Little Ones

Many Christians live with the idea that humanity is ready for Christ to come. People are told to watch, prepare, and wait. Yet generation follows generation, Christ appears not to come, and the same question returns: Why is he taking so long?

The name Christ Arrives Readily begins by turning that question around.

What if Christ is not the one who is unready? What if he is already prepared for the encounter and is waiting for us? What if the apparent delay lies not in his unwillingness to arrive, but in our difficulty recognizing how near he already is?

Human beings naturally imagine heavenly superiority by enlarging the qualities they admire in themselves. If intelligence is valuable, heavenly beings must possess infinitely more intelligence. If knowledge gives power, heavenly beings must possess enormous stores of knowledge. If science allows humanity to manipulate nature, divine knowledge must be something like perfect science.

But perhaps this entire picture begins from the wrong end.

The Final Judgment is usually imagined as a single universal courtroom in which every human being appears in exactly the same position: everyone stands before the Judge, everyone is examined, and everyone receives either a favourable or unfavourable verdict.

But the Gospel picture is not so simple.

Jesus sometimes speaks not merely about receiving a favourable judgment, but about not entering judgment at all.

This distinction is easy to miss because the two ideas are often treated as if they meant the same thing.

They do not.

Luke 6:20–26 is often read as a simple symmetrical contrast. The poor are blessed, the rich are cursed; the hungry will be filled, the full will hunger; those who weep will laugh, while those who laugh will mourn.

At first sight, the passage appears to describe one single rule of reversal.

But the structure is more complicated.

There is an apparent contradiction in the Gospel portrayal of Satan.

At one point, through Peter, Jesus is urged not to go toward suffering and crucifixion. Jesus reacts with extraordinary severity: “Get behind me, Satan.”

Later, through Judas, the process leading directly to the crucifixion is set in motion.

At first glance the two actions seem opposite.

First Satan appears to resist the cross.

Then Satan appears to produce it.

People often imagine worship as an act of lowering oneself before visible greatness. One bows before a throne, prostrates before majesty, trembles before power. That model works easily with the image of a mighty king. But it becomes deeply problematic when applied to Jesus, because whenever one goes looking for him in that mode, one finds not a monarch demanding ceremony, but a servant washing the feet of others.