The Second Coming (Parousia)

As the apostles watched Christ ascend, two angels gave them the promise on which all Christian hope of the future rests: "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). This same Jesus — not a symbol, a spirit of progress, or a gradual improvement of the world, but the crucified and risen Lord in person. The word the New Testament uses, parousia, was the term for a royal visit: the arrival of the king in his city.

The first coming was hidden — a cave, a manger, thirty obscure years. The second will be the opposite: "as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:27), and "every eye shall see him" (Revelation 1:7). The Creed gives the Church's whole teaching in one line — "And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no end" (Creed, article 7). With His coming arrive the-general-resurrection, the-last-judgment, and the renewal of all creation.

Christ was asked for the schedule and refused to give one: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only" (Matthew 24:36). The Orthodox Church has taken Him at His word. It reads the signs He named — wars, false christs, the preaching of the Gospel to all nations — with sobriety, but it has never endorsed a timetable, an end-times chart, or a candidate for the last day, and the long history of confident predictions, every one of them wrong so far, is its own sermon. Speculative systems about the millennium and the Antichrist are treated separately under antichrist-and-chiliasm.

Why the delay? St. Peter answers that God's patience is mercy: the Lord "is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). But the day will come "as a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2), and so the Gospel's practical command is a single word: watch. "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour" (Matthew 25:13). In Orthodox spiritual teaching this ripens into nepsis — a wakeful, attentive heart — because readiness for the last day is not calendrical but moral: the bridesmaids' problem was not information but oil.

Here is the strangest and most wonderful Orthodox note on the subject. In the Liturgy's great prayer of offering, the priest remembers "all those things which have come to pass for us: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand… the second and glorious coming" — remembering, as if already accomplished, something still future. The Liturgy stands where time folds: the Eucharist is a real foretaste of the Kingdom, and every communion is a small Parousia. By long tradition many church buildings face east, toward the dawn — the whole congregation oriented, literally, toward His coming.

This is why one of the earliest recorded Christian prayers is not "delay" but "come": Maranatha — "Our Lord, come," as the ancient Church used it (1 Corinthians 16:22) — and why the Bible ends with the same cry: "Even so, come, Lord Jesus" (Revelation 22:20). For those who love Christ, the Parousia is not doom but the arrival of the Bridegroom. The Church's eschatology, done right, produces neither panic nor prediction, but a life lived leaning toward the east.