The world once again appears to be moving toward its end. The headlines speak with the old apocalyptic urgency, as though history had only now discovered wars, rumors of wars, political madness, and the trembling of human institutions. But every generation has heard these footsteps in the night.

            And from the church’s earliest days, one prayer has arisen whenever the darkness seemed to be closing in:

“Come, Lord Jesus.” 

            The original prayer was not simply a general wish that Christ would return someday. It was apparently spoken where the church gathered around the meal, asking the coming Lord to be present among them now and to bring his kingdom to completion. The later table prayer, which many of us grew up with, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” domesticates but still preserves an echo of that ancient eucharistic and eschatological cry.

            Its ancient form, Maranatha, “Our Lord, come” (1 Corinthians 16:22), was the plea of a church living beneath persecution and the apparent triumph of the powers of this world. 

“Come, Lord Jesus” is, therefore, a prayer for the end of the old creation and the coming of the new.

            The first Christians lived with a heightened expectation of Christ’s return. Yet the apostles died, the martyrs were buried, empires rose and collapsed, and still the heavens did not open. The church learned to live uneasily with what theologians call the delay of the Parousia, the apparent postponement of Christ’s promised appearing. And that postponement has now stretched across twenty centuries.

            But this delay is not merely a theological problem. It is also a spiritual temptation. When the master is delayed, the servants begin to behave as though the house belongs to them. The delayed Lord becomes the absent Lord, and the absent Lord is soon replaced by the busy Christian. Faith waits for its final redemption in Christ, even as the old Adam within the church continues to invent more manageable saviors.

            The church settles into the world. “Come, Lord Jesus” becomes a liturgical antique. The kingdom of God is converted into a moral program, a political project, or a plan for improving civilization.

            But the gospel does not tell us to complete what Christ has left unfinished. It announces that in his death and resurrection, the decisive work has been finished, and in the gospel that finished work is now delivered to sinners.

            Christ has not left his church staring at a distant horizon with nothing but instructions to remain hopeful. 

            The one for whom we wait is the one who already comes to us. He comes when the preacher ceases describing what we ought to become and declares, “Your sins are forgiven.”

He comes when water is joined to his command and promise, and the sinner is buried and raised with him. He comes when bread and wine are placed into empty hands with the words, “Given and shed for you.”

            The one who comes to judge is the one who has already borne the judgment. The hands raised to awaken the dead still bear the wounds of the cross. The Christ who will come in glory is the same Christ who now comes in the humility of proclamation and sacrament. The voice that will awaken the dead is already speaking the gospel Word into our ears. 

 

The last day will reveal the Christ whom faith already knows.

 

            Until he comes, we are not given a timetable. We are given this gospel Word to proclaim. The church names sin and forgives sins. We care for the neighbor and bear witness to the hope the world neither knows nor gives.

            So, we pray:

            ‘Come, Lord Jesus. And while you delay, come in the Word joined to water, where you bury the sinner and raise a new creation. Come in the forgiveness that reaches us before we are worthy. Come in the meal where beggars are seated at the King’s table. Then, when the last day arrives, we shall discover that You who come upon the clouds are no stranger. You are the one who has already called us by name.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.’