The tongue tells the tale

One of the reasons many, particularly in the Protestant tradition, have become ambivalent about the Epistle of James is a misunderstanding of the type of literature it is. Whereas Paul, being himself a Pharisee trained under the respected teacher Gamaliel, wrote from the perspective of Christ being the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. James wrote from a different, but equally important, perspective.

The great tradition of Hebrew wisdom was embodied by Solomon, the wisest of Israel's kings and perhaps the wisest man who ever lived. Proverbs is his most memorable work, as well as most of the book of Ecclesiastes and the dialogue with his beloved, the Song of Solomon. Several non-canonical books of the Apocrypha are also attributed to him. 

James was steeped in this tradition. Consequently, his epistle is a collection of wise sayings and godly counsel. Perhaps the most practical of all his wisdom is his advice concerning the tongue. "How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire," he writes, echoing Solomon. "And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness" (James 3:5-6). James sees the tongue as the epicenter of human evil, untamable by any human being. It exposes the double-mindedness of man, his utter inability to live consistently in obedience to God. For while we may, at one moment, use the tongue to "bless our Lord and Father," we may, at the next moment, use it to "curse people who are made in the likeness of God" (James 3:9).

This kind of forked-tongue double-mindedness, says James, "ought not be so" (James 3:10). Human beings are created to obey God at all times, not only to honor him with our lips, but also to glorify him with our lives. The tongue tells the tale, whether we  are truly honoring God or vainly invoking his name. We cannot control the tongue unless we are submitted unreservedly in absolute obedience to God. For only then can our tongue praise his name and our lives reflect his glory.

The kingdom is staring you right in the face

"The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed," Jesus says, "nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (Luke 17.20b-21).

This, our Lord says in response to a question from the Pharisees about "when the kingdom of God would come" (v. 20a). It is a question which betrays the Pharisees' utter faithlessness. Face to face with the One who embodies the kingdom of God, they nevertheless ask, "When will the kingdom come?"

Implied in Jesus' answer is the Pharisees' insistence on some kind of observable "sign." But in answering as he does, Jesus effectively tells them, "If you cannot see the kingdom right before your eyes, no sign will convince you. You will run after every charlatan and pretender who comes along saying, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' All the while the kingdom you seek is staring you right in the face."

Jesus is the kingdom of God, the very embodiment of God's new order. The Pharisees' failure to see what is literally within their grasp is only further proof of this. In the kingdom of God, privilege counts for nothing. Those, like the Pharisees, who think they have it all figured out will be the ones who miss out. As Jesus embodies the kingdom of God, the new order of the world to come, the Pharisees embody the absolute worst of the old order, the world that is passing away. They are the representatives of "this generation," the corrupt religious establishment which would reject Jesus and send him to the cross.

Jesus compares his inquisitors to the people of Noah's day who were "eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage" (v. 27), blissfully unaware of their impending doom. So, too, are the Pharisees like like the people of Lot's day, "eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all" (vv. 28-29).

By invoking these images of past judgment, Jesus is warning the guardians of the status quo that his day is coming and they will be held accountable for their actions. They will reject him. They will kill him. They will pretend business as usual. But the Son of Man will have the last word.

But there is also a word of caution to Jesus' disciples. They must remain alert, lest they suffer the same fate as the Pharisees. If they become too concerned with saving their own lives, they will be swept away, also, in the coming judgment. "Remember Lot's wife," Jesus says (v. 32). She looked back upon Sodom and became a pillar of salt. So it will be with any who try to preserve any part of the old order. It is passing away in judgment. The way of faith is the way of flight. Flee from this passing world and look forward -- LOOK UP! -- to the glorious new world of the kingdom of God which, even now, "is in the midst of you."

A tale of two Philips?

