Who Can Endure the Day of His Coming?

Thus says the Lord, See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?
(Malachi 3:1-2, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

As Jesus’s followers began to see in him a potential messiah, they had something very specific in mind. They wanted a leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, restore Israel to its former glory, and usher in a world where they would fully enjoy the fruits of their covenant with the Lord. In that spirit, the disciples approached him one day and asked when they could expect “the end of the age” to commence. “About that day and hour no one knows,” he told them, “neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

“Keep awake, therefore,” he warned, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

That urgent tone led them to expect his return in their lifetimes.

The Greek noun parousia appears several times in that passage from Matthew, frequently translated into English as “the coming.” Parousia had specific connotations in first-century Greek, referring to the arrival of a royal dignitary, but also—crucially—to the very fact of their presence. The earliest Christians understood Jesus in that light. The Son of Man’s arrival mattered, of course, but they also cared deeply about what would happen after he showed up. They remained hopeful Jesus had only gone away for a short time, that “Phase 2” of their liberation might begin at any moment, and they organized themselves accordingly.

For a while, many held on to the idea of Jesus as an intrinsically Jewish messiah, but the influx of more and more non-Jewish devotees diluted that argument’s force, and it became even less convincing after the Roman sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. Meanwhile, decades turned into centuries, the final days felt less immediate, and Christians came to understand parousia not as the revival of one nation but the spread of a new kingdom across the entire world.

Let’s skip ahead a millennium or so.

In a 2020 essay, the British Quaker theologian Mark Russ describes how George Fox and the first generation of Friends envisioned parousia as an interior process that, to quote Revelation, “if any man will hear His voice and open to Him,” had already begun:

“The Quaker experience of an inward apocalypse revealed the world for what it was. It ‘ended the world’ by revealing the illegitimacy of dominating power structures. Through publicly witnessing to their experience in both words and actions, Quakers hoped to prompt a similar inward apocalypse in others.”

A woman in silhouette sits cross-legged on the floor, her face in profile to the camera. Behind her, a screen shows a close-up of bright orange flames.
Photo: Chris/Unsplash

God would not come down from heaven and sweep the world clean; instead, one by one, Friends began to recognize Spirit’s presence in the world at that very moment. This realization convinced them of the necessity of repentance—fixing their hearts to conform with the wisdom of the Inward Teacher. Fixing their hearts would inevitably lead to fixing their lives; doing so in community would lead to the transformation of human society.

Before too long, the Quakers faced the same problem the earliest Christians had: The world remained much as it was, generally even more so. Russ’s essay offers some insights into how Friends gradually stopped believing they were living in end times and eventually reframed their relationship with Spirit as less urgently apocalyptic. (Connecting with God still holds great significance, of course, but it no longer ushers in the end of the world—instead, it offers support while you do your bit to help the moral arc of the universe finish its slow bend toward justice.)

That brings us to today.

We remain very much haunted by the specter of the end times, though many of us fear that humanity will usher in its own destruction without God’s help. Some, though, continue to believe God will steer the last days with a firm hand, a prospect that thrills some and terrifies others. 

The prophet Malachi understood the terror implicit in the coming of the Lord. If we expect paradise to resemble the contemporary secular world, but with even more wealth and luxury, we will find ourselves profoundly disappointed. God won’t come around to tell us what a great job we’ve done. No, God draws near to us for judgment, and—as Friends have recounted through the centuries—judgment feels like being thrown into a refiner’s fire, burning away all our impurities, or like being scrubbed with the most caustic soap imaginable, stripping those impurities away like so much dead flesh. All our comfort, all our complacency, utterly annihilated.

Who, Malachi asked, especially among the rich and powerful, among those who turned away from God’s instructions to attain positions of privilege, could bear to live through that? 

Ron Hogan

Ron Hogan is the audience development specialist for Friends Publishing Corporation and webmaster for Quaker.org. He is also the author of Our Endless and Proper Work.

1 thought on “Who Can Endure the Day of His Coming?

  1. I really liked this perspective and feel I am myself have begun to live towards that new world with the gentle guidance in each moment of a kind but firm Spirit/Flowing of Love. Looking back over my life I see how often I have been helped to go in the right direction and saved from mistakes I have made. I have found the words of Julian of Norwich to be true:
    “There is a force of love moving through the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go.”
    Thank you Ron Hogan!

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