Between Ordinary Life and Cosmic Revelation: A Reflection on 2 Thessalonians 1:10-2:2 and Luke 17:26-37
The Early Expectation and What It Meant
The Thessalonians were shaken because they believed the day of the Lord has come. This wasn’t abstract anxiety—they expected the imminent, visible return of Christ and the restoration of all creation. Paul addresses genuine confusion: some had abandoned ordinary life, believing the end was upon them. Christ’s words in Luke work from the opposite angle: life will look utterly ordinary—eating, drinking, marrying, planting, building—right up until the moment everything is revealed.
But what were they expecting? Not the destruction of creation but its transfiguration. Not escape from matter but matter itself glorified. The earliest Christians expected the resurrection of the dead, the renewal of heaven and earth, the restoration of all things to their proper relation with God—what the Greek Fathers called apokatastasis, the restoration of creation to its original goodness and beyond.
The Eschatological Reality: What Revelation Actually Is
Christ’s return is not the end of the world but the full manifestation of what the world truly is: creation charged with divine glory, matter united to divine life, death destroyed from within, all things gathered into the love that created them.
St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that the entire cosmos is engaged in a movement toward God, a cosmic liturgy in which all creation offers itself back to its Creator.[1] The Incarnation inaugurated this cosmic transformation—when the Word became flesh, divine and human natures united without confusion, and this union is the destiny of all creation. Not just individual souls escaping matter, but the cosmos itself transfigured.[2]
The resurrection of Christ was not merely Jesus returning to life but death itself being destroyed from within. When Christ died, He entered death fully and broke it open. The resurrection vindicates Beauty and Goodness as ultimate reality—not wishful thinking but the actual ontological structure of existence. Evil, violence, corruption—these are parasitic, they have no being in themselves.[3] The cross and resurrection prove that love is more real than hatred, life stronger than death, and creation’s destiny is not annihilation but glorification.
This is what the lightning flash reveals: the universe as it truly is, charged with divine presence, matter transfigured, all darkness burned away not by destruction but by the overwhelming presence of infinite love.
The Beautiful Restoration: Gregory of Nyssa and the Fathers
St. Gregory of Nyssa, following the apostolic witness that God wills all to be saved, taught that divine love will ultimately draw all creation back to itself. Not through coercion—God never violates human freedom—but through the irresistible beauty of infinite love made fully visible. When reality manifests completely, when the veil is torn away and we see divine love as it truly is, how could anyone finally refuse it?
Gregory speaks of a purgatorial fire that is not vindictive punishment but divine love itself, burning away everything that cannot stand in the presence of infinite goodness. Like gold refined in a furnace, the soul is separated from the dross of sin and death through this encounter with love. The process is painful because we have built ourselves around illusions, false identities, violence, and suppression—and these cannot survive the presence of truth.
St. Isaac the Syrian writes with stunning boldness: “I say that those who are suffering in hell are suffering in being scourged by love… It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it.”
The fire of Gehenna, Isaac suggests, is not God’s absence but God’s presence experienced as torment by those who have built their entire existence on refusing love. But divine love never gives up, never stops working toward restoration. This is the Christian hope: not that some are saved while others are eternally damned, but that divine love is so powerful, so beautiful, so utterly unrelenting that it will ultimately win every heart freely offered.
Noah, Lot, and the Disruption That Serves Restoration
When Genesis says the earth was filled with violence, this wasn’t arbitrary divine anger. Violence erupts when humanity collectively refuses the work of integration, when we live entirely on the surface—all doing, no being, all construction, no depth. The flood is divine love refusing to let humanity continue in corruption that destroys them and everything around them. Not vindictive destruction but painful interruption that serves ultimate restoration.
Noah walked with God—not just external obedience but relationship, presence, communion. He heard the divine voice when others had drowned it out. He did the inner work of staying awake. But notice: Noah’s righteousness didn’t just save Noah. He preserved life itself, carried creation through the waters of judgment into renewal. His faithfulness served cosmic purposes beyond his individual salvation.
