In some fundamentalist-type religious groups, you hear about the second coming all the time, usually pointing to something going on in the world today as a sure sign that “Jesus is coming soon!” so you’d better “Repent or perish!” But in others (probably most), you hear little, maybe because talk of judgment and Jesus’ second coming is usually associated with the kind of church mentioned above, and most of us don’t want to be connected to that.
But, truth be told, Jesus spent quite a bit of time talking about his next coming, and our text for Sunday comes in the middle of a long section filled with Jesus’ warnings about the end of time. In our passage Jesus uses a wedding illustration to make two points: (1) His coming will be sudden, so (2) We must be prepared.
Most of us are quite overwhelmed with just trying to make it to the weekend, so we have little time or energy to think much beyond that. But we must. At the risk of sounding cliché, much of the stuff we spend our time on won’t matter a hundred years from now. But our relationship with Jesus and how it affected our lives will matter a lot. In fact, it’ll be all that matters.