Reading the Church Fathers is always a richly rewarding, although sometimes frustrating, experience. For all their wisdom, these early saints and doctors of the church were not without their quirks. Irenaeus, for instance, taught that Jesus lived well into his fifties. Origen espoused numerous novel doctrines, particularly in his later years. Papias was repudiated by Eusebius for claiming to have received directly from the apostles "certain strange parables and teachings of the Saviour, and some other more mythical things" including "his statement that there will be a period of some thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and that the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth." Commenting on such teachings, Eusebius observes, "I suppose he got these ideas through a misunderstanding of the apostolic accounts, not perceiving that the things said by them were spoken mystically in figures."

Maybe some of these aberrations are more than mere quirks, but we must always be charitable when considering the nascent theology of the early Fathers, keeping in mind that many of them sealed their testimony with the blood of martyrdom. Still, reading some of their exegetical works can be somewhat amusing at times. In reading from John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, I came across this rather dubious exegetical stretch.

Why were these [the believers in Samaria] not in receipt of the Holy Spirit? It may be that Philip kept this honor for the apostles, or that the did not have this gift or that he was one of the seven. The last is most likely. Thus, I take it, this Philip was one of the seven, the one after Stephen, while the Philip in the story of the eunuch was one of the apostles.

This "two Philips" theory does not hold up under even the most rudimentary of exegetical scrutiny. "Philip" is named among the eleven in the Upper Room prior to Pentecost (Acts 1.13), but that very fact itself means he would have been in Jerusalem with the other apostles (who, except for Peter and John's brief follow-up visit to Samaria, were the only ones among the disciples who were not scattered following the death of Stephen, Acts 8.1), not on the road to Gaza at the time of the encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26-40). Furthermore, the wider context makes it clear that the Philip who first proclaimed Christ to the Samaritans and the Philip who met the Ethiopian eunuch are one and the same. Luke structures the narrative in such a way as to demonstrate the important evangelistic role this Philip began to take on in the immediate aftermath of the death of his fellow deacon Stephen. The encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch came immediately after Peter and John completed the work he began in Samaria. Immediately after baptizing the eunuch, he wound up in Azotus and continued his evangelistic work throughout "all the towns until he came to Caesarea," further suggesting that this Philip is one of the seven, not one of the twelve. The apostles, even after the death of James and the imprisonment of Peter, were still holding down the fort in Jerusalem as late as the Jerusalem Council, recorded in Acts 15.

The baptism of the eunuch, Rembrandt, 1626

It is difficult to understand why Chrysostom found it necessary to presume the Philip who preached Christ to the Samaritans and the Philip who preached Christ to the Ethiopian eunuch were two different people. He seems concerned over the fact that the Samaritans did not receive the Holy Spirit until the arrival of Peter and John. By assuming the Philip who met the eunuch was an apostle, Chrysostom removes any lingering question about how the eunuch might have received the Spirit, as well. Yet, the Holy Spirit does not seem to be the exclusive property of the apostles, even before Philip's visit to Samaria. Stephen was "a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 6.5). Moreover, it is "the Spirit" who prompts Philip to engage the eunuch in conversation. Perhaps, between his initial visit to Samaria and his subsequent travels down the road to Gaza, Philip received additional instruction with regard to the Holy Spirit from the apostles (which would have been easy, since Peter and John soon arrived on the scene). His hasty departure from Jerusalem after the outbreak of persecution may have left him with an adequate, yet incomplete, understanding of the gift of salvation. This would be the case later with Apollos (Acts 18.24-28), who "was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John." It fell to Priscilla and Aquila to "[explain] to him the way of God more accurately." It is only speculation that this would have also been the case with Philip. Nevertheless, there is no need to try to explain away a relatively minor quibble over early church order by splitting one Philip into two.

A glorious vision of new life

Ezekiel 37.1-14, Romans 6.16-23, John 11.7-44

One of the most important lessons which ministers are taught in seminary and in countless books on pastoral theology is to model your ministry after Jesus. That’s pretty sound advice, except in one area. We don’t learn much from Jesus about how to conduct a funeral. Every time Jesus shows up at a funeral, he has the peculiar habit of bringing the deceased back to life. What began as a funeral ends as a wedding feast.

