One of the oldest beliefs that Christians hold dear is the notion that Jesus will come again. In the Nicene Creed, the doctrine stands right alongside belief in the resurrection itself: On the third day he rose againin accordance with the Scriptures;he ascended into heavenand is seated at the right handof the Father.He will come again in glory ... Expectation of the Second Coming, or parousia, as it’s known in Greek, is present in the earliest letters of Paul, written just a few years after the death of Jesus, and remained strong a generation or two later among the various gospel writers, so that Mark, whom scholars consider to be the originator of the oldest of the gospels, quotes Jesus as promising his listeners that "there are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power." The phrase "maranatha," or "Lord, Come!" was a familiar greeting among the early followers of Jesus, who anticipated seeing the messiah return in their own lifetime. And for over two thousand years, the teaching that Christ will come again and that his arrival is imminent has remained an official part of Christian dogma.

But within a relatively short time after the death of Jesus, many began to realize that he might not be coming back anytime soon. The weeks turned into months, and the months turned into decades, and still the heavens didn’t open. Life continued; business went on pretty much as usual, despite the enormous personal impact that Jesus bar Joseph had on the people of Palestine during his brief ministry there. And the advice of the master, "take no thought for the morrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself" could no longer be interpreted quite so literally as the church settled in for what looked like an increasingly long wait. What began as an impromptu band of disciples intoxicated with the sense that love was transforming their world from the inside out, prompting them to share their worldly goods in giddy anticipation that God would provide for all, was on its way to becoming a bureaucracy with hierarchies of bishops, presbyters and deacons, very much involved in earthly affairs, with considerable property and a position to protect.

The question therefore naturally arises what kind of reception Jesus might receive if he walked into any of the churches that celebrate his memory this Easter morning. Here, I suspect, we would ask him to fill out a name tag, give him a blue mug, try to sign him up for the newsletter and maybe enlist him on a committee. Perhaps someone might even talk with him during the coffee hour and ask him about his Spanish-sounding name. No doubt, we would try to welcome Jesus into our congregation, on our own terms and in our own way. But we would also find methods to keep him at a comfortable distance without getting too close too fast or allowing him to perturb the social equilibrium that every institution uses to police its own boundaries. The truth remains that people change only as much as they want to. So even if Jesus were somehow elected president of our congregation, I doubt if he’d be able to change the color of the pew cushions here, much less make any more dramatic changes in how we think and live, unless you and I were somehow ready to respond to the summons.

Most authors agree that if Jesus did come again as promised, we’d probably find ways to disregard his message and dismiss him. That’s the premise behind a novel by Morris West titled The Clowns of God written twenty-five years ago, at the height of Cold War, where a hypothetical French Pope named Jean Marie Barette has a private vision of the apocalypse. He sees the end days coming, the obliteration of the planet beneath a mushroom cloud, and believes that God has given him a revelation into the future because the Second Coming is at hand. Furiously, he begins to work on an extraordinary encyclical to warn humankind of the disaster that’s in store, a letter he intends to send privately to heads of state before publishing to the world at large. But before the Pope can do so, his secretary discovers a copy of the draft on his boss’s desk and secretly sends copies of it to the Curia. The Cardinals are horrified, naturally. They’re certain that the Pope has lost his mind and urge him to suppress the document. When he refuses, they call in a team of psychiatrists to certify him as insane, and threaten to release an unflattering report on his mental condition unless Jean Marie agrees to abdicate and enter the seclusion of a monastery. Much of the novel revolves around the question of whether any genuinely sane individual has private visions of Armageddon and whether any person as important and responsible as the Pope ought really to believe in all the ancient myths and legends that accumulated around an itinerant and probably illiterate first century rabbi. Much to his credit, Jean Marie himself worries whether he hasn’t become delusional or lost his bearings. And this element of healthy skepticism and self-doubt seems so reasonable and well-grounded that the reader is left wondering which is crazier: a Pope who says the end of the world is coming, or a church that fails to see nuclear weapons as the affront to God we know these devices to be. The point is that if we take his words seriously, Jesus does challenge our everyday definitions of what’s considered normal and who might be deranged.

