The family loads up the car to drive to grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving. The father and mother plan the trip carefully, packing the necessary things to keep their two young children safe and happy on the trip. And then, early on the morning of the trip, while it is still dark, the parents pack the car, and the father gently carries his two sleeping children down to the car, buckles them in their car seats, and off they go for a five-hour drive to grandmother’s house. And as they pull out of the driveway, with the children asleep in the back seat, the parents think to themselves, “This will be a great thanksgiving, a wonderful feast, a little taste of heaven.”
But five minutes into the trip the unthinkable happens. The children, ages three and six, wake up. And instantly, the quiet of the early dawn is shattered with the question from the back seat, “Are we there yet?” This is the first of forty-seven times that question will be asked during this five-hour drive. And each time, with infinite tenderness and patience, that only God could give to young parents, they answer their children, “Not yet. We’re almost there. Just a little while longer.”
It helps little for the father to tell the children how many more miles, or how many more hours or minutes, until grandmother’s house; for the children have no context or understanding to evaluate what 245 miles means, or how long 4 hours and 35 minutes will last. So instead, the parents must simply urge their children to trust them, and encourage them that they are getting ever-closer to their destination. Eventually the children begin to lose patience, and their buckled car seats begin to feel like prisons. They do not understand their present suffering, nor why the trip seems to last forever. “Are we there yet?” they ask with greater and greater impatience and frustration. Sometimes the horizon is hard to see from the back seat.
My brothers and sisters our gospel reading today from Saint Luke shows that Jesus understood, and anticipated, our frustration while awaiting the final outcome of God’s future for humanity. While touring the magnificent buildings and grounds of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus saw that his disciples were overly impressed with the architectural wonder of the facility. And indeed, it was an impressive building, which even the master-builder Herod took 46 years to complete! But Jesus used the moment to teach his disciples, like a parent to children in the back seat on a long journey. Jesus said the days were coming when this great temple would crumble, and no two stones would be standing on top of each other. “When will this be? How will we know when it will happen?” they asked in wide-eyed amazement. They might as well have asked, “Are we there yet?” We are all curious and impatient about the future, and if we don’t have a specific clock or map to that future, how quickly it is for US to lose hope.
But Jesus does not offer his disciples, or us, a detailed timeline by which to foretell the future, or even to help us mark our progress toward that future. That we delight in such exact schemes and calculations is obvious, just see how readily we buy books by authors who claim to know the signs of the end times, or pander after astrologers or psychics who claim to know the future. But all such claims are bogus. As Jesus himself said, “No one, not even the Son of Man himself, knows the exact times or seasons of the Father’s plans” (Mark 13:32). But Jesus does offer us something in our gospel lesson today that is even more valuable.
Jesus cannot tell us how long it will be in clock time before the end, for own sakes. Imagine how devastating it would be if any one of us knew exactly how many years, or days, or minutes it would be before our death? We would become preoccupied with the countdown, and therefore miss so much of life’s joys in the meantime. But Jesus did help his followers anticipate the conditions of God’s gradual unfolding of history as He moved it surely toward its destination. Even if the time of the end was wrapped in surprise, Jesus did not want the meantime to be a surprise.
So he told us all that before the end, his followers would experience suffering for the sake of their faithfulness to God. They would be dragged before authorities, they would be betrayed by their closest friends and family, they would even suffer and die in some cases—all for the sake of their relationship to God. This may not seem like a very comforting picture of the future, but it is important to know that God does not always rescue His children from suffering. In fact, suffering may even refine faith. Every attempt by an enemy of God to destroy Christian faith by persecuting a Christian serves only to spread the message, and bear witness to the power and suffering love that God has for all humanity. So, although no one can eagerly hope to suffer for the cause of Christ, when such suffering occurs we should not say that Jesus did not warn us it would be so. So, we need not wonder if God has abandoned us when we suffer, anymore than God abandoned Jesus or the apostles or the history of faithful martyrs when they suffered.
You will often these days hear or read of some Christian author/speaker who speaks of a “rapture” of Christians before the end times, a swift and sure exodus of all believers by God that saves them from suffering. In the more fanciful of these schemes, they will imagine airplanes crashing and cars colliding because the pilot or driver of that vehicle was suddenly “raptured” up to heaven leaving the poor ones on board who are left behind to a miserable fate. It is tempting to think in terms of God rescuing His faithful ones from all suffering and persecution in this way, but that is not the teaching of Jesus in the reading for today. He clearly tells us to anticipate such suffering, as a sign that the times are progressing toward God’s destination for history. Such suffering means “we are not there yet,” but we are closer than we were before.
So, take heart, even if the horizon is not visible from the limited perspective of the back seat. The destination will make the journey worth the wait. The suffering may be difficult, but it will not last forever. And in the end, like a grandmother’s wide and loving embrace at the end of long drive, God will welcome us all home. And on that good day, we will say to each other, “This is a great thanksgiving, a wonderful feast, it is a taste of heaven.”