But isn’t that the point John is trying to make by structuring the first half of his Gospel around the signs and wonders of Jesus’ ministry? What begins at a wedding in Cana comes full circle at a funeral in Bethany. Jesus has been setting the stage for the raising of Lazarus ever since he turned water to wine.

But to understand the story fully, we have to go back further, much further, to the day when the Israelites languished in exile in Babylon. For it is during that dark period of Israel’s history that the prophet Ezekiel had a vision: a vision which looked at first like a gloomy vision of death, but which was transformed by the Word and the Spirit of God into a glorious vision of new life. Ezekiel envisioned the day when the people of Israel would be gathered again in their homeland. To describe this great homecoming, he uses imagery that is breathtaking, or more accurately, breath-giving. “Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the LORD.”

This marvelous prophetic vision, these inspiring, hopeful, uplifting images seen and described by Ezekiel so many years before literally reverberate in the words of Jesus throughout the first half of John’s Gospel. “Truly, truly I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” “Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out.” “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

The language of Ezekiel and the language of Jesus are unmistakably one and the same. For the Israelites in Babylon, Ezekiel’s vision is symbolic of their return from exile. Though they were at the time “dead” in Babylon, God promises through the prophet that the day is coming when they would be “alive” again; restored to their homeland. In previous chapters, Ezekiel has spoken about the renewal of the covenant, cleansing from sin, of God gathering his sheep as when a shepherd seeks them out when they are scattered, and, finally, of giving Israel a new heart and a new spirit. Not for Israel’s sake, but for the sake of his holy name, God will act to rescue and vindicate his people, and thus vindicate his holiness for all to see.

Through Ezekiel, God speaks to his people, “I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

By now, the picture is becoming clear. This is the language of restoration, of gaining back that which was lost. God himself, who breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils in the beginning, is going to do so again. The renewal of the covenant will mean the new creation. And the word which came to be used to describe this great reworking, this world-ending, creation-transforming act which God promised to do among his people to manifest his glory was RESURRECTION!

Even after their return from exile, the Israelites whose hearts were truly seeking after God knew that Ezekiel’s vision was more than just a metaphor. There was a deeper, dare we say LITERAL, meaning behind all the symbolic language. No exile would be permanent. Even death itself would be swallowed up by life in the great and glorious day when God would act to restore all things.

So, as John writes his Gospel, he brings together this long history of hope and expectation, a hope expressed in symbols but expected to be reality. From the wedding at Cana to the funeral at Bethany, everything Jesus has said and every sign he has performed has been leading up to this moment. It’s not like he hasn’t been preparing the people for it. He speaks the very language which the people of God ought to understand. “You must be born again.” “I am the light of the world.” “I will raise them up on the last day.” “[He] who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. . . The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” “I am the good shepherd.” “Before Abraham was, I AM.”

But every time Jesus opens his mouth or performs some sign, somebody somewhere wants to kill him. The people are so bound up in their sins, so enslaved by their human traditions, that they cannot receive the Word of God, but instead reject the Word made flesh as a blasphemer. “I am this. I am that.” Doesn’t he know that’s taking the Lord’s name in vain?

By the time he gets to Bethany, Jesus is in no mood for sentimentality. Our polite English translations which say he was “deeply moved” really understate it. The Greek term means, literally, “indignant.” Even his disciples were still clueless. When he tells them they are going back to Judea, they try to stop him. “Lord, last time you were there, they tried to kill you.” But when it is obvious they won’t prevail, they seem resigned to a tragic end. As Thomas says, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.”

What are they expecting? DEATH! What was Mary expecting? “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” What were the people expecting? “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

But now that Jesus has arrived on the scene, we know that death will not have the last word.

