The Second Coming

'The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, "Look here it is!" or "There it is!" For in fact the kingdom of God is among you.' Luke 17: 20-21
Sunday by Sunday we say 'Christ will come again' and affirm our faith. that 'he will come again in glory'. Yet the whole idea sounds so remote from our everyday experience that most Christians seldom give it a second thought, and the season set aside for reflection on it is usually swallowed up in what we might politely call 'the run-up to Christmas'.

The Second Coming has, become the almost exclusive preserve of the cults, the oddballs and the obsessives. For most of the rest of us, it is simply an item in the Creed, something we are 'bound to believe'. That, or less.
Which is a great pity, because that leaves the whole story of God's revelation with the last-chapter missing, as it were - rather like a detective story where the author forgot to tell us if the butler did it or not. In fact, the teaching of Jesus and the apostles has rather a lot to say about the End (rather more, actually, than about the Beginning), because they were concerned to demonstrate that God had not been outmanoeuvred or defeated by evil, but that his purposes would finally be fulfilled - his 'kingdom come, his will be done'. To believe less was to believe in too small a God altogether.

Christians believe in the ultimate victory of God - the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil, of life over death. That is the heart of the message of Jesus about the kingdom of God. We do not know, because we are not told, how precisely this will come about, nor when. But 'among us', hidden somewhere in the whole idea of the reign of God, is this wonderful truth: 'All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well'.