Matthew 24:36 But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
It’s an old joke that we still see on bumper stickers and T-shirts: “Jesus is coming. Look busy.”
Earlier in this chapter of Matthew, the disciples come to Jesus, asking him to tell them exactly when the temple will be destroyed and when the world will end. Some terrible things will happen before the Son of Man returns, Jesus tells them, but nobody knows when this event will occur, not even Jesus himself. Consequently, because the “end times” are going to look like any other, we should live as though the world were ending tomorrow.
Beyond being a theological imperative to faithfully serve God—to “look busy,” as it were—Jesus’ words strike me as awfully good advice. We cannot know when the world will end, so we might do well to pray, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “Teach us to care and not to care.”
MOVING FORWARD: Pray this for the next week: God, teach us to live with an eye toward the future, but teach us also that our lives are brief. Teach us to live in the moment as well as in that Eternal Now that stretches beyond us. Amen.
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