Lot’s wife turned back, trying to cling to a life that was already ending, attempting to preserve an identity built on denial. When she looked back, she became salt—a pillar of what happens when you try to preserve what was never real in the first place. You cannot carry the false self into the Kingdom. The performed identity, the life built on suppression and violence, dissolves when love fully manifests.
The Tension You’re Living In: Already and Not Yet
Here’s the paradox both Paul and Christ hold before you: The Kingdom is already within you, already growing, already real—and its full manifestation is still to come.
You are already participating in the resurrection, already being transfigured, already communing with the divine life that will be fully revealed. St. Paul says the Thessalonians are being glorified in Christ while Christ is glorified in them—present tense, happening now. The faith that forms you toward love is already the same reality that will be unveiled when Christ returns in glory.
But the full restoration hasn’t come yet. Death still operates. Corruption still ravages creation. Violence still erupts. The complete transfiguration of matter, the resurrection of all the dead, the burning away of every false thing, the full manifestation of divine love permeating every atom of creation—this is still future, still promised, still coming like lightning flashing from east to west.
You cannot know when. The Thessalonians were wrong to think the day had come. But Christ warns against the opposite error: being so absorbed in ordinary life that you sleepwalk through existence, never waking to the reality already present, never doing the work that prepares you to stand when love fully manifests.
What You’re Being Called to Do
Live awake to the Kingdom already present within ordinary life, while preparing for its full revelation.
The two grinding grain, the two in one bed—they live apparently identical lives. But one is awake, doing the inner work of transformation, growing in love, being formed into someone capable of standing in the full presence of divine glory. The other sleepwalks, performs life without presence, never faces what needs to be faced, never integrates what’s been denied.
When lightning flashes—when reality fully manifests—it will simply reveal what’s been becoming true all along.
This isn’t about escaping ordinary life or waiting in crisis mode. These ordinary moments are charged with ultimate meaning. This meal, this conversation, this choice—you are being formed right now. The work of facing your denied anger, integrating your suppressed fear, choosing love from wholeness rather than performing goodness from suppression—this is participation in the cosmic transformation already underway.
St. Gregory of Nyssa writes that the soul has no ceiling, no upper limit. We grow infinitely into the infinite God. The work you do now in ordinary time—the faithfulness, the prayer, the integration, the love—this forms you into someone capable of receiving the infinite when it fully reveals itself.
Noah walked with God in ordinary time, so when the extraordinary came, he was ready. Abraham maintained relationship with divine presence through daily faithfulness, so when the Lord came to Mamre to reveal His plans, Abraham could intercede. The pattern is ancient and consistent: faithful preparation in ordinary time, sudden manifestation of what’s been true all along.
Where the Eagles Gather
The disciples ask, Where, Lord? Christ answers: Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.
Reality manifests where reality actually is. Not where rumors point, not where anxious voices claim secret knowledge, not where manipulators say Look here! Truth reveals itself to those formed to recognize it. The eagles—those with awakened vision—find the body because they have been trained to see what’s real.
You prepare for revelation not by obsessing over timing but by growing toward love now. By facing what you’ve denied. By choosing presence over performance. By living awake to the Kingdom already within you, already growing, already real—knowing that what is partially visible now will be fully revealed when heaven and earth unite, when matter itself is transfigured, when death is finally destroyed, when divine love permeates all creation so completely that every false thing burns away and only what is real remains.
And the Fathers dare to hope—beautifully, audaciously—that divine love is so powerful that even Gehenna will ultimately serve restoration, that the fire which torments will ultimately heal, that love will win every heart freely given when its full beauty is finally, completely, irresistibly revealed.
The Kingdom is within you. Live awake to it. When the lightning flashes, you will see clearly what has been true all along.
The Greater Horizon 