“24 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’ ”” (Matt 13:24-30 ESV)

Every generation is reassessed with the benefit of hindsight. No analogies to other generations, no self-assessments “in the moment” quite work and as Christians no end game is sought but the fact of a Christ returning to a world run amok with sin. No reassurance is sought in the world’s comforts. No picture of life in community, in world theater, in composite stage, is rosy enough to overcome the fact: future generations will judge us almost with caricatures of things we this day scramble and search to understand, to speak about meaningfully, to know, and to warn of.

If we actually believe this, that being on Tomorrow’s Right Side of justice, judgment, is a matter of looking outward from a long night of the soul, from a self-assessment most rudely awakening to the bearer, from seeing the Light via seeing Christ For Us, and no talk of historical analogies quite “work” just yet: we are waiting to see how they will summarize our generation; if we actually believe this then our day’s embrace a strange urgency of His message. Our days embrace a strange Acceptance of peaceful overtones beyond any we’d bequeath ourselves, being as we are intent on solving the difficulties ourselves and seeing it all as a worker’s to-do list.

No, Christ beckons us to know Him already satiated and Complete, already post-melee and post-spree, post-war and post-peace: the urgency is simply too great. And as prophets of the times, we are each of us requested to hearken to a few Observations most sanguine and almost Impossible, were they not met with the impossible force that meets an immovable object: Jesus’ plain Humanity and Patient dying on a Cross.

No, it is no idol Christ we serve, but rather a simple or single Man who—if we’re going too gung-ho on worshipping Him alone, then remember a bit that His trope and modus operandi is repeated by saints throughout history, before and after Him—a simple Man who radiated with an Eternity and a Relevance so dramatic as to defy all attempts to cubbyhole Him as just “one man”, and a dead man at that. Dead by decree, and dying for the sins of the world.

We will learn from our progeny of all the ways life springs forth abundant, recurring motifs of Peace and Able Growth, even with those caricatures of our present day sins, our “obvious” concessions to the evil, our overlooking of the statistics about poor peoples and the working classes, our little heavens of technically-enabled warmth and houses to protect from the elements, of food on the table and relatively sane bodies of worship to join.

People are trying, and we are no exception; brushed up against Impossible odds we go Superhero because He went Superhero. People want the peace just to be around manageable themes, while He spoke of strange persecutions and impossible odds. People do well to forgive someone this day, just to see what a Radical Message it is, but one that opens the doorway to blissful sight into our own soul… itself Forgiven. People almost forget the joy of the father around the Prodigal daughter or son, who spent not a smidgeon of Hate on the compromised nature of his son or daughter’s prior lifestyles. It was a strange Accomplishment of a Forgiveness that was more joyous than all the life amongst the cess-pools of indulgence and of caprice. This is ours to own this day, so that of our generation a few knowing historians might say, and then there were the Christians… and then there were those with a Corpus behind them called Sainthood, called Christ-like, called Peace.