Among the cast of characters in this story, Martha stands out as the one who seems to hold on to a glimmer of hope. She confesses her belief in “the resurrection at the last day.” She even confesses her belief in Jesus as the Savior of the world. But all of this only compounds her grief, because even her expectations are clouded by the shadow of death. Like her sister Mary, she complains, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

It’s no wonder “Jesus wept.” He wept not in grief over Lazarus, as the people presumed. He wept in grief over all these lost sheep who still didn’t get it. The disciples, Mary and Martha, the crowd: their focus is uniformly on DEATH. It’s the valley of dry bones all over again. Lazarus lies in the tomb, but the dead are outside grieving.

Martha is right about one thing. “Lord, by now there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Death does have a way of stinking up the place, of casting a long shadow over the hopes and expectations of a people. Death has a way of closing their eyes in blindness, of shutting them off in a cold, dark, smelly tomb.
But against this dark backdrop, the light of the world is about to shine. When Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life,” he means it literally. “You believe in the resurrection on the last day? Woman, you are looking at the resurrection. Open your eyes and behold the living end!”

In Jesus, the end has come, but life goes on. “Did I not tell you,” he says, “that if you believed you would see the glory of God? Did I not tell you a time was coming when the dead would hear my voice and come out of their tombs? Did I not tell you that everyone who believes in me has eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day? Did I not tell you I am the good shepherd, that I call my own by name and lead them out? Lazarus, come out!”

And Lazarus, called by name, hearing the voice of the good shepherd, the incarnate Word of God, comes out of the tomb, out of the darkness and into the warm embrace of the light. But wait. This marvelous work is not yet complete. Lazarus is still bound up in the grave clothes of the old life. John says his hands and feet “were bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth.”

Jesus says, “Unbind him and let him go.” Take off those inhibiting reminders of what used to be. Put off those shackles which tie him to the past. Let him come forth a new creation.

This is a pivotal moment in John’s Gospel. Here begins the unbinding not only of Lazarus, but of the whole mystery of God’s redemptive plan, seen thus far in tiny glimpses through the signs Jesus has performed, but only revealed fully and completely in Jesus himself. Here is the turning point, the radical re-orientation, whereby we begin to understand that Christ draws us to himself not by what he does, but by who he is: the Bread of Life, the light of the world, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life.

The life into which he calls us is the very life of God, lived in the unceasing fellowship and perfect unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is the life we had when God created us in his image and likeness. It is the life we lost when we took matters into our own hands and tried to become like God on our own terms. It is the life we can never again know, or even desire, as long as we are bound up in the grave clothes of sin and disobedience. The old life, as long as we are bound up in it, seems like the good life. It’s comfortable and cozy in that cool, dark cave. We like wearing those old clothes, even if they are a little tight in the waist from our over-indulgences. We see no need to take put off the old and be clothed in the new. We already have everything we could possibly want. We have it bad, but we have it good. We have the best of both worlds, and the freedom to choose to live however we want. But what’s that odor that keeps following us around?

Paul makes it very clear in his letter to the Romans. If that’s the kind of “life” you have, you’re not living, you’re dying! You are a slave to sin, and at the end of the day, you’re going to collect your wages—and the wages of sin is death! But the good news is Jesus has come to make us a better offer.

Charles Wesley describes so beautifully the joy that comes from receiving the free gift of God that is eternal life in Christ: “Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray; I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”

Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, even though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”

“Do you believe this?”

Go, then, and live the life that manifests the glory of God in you, through you, and all around you.

Understanding the end from the beginning

John's Gospel is the most self-contained of all the Gospels. The ordeal of Jesus' passion is presented as embodying the "tribulation" which the whole church must endure to the end, with Judas cast in the role of "the son of destruction" (John 17:12) and the hour in which the Apostles will be "scattered, each to his own home" (John 16:31) being the apostasy which must necessarily precede the Day of the Lord, that is, the resurrection (Peter and his three denials being, perhaps, the embodiment of this episode).

