They shall beat their swords into plowshares
Is 2:4
and their spears into pruning hooks;
one nation shall not raise the sword against another,
nor shall they train for war again.
What was Isaiah thinking? This makes no sense – he knew perfectly well that that didn’t describe the world he experienced in Judah at that time. It certainly didn’t describe life in the Roman empire at the time of Jesus. And today? Of course not, we have a major new war in Europe since last Christmas to add to all those already ongoing in various parts of the world. Why does Isaiah hold out this vision, albeit very beautiful, but bearing no resemblance to reality, then or now? What’s the point of proclaiming a future that clearly isn’t happening and isn’t going to happen any time we can see?
Well, Isaiah is prophesying – he’s not foretelling the future! It may be confusing that he says “In days to come …”, but we understand without difficulty that “Once upon a time …” doesn’t mean what follows is a history class. A prophesy isn’t like a weather forecast. It’s not an attempt to tell us how things will be. It’s an attempt to tell us how things are – now – what the underlying nature of our current reality is. Isaiah is telling the people how things would work in a world which has truly accepted God’s message, and which lives according to his law. He uses that vision of the perfect to demonstrate how far from that reality is the reality of the lives of the Israelites of his time. And by extension our lives also. It doesn’t mean that somehow, sometime, everything is going to flip around and we’ll wake up and find ourselves in this perfect world. But it does mean we have to continuously model our behavior towards that world, a world of peace; that we chose to contradict the pressures of darkness, of rivalry and jealousy, as Paul warns (Rom 13:11-14).
So what about Jesus’ words in our gospel today? (Mt 24:37-44) Aren’t those talking about the future? Preparing, staying awake for something to come, certainly sounds like someone talking about the regular course of history, as we understand it.
We can see the early church struggled with this issue. The followers of Jesus started with an understanding that the clear historical event of his life and death was to be followed by another similar historical event when he returned, presumably soon. Time went on, and soon turned out not to be quite as soon as originally expected. The apostles aged and died themselves. The traumatic events of the destruction of Jerusalem and the obliteration of Temple life (which was central not only to Jews but for Jesus and his early followers) both reinforced Jesus’ warnings but also confused expectations of how this was all supposed to play out.
All this provides the context in which Matthew was piecing together the sayings of Jesus and trying to deliver the good news. He was also living within Roman culture. Unlike the Israelites, who didn’t much go for divination, fortune telling, and the like, the Romans were obsessed with foretelling the future. So this whole section of Matthew’s gospel, focused on what Jesus said about the future, what to expect, and what to look for, is complicated and not always completely consistent.
Ever since, we, the church, have lived with this challenge. We believe that Jesus has already saved us, that the world is already changed, that the Son of Man came, died and conquered death. But we also know that we still live in an imperfect world, that the peace of God is not a current reality for us, that war and suffering continue. There is something more to come, some change still expected. But the message of Jesus is that we shouldn’t be looking outside for that change, we have to be prepared, internally, for whatever God is leading us to. We have to accept that we don’t know what the future will bring. But we do have to orient ourselves in a way that acknowledges the reality that we believe, that Isaiah and the other prophets called out, that God is in control, that we are people of the light. Christmas happened, and will happen again, and again.