Advent means “coming”. Thus, the season of the Church
Year that we are in right now is all about looking back to the first coming of
Christ two thousand years ago and
looking forward to the Second Coming of Christ, whenever that may happen.
It seems very appropriate to me then, that in reading
through the Bible this year, we happen to come now to a reading of 1 and 2
Thessalonians, for in these letters there is a strong focus on the end times
and the Second Coming of Christ in particular. In this regard, I like what C.
S. Lewis had to say in his essay entitled, The
World’s Last Night….
The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as
we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every
year in our lives Donne’s question “What if this present were the world’s last
night?” is equally relevant.
Sometimes this question has been pressed upon our minds
with the purpose of exciting fear. I do not think that is its right use. I am,
indeed, far from agreeing with those who think all religious fear barbarous and
degrading and demand that it should be banished from the spiritual life. Perfect
love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things—ignorance,
alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we
should all advance to that perfection of life in which we shall fear no longer;
but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should
allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear. The objection to any attempt at
perpetual trepidation about the Second Coming is, in my view, quite a different
one: namely, that it will certainly not succeed. Fear is an emotion: and it is
quite impossible—even physically impossible—to maintain any emotion for very
long. A perpetual excitement of hope about the Second Coming is impossible for
the same reason. Crisis-feeling of any sort is essentially transitory. Feelings
come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they cannot be
our regular spiritual diet….
What is important is not that we should always fear (or
hope) about the End but that we should always remember, always take it into
account….
I do not find that pictures of physical catastrophe—that
sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll—help one so much as
the naked idea of Judgment. We cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train
ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing
(or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams
in upon it; that light which is so different from the light of this world—and
yet, even now, we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women
sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress
will look by daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our
souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of
the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light
will last longer.
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