Christian eschatology is nothing if not simple common sense. The Greek term for "falling away" is apostasia, literally, "standing off." "Resurrection" in Greek is anastasis, literally, "standing again." Simple logic would dictate that a "standing again" be preceded by a "standing off." So when Paul says, for instance, in 2 Thessalonians 2, that "the Day of the Lord" (that is, the resurrection) will not come unless the apostasy comes first, he is merely stating the obvious. It is a scenario as old as Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve fell away by eating the forbidden fruit, had their nakedness (that is, their inner man of lawlessness) revealed, and had to face the judgment of God, being able to "stand again" only after God himself had intervened to provide them an adequate covering for their nakedness. If you want to understand "the end," then go back to "the beginning" and everything begins to make sense.

Following his resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias (John 21). There, he reminds Peter, in particular, of his apostasy (through symbols which recall the night of his denial, such as the breaking of bread and a charcoal fire), reinstates him in love (asking him three times, "Do you love me?"), and then says to him, "Follow me." Previously, in a conversation with Peter in chapter 13, Jesus said, "Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward" (v. 36). The conversation in chapter 21 closes the circle. Jesus, having gone to his death on the cross and then rising in triumph over sin and death, has established the pattern which Peter is now called to follow, even though it may lead him to a place he does not want to go. As John states several times throughout his Gospel that Jesus said this or that "to indicate the kind of death he was going to die," he now writes that Jesus said this to Peter "to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God."

Peter, and by implication all who would follow Jesus, must now replicate Jesus' ministry of redemption and transformation, up to and including making the ultimate sacrifice out of love for him. The path of each individual may not be completely identical. John, for instance, would not die a martyr's death but would, rather, glorify God through a life of abiding faith which would become an extension of the very life of Christ ("If it is my will that he abide until I come, what is that to you?"). Yet, all who follow Christ are called to hold back nothing, including life itself, from the service of his kingdom.

Ignorance masquerading as scholarship

Michael Patton pointed out this fine example of ignorance masquerading as scholarship from April DeConick, identified on her blog as the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University. If this is what passes for "biblical studies" at Rice, students should demand their money back.

There is a big difference between confessional scholarship and its working assumptions and historical-critical scholarship and its working assumptions, and we must never confuse the two. Confessional scholarship is willing to compromise and apologize in order to keep 'history' aligned with the faith tradition. It is willing to understand theology as history and write about knowledge in these terms. Historical-critical scholarship is built on the presuppositions of the scientific search for knowledge. It is unwilling to allow theology to be history.

If you are at all uncertain about this distinction, it is easiest to see it when you look at a religion that is not your own and the claims to truth that religion makes. Think about claims that are made about Mohammad, Buddha, or any religion that has "historical" founders or scriptures. Its views on their founders are theology historicized. They are religious truth claims that have been accepted as fact by believers from that tradition, and scholars who work in that tradition. Those outside that tradition recognize this easily.

The easiest example of this in Christianity (which I have also discussed on numerous occasions previously) is the physical resurrection of Jesus. Confessional scholars are willing (some even feel compelled) to allow for the physical resurrection of Jesus to be historical fact. Of course it is not. Dead bodies don't come back to life. And Jesus' body did not come back to life. This is a theological doctrine that was historicized in the literature of the early believers. Those outside of Christianity, and non-confessional academics in another field (like science) see this immediately.

What should be obvious from the tone of Professor DeConick's drivel is that there is no form of "scholarship" that demands a stricter adherence to a "confessional" perspective than the historical-critical method. "Of course it is not" is about as dogmatic a statement as one can make with regard to the historical veracity of the resurrection. Thomas C. Oden, former fad theologian turned orthodox scholar, marvelously refutes this tired (and patently ahistorical) argument in his book After Modernity. . .What? (pp. 134-36)

Suppose the prophets were right, that God's will is revealed through historical events, and hence that God's will is finally knowable only at the conclusion of the drama of history. Theology would then be intent on trying to understand, if possible the anticipated end of the process, beyond all current historical alienations, finitude, blindness, and sin.

