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Friends,
in today’s Gospel Jesus responds to questions about the end of the
world. When will it come? What will happen? Why were the first
Christians interested in these questions? The simplest and deepest
answer is that they had experienced the end of the world—precisely in
the dying and rising of Jesus.
Jesus
came preaching the Kingdom of God, and the nations conspired against
him. The old world seemed to conquer this new world that Jesus embodied.
But then, in the resurrection, they saw that the old world—the world
predicated upon death and the world that had done Jesus in—was now
defeated.
So
awed were they by the resurrection—and you can sense it in every book
and letter of the New Testament—that they awaited the imminent arrival
of the new state of affairs, the return of Jesus and the establishment
of God’s kingdom. Though Jesus did not immediately return, the old world
was over, broken, compromised, its destruction now just a matter of
time.
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