Love to preserve their way of life: possessions, wealth, family, and lifestyle. Power, too. Place. Sense of superiority. All of it over love.

Jesus was speaking to people who sacrificed the Way of Love to go to war with Rome, who were further brutalized by oppression. And we could be in a similar danger of hearing this as a lesson of accepting oppression rather than opposing it. But this, friends, is again forgetting the lessons, losing touch with the throughline. Not fight vs. flight, but a third way. Standing up in Jesus’s Way of Love in light of the dark moment.

It is loving when the world tries to pull the hate out of us. 

It is hoping when the world tries to make us give up.

And giving when the world tries to get us to hoard what we’ve got. Fearing there is no future, no hope, no love to trust, to stake our future upon. To give everything away. Not in love, but fear.

Righteous living is the alternative.

To giving up. Giving in. We can live through this time with gratitude for all that God is doing, even when it looks dark. Giving back! Loving neighbors! Joyously!

We must look for the good when evil forces would blind us, confuse us with fear. It’s there. In the gift-giving and the pledging and the serving and the singing and playing and creating and the talking and the crying and all of the ways we show up for one another. 

This morning, someone is dying. Someone is grieving. Someone is caring for them, comforting them. And we are praying. And love is there with them, around them, and here, with us, around us. 

Love is our work. It is our living. Our way. It is the ground of our being. Our everything. We don’t trade that in for fear. For hatred. For retaliation and abuse. To trade good for evil, joy for hatred and pain. That is the world’s worst transaction. Friends, we mustn’t be swindled, conned by someone who doesn’t even know what love is! Who’d trade it for a bag of beans.

We walk in love as God loves us. And that is what it means to live. To let go of fear and hatred and be people of light. People of hope. People of love.

And we give generously to this cause so we might all do the same. That we can continue to encourage one another, to live, to be, to love. Here. Always. To the end of our days. And so others can keep the love going. To the end of their days. And beyond. For everything we give. For love we give. Everything for love.