Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fourth Sunday of Advent 2025

‘I am coming soon’ is a phrase we heard three times in today’s second reading. Jesus’s promise to come at the end of time is one which gives much of scripture a lively freshness. Scripture is advental: we stand with it on the threshold of a new world – the world to which scripture points – which sometimes we can even see. Occasionally, in the history of Christianity, this expectation has boiled over into manic obsession. Despite Jesus’s own warnings in the gospel that we should be very careful of trying to predict the ‘when’ or ‘how’ of the Second Coming, quite a few people have had a go. At the turn of both millennia, during natural disaster such as plague, or during the violence of war, the temperature and chatter of nervous expectation have increased, sometimes to boiling point. Even in our own day, there are tiny pockets of Christians obsessed with ‘the end’ in very strange ways. 

But for most people – perhaps even most Western Christians – this side of Christianity is at best, confusing, and at worst, slightly embarrassing. Each Advent, we are given the opportunity, in prayer and practice, to school ourselves in the kind of hope which actually reveals Christ’s promise.

In the mid-1880s, the famous Anglican theologian Henry Parry Liddon preached a series of sermons in St Paul’s Cathedral on the coming of Christ.  In one of the most striking of these, he addresses those who mocked the importance of the doctrine of Christ’s second advent,

“The answer then to the question of the scoffers, ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’ is that it is where it was when he made it… For the Infinite Mind, there is no such thing as delay; nothing is postponed when all is present.”[1]

Liddon’s point is principally about the nature of God and the character of God’s assurance. Now, if this sounds rather philosophical, don’t panic! An assessment of the assurance of Christ’s coming in crudely linear terms is bound to fail because it imprisons a divine promise in categories which just cannot contain it. So, Liddon was making a metaphysical statement in answer to an empirical question. Christ’s coming is the object, not the subject. Where is this promise of his coming? It is where it was when he made it. God – and therefore God’s promises – is neither old nor new. Instead, God is eternal: older than the world’s deepest memory, fresher than your newest thought. God’s promises are not under the judgement of time in the usual way, imprisoned by the ticking of the passing years. In fact, because Christ’s resurrection has itself inaugurated the new age, that also has implications for how the Church understands time. The great Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben speaks of these centuries in-between the resurrection and Christ’s second coming as “the time which is left to us.” Part of what patterns this time – what gives it its quality – is a regular recollection of Christ’s promised consummation of all things. To think like this is not to fall into some form of anxious millenarian fantasy, rather the opposite. The character of Advent is about the character of God’s faithfulness, eternal, reliable, liberating; and these are qualities which can animate the character of time. How do we, as Christians, relate the day-to-day life of the Church to the promised Advent of Christ our redeemer and our judge? We do so, by paying attention to the quality of time that we live, and how we shape that time. 

In part, that is indeed about how we think about the future. Nearly thirty years ago, the sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry observed how, in contemporary cultural terms, “the future is dissolving into the present, that ‘we want the future now’ has become emblematic of a panic about the future… the future appears to dissolve and it no longer functions as something in which people appear to trust.” Lash and Urry were commenting on the kind of cultural immediacy which has lost all knowledge of the transcendent, not to mention any hope in it. Several decades on from their analysis, in what we have learned to call the ‘polycrisis’ of this second decade of the 21st century, things have got even worse. Wars where longed-for ceasefires are increasingly meaningless, where institutions once trusted to broker peace or offer hope to the hungry are denigrated or undermined, and where the hope of any kind of settled geopolitical consensus for a peaceful global future seems very far away indeed, all combine to make us slaves of the immediate, our brows too furrowed for our sight to be capable of any distance or imagination. 

The crisis is potentially as acute for the Church herself. Even longer ago than Scott and Urry’s cultural diagnosis, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz warned that the Church had uncritically bought into an evolutionary understanding of time, where imminent expectation had been swopped for constant expectation,

“Christianity’s potentials of hope have become too interiorized, de-temporalized and individualized. The absence of a temporally understood expectation has in the end weakened and degenerated discipleship. For radical discipleship is de facto not lived if ‘the time is not shortened’ and ‘the Lord does not soon return.’ Discipleship and imminent expectation belong inseparably together.”[2]

This is not an encouragement to millenarianism in disguise. Rather, in a provocative way, Metz is encouraging us to realise that the future offers resources for life now. How we live, as Christians, how we pray, as Christians, is supposed to anticipate Christ’s coming Kingdom. And in anticipating that Kingdom, in shaping ‘the time which is left to us’, we hasten its coming. ‘Do not stand there looking into heaven’, the apostles are told after Jesus’s Ascension! Instead, get on with the mission, live the life of faith, and share the eternal promise that Christ will come to complete his work as surely as he has begun it. The time is short because Christ’s promise of a final consummation has been made. That is ‘soon’, proximate, tangible, because all history now unfolds in the light of that promise. 

There has been a lot of noise in some parts of the media this year about putting Christ ‘back into Christmas.’ In some instances, this has been allied to narratives about British culture which are certainly not theological, which seek to exclude rather than to embrace, and which take delight in setting parts of our society up against each other. Various Christian organizations have organized messaging to counter some of these presumptions. One reads, ‘Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, love your enemies, and go to Mass.’ Each of these basic Christian moves enriches the quality of the time in which we live. Each of these basic Christian moves draws its energy from a vision of the end. Whenever we engage in this kind of straightforward Christian activity, we anticipate Christ’s coming, during this ‘time that is left to us.’ And in anticipating, we hasten; called to be active participants unveiling the life of the world to come. 

For this, as for all else, we know that we are entirely reliant on Christ. In our own strength, we will flounder, divide, isolate, gather only to ourselves. And so we need Advent to remind us of that great, ongoing, prayer of the Church, as fundamental as her breathing, for Christ to come and make us whole; that the one who formed us out of the dust of the earth might yet finally gather and reshape us, schooling us through the practices and teachings he has given us, and allowing us to glimpse the final end as a result. When we live the Christian life, we stand on the edge of both worlds, confident that the Lord’s final victory of love will lose nothing that he has willed and made. 

‘Surely, I am coming soon.’

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.