Daily Reading for December 7 • The Second Sunday of Advent
O God our Father, we thank you for your servant John,
who like a burning lamp and faithful to his calling,
announced the advent of our Lord
and people rejoiced for a while in his light,
for he was just a witness
to the greater light of your Son Jesus Christ,
the light of the World.
May we too through the enabling of your Son Jesus,
be like lights in a dark world,
to lead the people into the knowledge of Jesus
our Lord and the light of the world.
Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, in Our Modern Services of the Anglican Church of Kenya.
The God of hope is himself the coming God (Isa. 35:4; 40:5). When God comes in his glory, he will fill the universe with his radiance, everyone will see him, and he will swallow up death for ever. This future is God’s mode of being in history. The power of the future is his power in time. His eternity is not timeless simultaneity; it is the power of his future over every historical time. It is therefore logical that it was not only God himself who was experienced as ‘the Coming One’, but that the conveyers of hope who communicate his coming and prepare men and women for his parousia should also be given this title: the Messiah, the Son of man, and Wisdom. The coming God is older than the various expectations of the messiah and the Son of man. These live from the hope for him. By virtue of hope for the coming God, the expected future acquires an inexhaustible ‘added value’ over against present and past in the experience of time. Sub specie aeternitatis not all times are of equal significance. Nor is time experienced as the power of transience, like Chronos, who devours his own children. If God’s being is in his coming, then the future that comes to meet us must become the theological paradigm of transcendence.
From Jürgen Moltmann’s The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, translated by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).