Friday after Ad te levavi, The First Sunday in Advent
Posted on December 2, 2022 by under
Scripture: St. Luke 17:20-25 (NKJV)
17:20 Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; 21 nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”
22 Then He said to the disciples, “The days will come when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. 23 And they will say to you, ‘Look here!’ or ‘Look there!’ Do not go after them or follow them. 24 For as the lightning that flashes out of one part under heaven shines to the other part under heaven, so also the Son of Man will be in His day. 25 But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.”
Devotion
In this season of waiting, the desire in the Pharisees’ question seems almost reasonable. “What might we observe to know that the Kingdom is coming upon us? What cataclysm or what great wonder will make us know the Kingdom is here? What will tell us that the Last Day will be next Tuesday, so we can be prepared for it?” So many false teachings are built from such wrong expectations that we can’t list them all. Not only millennialism and cults based upon certain expectations concerning Jesus’ return, but all who look for physical signs and wonders in these latter days, or who assert some priority of the genetic or religious descendants of the ancient people of Israel, are guilty of the same sort of misunderstanding.
Jesus says that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with great outward show. Until that last moment when He appears again, all things will continue on normally. Calamitous signs, wars and rumors of wars, seedtime and harvest; all of these things will continue on until the end, just as they always have. The Kingdom neither appears, nor is received, through the physical sight of world events, but through God’s Word and Sacraments. By those means, the Holy Spirit creates faith in the hearts of those who rejected the Son of Man and alienated themselves from God.
Prayer: Stir up, we beseech Thee, Thy power, O Lord, and come, that by Thy protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins, and saved by Thy mighty deliverance; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
