Advent 1, 30 November 2025
Readings: Isaiah 2.1-5; Romans 13.11-14; Matthew 24.36-44
Theme: Your Kingdom Come
Each year, Advent marks the beginning of the church’s new year. It is the time when we switch from reading one Gospel to reading another, according to a three-year repeating cycle. This year, in our Sunday services, we will be reading the Gospel of Matthew. Central to this Gospel is the theme that Jesus inaugurates God’s Kingdom. With the coming of the Messiah (Christ), the promises made in the Old Testament have now been fulfilled. To announce the Kingdom is to proclaim that Jesus, the Lord, has come and will return. This is the core message of the Gospel of Matthew. This is clearly in evidence in our Gospel for this first Sunday of Advent in which, the Lord, who has already come, is prophesying about his return at a time that is only known by the Father, and not even, by the Son. This is why we are to be ready at all times, because we do not know when it will happen.
This theme of the dual coming of the Kingdom in Jesus is also the theme which accompanies our year of renewal in the chaplaincy, which is meant to underline and to make explicit just what our main focus should always be. It is neither necessary, nor indeed possible, for us to do everything. The first and chief purpose of the chaplaincy is to proclaim that Jesus is Lord; to proclaim God’s Kingdom in the first advent and the final return of Jesus: ‘Your Kingdom Come’. Whenever and wherever we do this, we fulfil our purpose as church. This is the principle reason why the Anglican Chaplaincy exists on the Costa del Sol.
Crucially, this means that we are not merely here for ourselves as a surrogate form of community service for expats or as an organization for trips, cultural events and for entertainment. These activities are the legitimate focus of many of the other expat groups in the area and they quite rightly concentrate their work on these areas. Yet, for the chaplaincy, the proclamation of the Kingdom of Jesus is where we are to concentrate our efforts. All our other activities need to serve this principal and foundational purpose.
This is why the ‘dual sense of coming’ is important for us to grasp. It means that the message brought by Jesus should illuminate how we are to understand our lives as suspended, as it were, between the two poles of Jesus’s first coming in the flesh and his second coming in his final return as the resurrected one in his full glory.
Such a time line is fundamental to Matthew’s Gospel, and indeed to the New Testament in general, especially to Paul’s writings as well, because while the Lord Jesus has already come, he will also come again at the announcement of the end of time. This is the moment of the final judgment and it frames, together with his first coming, the beginning and end of the specifically Christian account of history. God will come again, and that coming will be the end of the world as we have known it.
This means that coming to know Jesus and his Kingdom requires of us that we come to know the promises of the Scriptures and how it is that Jesus fulfils these promises within this time line.
It was for this reason that groups of people first met on the Costa del Sol fifty years ago to form the Chaplaincy. It is also why, during our year of renewal, we are dedicating this year to studying the life and teachings of Paul in the ‘Paul Book Club’, so as to deepen our understanding of just what it means for us here and now to proclaim God’s Kingdom in this dual perspective of the first coming of Jesus, the Lord, in the flesh, and in his final glorious return in his resurrected body. The path to fulfil our purpose as a chaplaincy began with the prayerful study of the Scriptures, and, in this special year, we seek to renew our chaplaincy around this specific focus again, so that we can clearly announce this dual perspective on the Kingdom as ‘already here’ and ‘still yet to come’ in its fullness at the end of time with the return of Jesus as the true Lord of history.
That is why, week in and week out, we prayerfully read and study the Scriptures, in English, so as to be able to proclaim effectively that ‘Jesus is Lord’, and it is also why each year, we concentrate in our services on a particular Gospel so as to get to know Jesus better from that evangelist’s perspective. This allows us to better realize that the picture portrayed by each of the Gospel writers is slightly different. Each evangelist accentuates their portrait of Jesus from a particular angle. It may depend on the community to which they are addressing their writing, or on the particular theology of the evangelist based on their reading of Jewish history and the cultural contexts within which they are situated. Their own closeness to Jesus and the eye witnesses that they would have been in contact with are also important factors which determine the shape and the style of their Gospels.
For this reason, it is important for us to gain a good sense of the contours of the portrayals of the person of Jesus sketched in each of the Gospels that we study each year. In doing this, we gain a fuller picture of Jesus and his Kingdom than if we simply concentrated on one part of the Scriptures, one Gospel, for example, and took that as the whole story. All parts of Scripture need to be brought into conversation with one another so that our own picture of Jesus and his Kingdom is more balanced and provides a richer portrayal of the dynamic nature of God’s Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus.
As we begin this new year, therefore, let us recommit ourselves to better knowing the Scriptures because, as one of the greatest biblical scholars and translators of all time, St Jerome, commented in his fourth century study of Isaiah, “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”