Jesus’ depiction of the coming “of the Son of Man” stands in pretty stark contrast to popular ideas of how things might end, or at least of how the race my move into a new kind of future.
We largely live among the “don’t worry, be happy” crowd – many of whom do not believe a word of the testimony concerning the last things, while others of them accept some notion of Divine judgment and some version or another of eternal or “heavenly” life, but who are at least implicitly and often explicitly convinced that such eventualities are of no real consequence, on the assumption that “everybody goes to heaven”, an assertion informed by a conviction that a loving God would never condemn one of His beloved children to eternal damnation. Ironically, these latter will often admit of particular exceptions to the “nobody goes to hell” doctrine (such as, guess who!!), although its far from clear how they avoid having to reconcile that with their “no loving God would do that” principle.
No small number of them seem to believe that there is a corresponding (and more urgent!) mission to build heaven on earth by advancing peace and justice in all the various communities of the world – and those who reject the “religious” framework of such a worldview very often satisfy their need for moral self-respect by aiming for a utopian future built on even thinner gruel. Either way, whether it is characterized as heaven on earth, or as a final state of social justice wrought from a conflict to overthrow “the patriarchy”, the goal of human history and the struggle it ensues, for quite possibly a majority of the people populating the contemporary Western world, seems to consist of a human-engineered and executed utopia – or near utopia. Jesus doesn’t seem to see it that way.
In the passages immediately preceding the text of today’s Gospel, he spoke of the expected persecution of the Church, and of terrible tribulations in the world, and in today’s reading he tells us that the Son of Man’s coming will be sudden and unexpected; that it will interrupt the normal events of daily life. He also says that some will be “taken” and some will be “left”, and admonishes his followers to remain “awake” and “prepared”. It’s not entirely clear to me what it means in that context to be “taken”, but to be “left” sounds nothing like living in utopia, as Jesus compares that day to the day of Noah, when the unprepared people were not awake to the judgment of God, and “They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.”
What “the world” builds of its own accord is not heaven on earth, but a poor substitute that invariably folds like the house of cards that it is. The goal of the Christian should not be to vainly attempt to turn the earth into heaven, but simply to strive to be, oneself and collectively, the presence of heaven on earth. So, walk in the light of the Lord, which is our armor!