NOTES for Mat 24:42-51

Of course, we believe in the Lord's Second Coming. We believe that He will come in power and glory, victorious over all evil, bringing the history of this world to an end and opening the gates to a new mode of being, with a new earth and a new heaven. And of course, we understand that we are not given to know when this will happen. Christians have believed and waited for two thousand years already, and the Second Coming has still not occurred. It may well not happen in our lifetime either!

But what does that actually change in our lives? That is what Jesus' parable is about. A good servant is one who always works well, for whom the master is always near. But is this not also true for us? Christ did not go away completely; He remained with us. Is He not our King and God? Is He not the victor over our evil? Do we not feel His gracious power? Was our life not entirely renewed when He entered it?

Thus, for us who believe in Him, there is no fundamental difference between the First and the Second Coming, and this is precisely what can and should determine our life.

Perhaps the most important thing Holy Scripture tells us about the end of the world is that it will come. In today's Gospel reading, the Lord tells the disciples in considerable detail that the end will be like a harvest, when creation brings its fruit to the Creator. But it is very important that he goes on to say that we do not know the hour in which our Lord will come. Later, after the Resurrection, the Lord will speak of this even more plainly: it is not for you to know the times and seasons that the Father has placed under his own authority. It follows that we need to know that the end will come—since the Lord himself speaks of it—but we are not meant to know when it will come. Moreover, in the parable the Lord says that we should always be ready for that day.

The early Christians expected the end of the world from one day to the next. On the one hand, this expectation inspired them and gave them strength to withstand persecution and temptation; on the other, after two or three centuries it led to a measure of bewilderment, disappointment and reinterpretation of the Gospel. In our own time we have forgotten the coming end, so that its timing and the signs of its approach concern us more than what we will say at the Last Judgment.

Perhaps the point is that we do not need the news of the end of time in order to decide our actions and conduct. We ought to live according to God's truth at all times—on the day after the world's creation as well as on the eve of its end. Rather, the fact that the world's history will reach its conclusion is something we need in order to have the right attitude towards this world and the realities of our lives. The heavens will wear out like a worn garment, and with them the evil and suffering, the violence and falsehood that we bring into creation will cease. It is at once a day of judgment and a day of hope. We will see Christ and see his creation in all the beauty he intended for it. In comparison, all the many dependencies and illusions that crowd our minds, and with which we will have to part, recede into the background.

The texts for the first Sunday of Advent call us first of all to watchfulness. Not only because we cannot determine the moment when a child will be born. But also because our expectation of seeing Jesus now must be like what parents feel when they have already been waiting eight months for the birth of a child. There is no patience left at all: when at last will we be able to see, to know who this is, what He is like? Life is about to change at any minute, and there are too many of those minutes.

The changes in our life that Jesus gives us are immeasurably greater. He will come to us as a newborn infant, who cannot speak and who will not get anywhere unless we carry Him. In the time left to us before His birth, we must accustom ourselves to the thought that, like any little child, Jesus means cares, constant anxieties, and watchfulness at any time of day or night.

Is He well with us? Is He warm? Will we teach Him to smile? And will we unlearn how to wage war when He appears in our life?

The parables of the Lord Jesus Christ that we read today give us an incredible hope, one we have in no way deserved. Two days before Passover, when the Son of Man was handed over to be crucified, He shows His disciples from different perspectives what the Kingdom of Heaven is, the Kingdom to which He has called us.

The Lord tells His disciples that they must keep watch and be ready to meet the Day of the Lord. In the parable of the ten virgins, He says that the Kingdom of Heaven itself is like people awaiting an encounter with God. The central point of this parable is the call to wait for that encounter and desire it with all one’s heart.

The parable of the talents speaks of the gift of God given to each of us. This gift is likened to immense wealth: one talent amounted to more than twenty-five kilograms of silver! And the Lord calls us to put this priceless treasure to work. Judging by the text that follows, the talents mean not so much natural abilities and inclinations (that sense belongs to much later usage, which developed under the influence of the New Testament). The parable of the Last Judgment clearly shows us that people’s principal treasure is the ability to show mercy to one another as God Himself shows mercy to us. This is His silver, entrusted to us to make it grow.

And, of course, the central place in the passage we read is occupied by the parable of the Last Judgment. We read it before Lent, and today this text once again reveals what matters most in our life, what the Lord expects from us and, above all, where He has arranged to meet us.

When speaking about the day of His return and the triumph of the Kingdom, it is certainly no accident that Jesus warns against any attempt to determine its exact date. It is not that His Father knows something He does not. Most likely, the date has simply not yet been determined—and perhaps it will be determined only at the very last moment. Indeed, Christ's return in glory cannot be regarded as an isolated historical event. It must become, and will become, the completion of a particular stage in the history of the Kingdom—a stage that will probably be followed by others, but after which the world will be transformed and completely renewed.

When this stage ends, however, depends not only on God but also on human beings. We live in the age of the advancing Kingdom, and in a certain sense its advance depends on us even more than it does on Him. For His part, He has already done everything necessary for the Kingdom to be revealed in all its fullness.

