The End has Come

Next Sunday we will begin Advent, in which we’ll once again recall Christ’s birth and anticipate the fruit of his faithfulness in awaiting his return to judge and reconcile us to him. But today, we celebrate the end of the Christian year. We are not simply recognizing another year gone by; in fact, I’d say that it’s essential to stop right here, to think of this day - this Sunday where we celebrate the reign of Christ - as God’s sabbath; that is, the completion or fulfillment of his work. It is the work of having accomplished God’s intent: to reconcile his creation to himself. 

We hear Paul express this fulfillment in his letter to the Church in Colossus: “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” He’s done it. This is what Jesus’s life was all about: to tell the truth - that in being God the Son - eternally God and so eternally human - he is the firstborn of all creation. So the life of everyone who exists hinges on his life and on his mission. We have life solely because God chose us from eternity, created, redeemed, reconciled, and gave us rest in himself, from eternity. We experience all of these things play out in our own lives and the lives of others as we read history, and become a part of history ourselves. But for God, our life in him is complete already; accomplished in an eternal act of sacrificial love. 

A love that doesn’t choose its own way, but instead says, “not my will but yours be done Father.” Jesus’s yes to God that inspires human hatred, rejection, confusion, betrayal, violence and his own death, overthrows Adam’s choice, and so our choices to plot our own ways. And so he wins victory over death not just once as happened when mere priests made animal sacrifices, but being always and before all things, i.e. eternally both God and human offering himself in sacrifice on the Cross just once, being raised from the dead just once, he wins life for all people who desire it, past, present and future.” 

This is not just good news, even profoundly good news. It’s actually the only thing that ultimately matters. God’s judgment, his demand for perfect relationship is met fully and completely in Jesus’s faithfulness all the way to the Cross. And we are joined to his fulfillment of God’s demand for relationship when we are willing to follow and so be joined to Jesus: taking of his body and blood, allowing ourselves to be transformed into his likeness; becoming a tool or instrument of his grace, enduring and persevering with joy, hope, love, and peace because we have the assurance in Christ that we already have life, life in perfection, life in eternal perfection with God.

In Christ, no longer are we on our own; we have been joined to God, by God where perfect love casts out death, and the fear that this life and its cruelty, violence, sadness, loss, and pain, is all there is; where accumulating power, control, the capacity to exercise force, to command law and violence to obtain your will, is necessary to find security and fruitfulness.

When they came to a place called Golgatha, the place of the skull, they crucified Jesus right there. Where was it? Outside of Jerusalem, right where King David had fought, defeated and placed the skull of Goliath whom the book of Samuel presents as serpent-like (1 Sam 17). It is finished. The enmity between the children of Adam and Eve and the Serpent - Satan if you like - is overcome. Jesus’s heel remains always above the serpent’s head. Sin is overcome on the Cross at the place of the skull, foreshadowed by David’s own defeat of Goliath. So we see again and again that God is present working in each life, toward this final end: to reveal himself to us.  

So today we commit to the radical belief that in Christ, we have been brought from death into life; from being defined by how much we can get, take or accomplish in this world, to how much we are willing to give away of ourselves for the sake of other people, because we know that we are already of infinite value to God. We stop being like those who scoff and laugh and Jesus, telling him to save himself. For we can see the full story of who Jesus Christ is: not merely a human prophet, or a teacher, or a wise sage. 

These folks might have valuable and wise things to say, but they cannot change reality. They cannot make the dead alive; they cannot make those who will die live eternally. That, my friends, is a capacity that belongs solely to the one who is the first fruits, who created all things, who bore all things so that he might bring us to life and so then into the light of living in accordance with a world reconciled to its maker, God. Let us pray: "Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom,” that we might hear, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." AMEN.