The earliest church reasoned in this way: In Jesus' resurrection the end is already present, in an anticipated sense. Thus the will of God is finally revealed. So to participate in Christ is already to share in the events of the last days. It all made reasonable sense, seen from within the assumptions of Jewish historical reasoning, transformed by a living encounter with the resurrected Jesus.

We today must learn to think historically in the Hebraic sense if we are to make sense of this central proclamation of Christianity. Seen in this frame of reference, the resurrection is so decisive that the importance of all other theological issues pales beside it. It focuses on nothing less than the final revelation of the will of God in history.

We are searching for the center of the wide circumference of Christian experience. What is the center? Resurrection as interpersonal meeting with the living Christ. Not resurrection as idea or past event but resurrection as a currently experienced interpersonal encounter. This is why interpersonal meeting has been the central feature of Christian theology from its inception.

Something so decisive happened anticipatively for human history in the resurrection of Jesus that it does not and cannot fit into ordinary categories of understanding. We cannot rule out the resurrection of Jesus simply on the grounds (as Troeltsch's law of analogy would require) that nothing like this ever happened to us before. How could it! The event of which Christianity speaks is, like all truly significant interpersonal meeting, an event without analogy.

The least plausible of all explanations of the resurrection is that it was generated out of the despairing imagination of the disciples. For that does not explain why they were willing to risk their lives for it. Nor does it account for one of the most characteristic literary features of the Easter narratives: the report that the beholders were utterly surprised by the appearance oft he risen Lord. The "surprise" element of the Easter narratives is too recurrent to be considered an anomaly. It is not likely that one would report being surprised by something that one had previously projected. No. Something occurred in Jesus' resurrection. It is quite unconvincing to assume that it could have been nothing. Whatever it was, it was experienced as the resurrected or spiritual or glorified body of Jesus and understood as the final self-disclosure of God.

Pet peeve rant: Truncated pericopes for the first Sunday of Advent

The first Sunday of Advent is always a challenge to the careful homiletician and disciplined lectionarian. Whether it is year A, B, or C, the Gospel text is a portion of one of the synoptic accounts of the Olivet Discourse, specifically that portion in which Jesus addresses the subject of "the coming of the Son of Man." Perhaps more than any other week of the Christian year, this over-arching theme forces the preacher to read the text in a manner that is historically and contextually dubious. Over the centuries, the Christian community has come to understand "the coming of the Son of Man" in a manner quite different from that of the first century Jewish community out of which the earliest Christians came. This is due, in large part, to the failure of succeeding generations of believers to allow Scripture to be its own best interpreter.

Within a strict biblical context, "the coming of the Son of Man" is a relatively easy concept to grasp. Daniel's vision of "one like a son of man" who came "with the clouds of heaven" (Daniel 7:13) is the key here. It is a vision of one entering into the presence of "the Ancient of Days" to be "given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him" (Daniel 7:14a). At Olivet, Jesus foretells the cataclysmic events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem and the ordeal his disciples will be called upon to endure for their faith. But it is his own ordeal of suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to the right hand of the Father which will put all of those events in proper perspective. What Daniel foresaw in his vision, Jesus brings to fulfillment. Following his ordeal of suffering and death, he will be vindicated as the true Son of God and Son of Man by being raised from the dead and taken up "with the clouds of heaven" to be seated at the right hand of the Father until his coming again in glory.

The whole of Scripture paints a multi-dimensional picture of God's Anointed One coming first as one of us, born of a virgin in the humblest of surroundings, suffering, dying, and rising again; being taken up to heaven and sending the Holy Spirit to empower the church to continue the work he began; and finally coming again to restore all things in himself to the glory of the Father. It is precisely this multi-dimensional understanding of "the coming of the Son of Man" that is supposed to be the theme of Advent. But the truncated pericopes of the first Sunday do not tell the whole story.