Week 22 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: 1 Thessalonians 5.1-6, 9-11; Psalm 26/27; Luke 4.31-37

A pregnant woman is, as we say, 'expecting', and so she will be looking out for the moment when her labour begins. It will not be a complete surprise. It may come sooner than anticipated, of course, or it may come later, to test her patience further. But come it will.

This is the metaphor Paul uses to speak about the return of Jesus. We live with this conviction, he says, and so must keep a sense of readiness, staying alert and sober. The world is pregnant with the One who will return even if we do not know the exact day or hour of his return. But come he will. The psalm expresses the same conviction: I believe I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.

It will not be surprising then if the 'unclean spirits', with whom Jesus grapples in the gospel, should attack this conviction in us. There are various fronts on which they might attack it. Jesus has not returned yet, has he, after all these centuries, so how likely is it that he will turn up today, or next week, or next year? A respectable and grown-up religion should be one that makes a difference to human lives now, not one living out of a promise of something happening in the unknown future. That merely draws people's attention away from present challenges and problems, which are enormous today all across the world. Why waste energy in the direction of something that - let's be honest - is unlikely to happen in our lifetime? Staying sober and alert at every moment is a tall order for the kind of creature we are: it is practically impossible considering our attention span, our various physical and emotional needs that demand attention, the many other interesting and worthwhile things we can and should be doing.

But let us spend some more time with Paul's metaphor because it is itself, well, pregnant! It is about a future event, yes, but it is also a very present reality, a life already underway though not yet visible. Being pregnant makes a huge difference already in the lives of the woman who is expecting, of the father of the child, and of others who will be intimately affected by the new person's arrival.  Keeping our eye on the event that is coming enables us to live well now, to stay sober and alert, to engage with the problems there are so that we will have prepared for the arrival of the one who comes. We need to prepare well in many different ways in order to welcome him or her.

'The creation waits with eager longing', Paul says elsewhere, 'in a great act of giving birth'. The world is pregnant, a new life is underway within it, a life for now hidden with Christ in God. But people who believe are already one with this new life and are living from it. We can add this to the metaphor: the Church, the community of those who actively look for the coming of Christ, is therefore like the womb of the world, the place in which the life of the future kingdom is already present, in a kind of embryonic way.

But this shows us also the main limitation of the metaphor of pregnancy, the point at which the analogy breaks down. Whereas the growing child lives for now from its mother, exercising all its vital functions in complete dependence on her, the life of faith means living from the One who is coming to birth in us, the One with whom the world and the Church is pregnant. The direction of dependence is reversed. It is not that the child lives from the mother but that the mother lives from the child.

The one who is coming commands all unclean spirits with his word of authority and power, and he can prevent and remove all their ways of damaging human beings. When he does come in the clear and visible fullness of that authority and power, it will be for the world's healing, for human well-being, for the establishment of justice, for eternal life in the land of the living God. Living with that conviction, being pregnant in that way, we will strive to stay alert and sober, and to strengthen already, here and now, the life of the kingdom that is coming.