Now it is up to us: what happens next will be determined to a considerable degree by our choice. Every “yes” to Christ and the Kingdom brings nearer the day of the Messiah's return in glory, while every “no” puts it farther away. Any such “yes” or “no” may become the last in the earthly history we see and within which we live. This is not because God will grow tired of waiting and decide to bring it to an end, but because the process really must be completed someday: sooner or later a moment will come when there is nothing left to wait for. For humanity, however, that moment may apparently come unexpectedly. It is no accident that Jesus compares the day of His return with the coming of the worldwide flood, which no one took seriously despite the warnings.

Of course everyone, or at least every Christian, knows in theory that the present stage of world history must end someday, and that the Savior, who promised to return in glory, will certainly fulfill His promise. Yet it is no secret that for most Christians today all this is, unfortunately, more an abstraction than a reality shaping their lives.

At times such lukewarmness gives way to brief bursts of feverish expectation of the “end of the world,” but these bring nothing into the lives of those waiting apart from emotional excitement. Jesus calls us to something else: daily readiness, so that His return will take no one by surprise, even if at that moment a Christian is occupied with everyday affairs. Evidently, there is no other way to meet Christ and enter the Kingdom.

Whatever the end described in this Gospel “apocalypse” may be, and whenever it may come, we are unlikely to learn anything about it in advance that would help us prepare for it better. As a model of proper conduct, Jesus offers His disciples the story of a steward in his master's house. This man simply did his work properly, and his master could return home at any time and find everything in good order. Thus, this is not a set of “survival instructions” for the end of the world, whenever that may come. It is a model by which Christ's disciples can “live and work” right now. This is the whole force of the Gospel's words about readiness for Jesus' coming: “Do not sleep; do not grow complacent! Live even now in the reality of the Kingdom that is drawing near!”

Today's passage is the second part of Jesus' account of the end of time, given in the Gospel according to Matthew. Here we find an explanation for the apparent misunderstanding that had already perplexed representatives of the first Christian generation: history had ended, yet Jesus, contrary to the promise He had given, still was not returning. Here He says directly that everything He told the disciples about would happen during their lifetime (v. 34; by "generation" here, according to the meaning of the Greek word, "generation" is meant).

On the other hand, He tells the disciples nothing definite about the timing of His return; more than that, He says these times are known only to the Heavenly Father (v. 36). In that case it becomes clear that the events marking the end of earthly history and the Savior's return could be separated by some time, whose duration could not be determined precisely at that moment. Jesus, in fact, did not promise the disciples that He would return in glory during their lifetime; He only promised them that they would witness the end of that history whose final stage they had reached. After that, all that remains is to wait for the Teacher's return and, as far as possible, not to relax spiritually (vv. 37-51).

It is no accident that Jesus compares His return with the situation described in the biblical parable of the flood: in Noah's days no one seriously believed that catastrophe was possible, and only Noah himself took the danger hanging over humanity seriously. Evidently, Jesus' return can be expected above all when most people are not thinking about that return at all, having sunk into everyday affairs and forgotten Christ, and perhaps spiritual life altogether.

But why do the times remain unknown? In speaking of the times, Jesus refers to the fact that they are known only to the Father. Meanwhile, everything known to the Father is known to Him as well. In that case, one can only suppose that on the day when Jesus told His disciples about the last times, the times were not yet known even to the Father. This would be entirely possible if He had not yet determined the time at that moment. Of course, for God time is not a self-sufficient reality as it is for us, but all His decisions, if they have to do with our world, still fit within the framework of our familiar concepts of past and future. And from our point of view, His decision about the day of Jesus' return was then still a matter of the future. It was still too early to speak about it.

God has no predetermined plan for everyone in which each human step would be known in advance; if that were the case, the day of the Savior's return would also have been known and predetermined from the creation of the world. But God leaves each person his freedom. And He carries out His plans in accord with the free choice of specific people. Here nothing can be predicted in advance, at least for us, people living in a world where past and future remain absolute realities. That is why the day of the Savior's return cannot be predicted in advance. To a certain extent, it depends on the choice made by each of us.

Those who reflect on the times of the Second Coming and the Last Judgment for some reason pay more attention to the cataclysms accompanying those critical times than to Jesus' very clear words that at that expected moment normal everyday life will continue: neither customary labors, nor weddings, nor even the taking of food will stop. The main upheavals will occur not in the earth's crust or in the atmosphere, but in people's lives, in their souls. The choice the Lord offers us is made already now, and it is made quietly and unnoticed by most of those around us. Completely similar people make the choice, but they make it differently. Until a certain time they are side by side, but the hour of parting will come, when each will go along the path he has chosen for himself.

It is interesting that here Jesus again mentions the fig tree, offering it to the disciples as an example of one that can sense the changes of the times. These words once more make us remember another fig tree, the one that gave no fruit. We are called to be constantly ready to bear fruit and place it in the Lord's hands.