"Like a Thief"

Matthew 24:36-44

The first vacation Jan and I took together was to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.  While there we took an all-night train to Palanque, one of the Mayan ruins.  All day we toured the ruins, exploring the tunnels, climbing over massive stones and studying the exhibits.  Late that night we caught the train back to Merida. Exhausted, we collapsed in the only seats we could find and went instantly to sleep.  The next thing I remember was Jan pulling on my arm and saying, "Wake up, wake up!  My purse is gone. We've been robbed."  I sprang to my feet and ran up and down the aisle eyeing the passengers suspiciously.  Seeing a porter I tried to explain our plight in unintelligible Spanish, "La bolsa de me esposa no esta agui. Esta…whoosh!"  The porter could only look at me with total bewilderment, smile and walk on. Anyone who has been robbed knows what an upsetting experience it is.  For this reason, it's somewhat disturbing to hear in our reading from Matthew that God's coming to us is like the coming of a thief.  "Keep awake," says Jesus.  "The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."  He will come to us like a thief in the night.

Surely likening God to a thief is not the way we tend to think of God.  If we can pick and chose our images, we'd probably rather think of God as the Good Shepherd, watching over his flock.  Or who doesn't warm to the idea that God is like the patient, forgiving father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, or like a mother who protects and cares for her own?  Yet thrown in with these comforting images is the notion of God as like a thief.  Actually Mathew is not the only one to employ this imagery.  Paul warns the Thessalonians, 'Don't let God jump you unawares like a thief in the night." Twice in Revelation we read: "I will come like a thief."  God, a thief?  What an unsettling image for God! 

And maybe that's the point.   Texts like this one aim to startle us out of complacency.  They jolt us out of absorption with our present lives and re-orient us to God's promised future. Each of the illustrations Matthew employs in today's reading depict people engaged in ordinary, daily activities. He reminds the church of the folks in days of Noah just going about their business--eating, drinking, marrying--when suddenly, unexpectedly they were swept away. Or, Matthew continues, consider two workers in the field or two women grinding corn—just people engaged in ordinary affairs of life--when suddenly one is taken and one left. Yet again, imagine a householder, it could be any of us, who turns out the light, pulls up the covers and settles in for a good night's sleep. Only on this night a thief breaks in at an unexpected hour.  Each of these illustrations heightens the sense of mystery about the coming of the Lord.  We can't predict when the Lord comes, but we can be certain that God will come.

In a contemporary poem titled "Otherwise," the poet Jane Kenyon tells about living through an ordinary day knowing that one day it will be otherwise. 

I got out bed

On two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

Cereal, sweet

Milk, ripe, flawless

peach.  It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate.  It might

 have been otherwise.

 We ate dinner together

 at a table with silver

 candlesticks.  It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

Matthew wrote to a church that was beginning to doubt that the day would ever come when the world would be otherwise. Their expectations for the Lord's return had grown tepid. Their hope for God's promised future had waned.  They had wearied of waiting for something that seemed forever delayed. Because of the church's waning expectation, Matthew attempts to jump start their anticipation for the One who is to come. Keep awake, Matthew warned. The Lord will come without warning, like a thief.  And then everything will be otherwise.

But if the church in Matthew's day was growing skeptical that the promised Day of the Lord would come, how much harder it is for us to hope for a world that is fundamentally otherwise than the one we know. Writing the forward for an Advent journal, Erskine Clarke wrote that "the spiritual crisis of our contemporary Western world is rooted nowhere more deeply than in our loss of tomorrow and any sense that history is moving toward a new day."  The reasons for this loss of a positive vision of the future are many:  an economy that focuses almost entirely on short term gain; the threat of war and terrorism, apocalyptic climate changes that threaten the earth we love. The fear of exploding populations competing for diminishing resources. "All of these forces," he concludes, "join hands and circle tomorrow so that the future seems cut off from us and human history appears devoid of purpose or direction." 

Yet in the midst of today's spiritual crisis comes these startling Advent proclamations about the coming reign of God.  We hear a counter-cultural cry to wake up, be alert because the Son of Man--read a Jesus-shaped God--will come at an unexpected hour like a thief in the night.  Some have exploited these warnings in Matthew to create a sense of fear and dread. But Matthew is seeking to evoke vigilance, not fear.  He intends to creation anticipation, not dread.  He wants to startle us into faithful lives shaped by the vision of a God who is coming like a thief. Coming to snatch the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.  God is coming to snatch power away from the generals, the tyrants and tycoons and give it to the poor, the oppressed and the hungry.  God is coming to take possession of the nations' weapons of mass destruction and turn them into instruments of peace. God is coming to steal the nations' blueprints of destruction and turn them into plans for healing. God will rob every heart of the desire for revenge, the instinct to hate and the passion to hurt. God is coming to plunder the board rooms and the corporate bank accounts of their greed and selfish gain and turn them into an apparatus for justice.  Don't let the dream die, the vision perish the hope vanish.  No one knows the day or the hour so keep awake. 

Here's the bottom line:  The world belongs to God.  The world has fallen away from God. God intends to take it back...Even if God has to steal it!