The Clowns of God is not a very good novel, I have to warn you, nor very original. Other authors have delved into the same theme with more subtlety and greater depth. Dostoevski, for instance, explored the question of how Jesus would be treated on his return in his classic tale The Brothers Karamazov. The character Ivan spins out the story in a chapter titled "The Grand Inquisitor," where he imagines that Christ has come back to the city of Seville during the era of the Spanish Inquisition. The setting is the town square, where only the day before, a hundred heretics have been burnt alive. Onto the scene, Jesus comes. He doesn’t arrive in clouds of glory, in Ivan’s fable, nor does lightening split the sky. Rather he appears again in human and humble form, yet, Ivan says, "people are drawn to him by an invincible force, they flock to him, surround him, follow him. He passes silently among them with a quiet smile of infinite compassion," until he finds himself face to face with the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, who arrests him at once. In the privacy of a prison cell, his Eminence proceeds to interrogate the captive, asking him why he’s decided to return after all these centuries if not to cause trouble and undermine the work of the church. For the church, the Cardinal declares, has made people happy. It gives them what they want: mystery, miracle and authority, a banner they can follow and an altar to which they can bow down in obedience. For obedience is all that feeble human nature can aspire to, the Cardinal says; he reprimands Jesus for promising people freedom, for asking them to love rather than merely to submit, for requiring them to be responsible when all they want is to follow the rules and be given absolution when they break them. And Jesus stands silently, listening to the allegations without refuting any of charges. Finally the Inquisitor tells the prisoner that he will be burnt with the other heretics on the following day. Then wordlessly, Jesus steps forward and kisses the startled old man upon the lips and slips silently into the night.

If Jesus returned tomorrow, I wonder: would we crucify him, label him with a personality disorder, or more probably (in a congregation like ours ) just find ways to ignore him altogether? My friend Forest Whitman, a ministerial colleague in Colorado, said he once had a dream that Jesus came back on Easter and had been invited to speak at the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship. The minister introduces the guest preacher and warmly welcomes him, then before the service begins asks if there are any announcements. Of course the announcements are endless: film festivals and potluck suppers, hiking clubs and book discussions, political rallies and sing-a-longs. An hour goes by before the announcements are over, and Jesus never has time to give his sermon, but he is invited to come back next year because people are eager to hear him talk.

Would Jesus be able to break through our self-absorption any more than he could break through the preoccupations of his listeners two thousand years ago? Would a man who repeatedly walked into the desert of Judea to be alone with God find a place on our busy schedules filled with much more important things to do? Would his simple invitation to "follow me" be any better received now than when it was first issued?

One of my favorite newspaper columnists, Sydney J. Harris asks, "I wonder how we today would regard and treat this man with His strange and frightening and ‘impractical’ doctrines of human behavior and relationships. Would we believe and follow, any more than the masses of people in His day believed and followed?"

Would not the militarists among us assail Him as a cowardly pacifist because He urges us not to resist evil?

Would not the nationalists among us attack Him as a dangerous internationalist because He tells us we are all of one flesh?

Would not the wealthy among us castigate Him as a trouble making radical because He bars the rich from entering the kingdom of heaven?

Would not the ecclesiastics among us denounce Him as a ranting heretic because He cuts through the cords of ritual and commands us only to love God and our neighbors?

Would not the Puritans among us despise and reject Him because He eats and drinks with publicans and sinners, preferring the company of winebibbers and harlots to that of "respectable" church members?

Would not each of us in his or her own way find some part of this man’s saying and doing to be so threatening to our ways of life, so much at odds with our rooted beliefs, that we could not tolerate him for long?

And yet the wonder is that Jesus remains so fresh and relevant despite the best efforts of church and state and respectable society to tame and tone down his message. He continues to confront the mighty and strengthen the weak, to challenge our conventional ideas of what’s right and wrong, to cut through pious hypocrisy, to inspire protest against injustice, to fill the outcast and oppressed with the conviction that they are beloved and valued, and to instill hope that another kind of community is possible, one not based on violence or built on terror or subjugation of the poor but built on the solid foundation of mutual respect for the co-humanity of all its members.

Despite all the efforts of scholastics and theologians over the centuries to turn Christ into a set of abstract doctrines or catechisms to be believed and then safely forgotten, he still has the vital force of a flesh-and-blood personality. Despite our best attempts to neglect him, trivialize him, or depict him as a sentimental caricature who hangs out with sheep and little children, he remains a subversive presence in our midst. Try as we might to bury Jesus beneath layers of liturgy and under the dead weight of institutional religion, he resurfaces again in every generation, coming up livelier than ever.

That is the kind of Jesus and the kind of resurrection I believe in. Not in a supernatural event that happened long ago or a Second Coming deferred to some uncertain future date, but in the power of compassion (the power that was in Jesus and that’s in each one of us) to roll away the stone of indifference–the stone of cynicism–the stones of business-as-usual and politics-as-usual and ethics-as-usual–to generate new life and healthier relationships and a more equitable sharing of the blessings of creation, here, now, in this moment.

Amen.