The Second Coming of christ as an awakening

“Do you believe in the Second Coming of Christ?” my mother asked during her last visit, a question that lingered long after she left.

I paused before answering. A sly grin came across my face, not because I doubted my faith, but because I no longer see that question through the same lens I once did. And I knew what her first impression of my response would be.

I told her that I don’t necessarily believe the Second Coming will be Jesus literally descending from a cloud, but rather an awakening: a gradual unfolding of divine consciousness within humanity. A remembering of the Christ who has never truly left.

If you haven’t yet read Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, open a new tab and order it! Rohr writes that Jesus and the Christ are two witnesses to the same divine mystery — one historical, one cosmic. Jesus, the man, revealed the Christ: the eternal, primordial pattern of divine love woven through all creation. To recognize this is to move from a faith of waiting to a faith of beholding, from passivity to participation.

The Second Coming, I challenge you to consider then, is not a single event we must anticipate, but an evolution of seeing — a collective awakening into Christ consciousness. It is the moment we realize that love is not returning to us, but rising from within us.

Rohr speaks of the “old dying paradigm,” a world still circling the wagons around anger, domination, and fear. (The opposite of love isn’t hate, but fear—more on that later.) We see it everywhere: in polarizing politics that divide, in religions that exclude, in cultures that feed on outrage and scarcity. But death is not the end; it is a passage.

Just as Christ’s crucifixion revealed that resurrection only comes through surrender, this global unraveling may be the very doorway through which a new consciousness is born. The systems that harm, oppress, and exploit cannot sustain life, and so they inevitably crumble. The light is breaking through the cracks, and we are called to help pull at the threads, to unravel the old garment so that something more whole may be woven. We are living in the slow dawn of resurrection. Not the spectacle of clouds splitting open, but the quiet unveiling of hearts turning toward mercy, truth, and unity.

Jesus never wasted energy condemning personal sin. (Say it with me: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” [Romans 8:1]). Instead, He confronted corporate sin — the oppressive systems that disguised cruelty as righteousness.

Scripture reminds us in Ephesians 6:12:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Christ’s battle was not with people and their personal wrongdoings, but with the unseen structures that deform love, the very ones still crouching at the door of every human heart (Genesis 4:7). Even as we recognize these forces, we must remember that our first responsibility is inward: to cleanse our own hearts, to “clean up our side of the street,” before trying to repair the world.

Dr. Curt Thompson writes that to love is “to know and to be known.” This is where healing begins — in the sacred act of witnessing one another (and oneself!) without judgment, and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in return. Love, in this way, becomes the mirror through which the divine sees itself again.

Once you invite love in, i’m talking about the full, broadly-sweeping love that sees without judgment, heals without criticism, and invites rather than excludes, you become light.

Jesus, as we should recall, is the Light of the world (John 8:12), the light by which we see. And remember: the larger your light, the greater the shadow it can cast. The more we awaken to Christ consciousness, the more vigilant we must become about the subtle ways our egos seek to claim credit for the light. As Romans 5:5 reminds us, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” — all of us.

Awareness is not immunity. Spiritual maturity is not moral superiority. To walk in light is to remain humble enough to see where we’ve stepped out of alignment and to pray for restoration to the original path of love. As Carl Jung said, we must constantly name, not judge, our shadows. This is why self-examination is not self-condemnation; it’s repentance in its truest form, a turning back toward the Light.

The Christ within us continually invites us to return, again and again, until our being becomes transparent to divine love and we radiate the grace we were given at first. And that love, once embodied, naturally overflows. It is what empowers us to confront injustice not with rage, but with radiant clarity — not from the wound, but from the wellspring of God’s grace.

The Awakening Within

If the Second Coming is an awakening, then the question becomes: What are we awakening to? How do we heal? What do we do as Christ-followers?

We awaken to the truth that Christ is not somewhere else — not in a distant heaven, nor trapped in the pages of the past — but pulsing through every cell of creation.

We awaken to the truth that to love one another is not an ethical command, but a cosmic remembrance of who we are (Imago Dei).

We awaken to the knowing that redemption is not won by fear, but revealed through presence.

Our work, then, is not to fight the world’s darkness as if it were outside of us, but to name our darkness and become so full of light that darkness cannot find a foothold within us. The transformation of the world begins with the transformation of our own consciousness.

When Jesus overturned the tables in the temple, He did not do so from hatred, but from alignment. His anger was clean, His love unshakable. This is the invitation: to embody that same fierce tenderness that exposes what is false and restores what is true, not waging war on flesh, but sharpening our spiritual eyes to awaken to the paradigms that subvert love and harm creation.

So, perhaps the Second Coming is not ahead of us at all. Perhaps the descent described in Mark 13 is a global consciousness descending onto the minds of His creation from the Universal Love of God. Perhaps it is happening now, in the quiet revolutions of the heart, in the courage to forgive, in the mothers who choose tenderness over control, in the communities who build belonging instead of walls.

Every moment love interrupts fear, the Christ returns.
Every time grace softens judgment, the Christ returns.
Every time we see God in the face of another, the Christ returns.

Mary Magdalene understood this deeply. She recognized the risen Christ not through sight, but through intimacy — through the knowing of the heart. And so must we. “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” (John 20:29)

The Second Coming is not a distant event to brace for; it is a living presence to awaken to.
Christ is coming — always coming — through us, within us, between us.
And the eyes that see it will call it heaven on earth.

May Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.

In love + light,
 April