The Coming That Wasn't What We Thought

If you’ve grown up in church, you’ve heard the phrase the second coming. You’ve probably said it. You’ve sung about it in hymns, prayed about it in worship services, encountered it in creeds — he will come again to judge the living and the dead. Christians have been waiting for Jesus to come back for nearly two thousand years. We’ve got a whole season of the church year — Advent — devoted to the theme of his coming.

And in English, coming lands a certain way. It sounds like an event. A moment. Something that happens and is over. The way you’d say the bus is coming or Christmas is coming. An arrival. A point on a timeline. We hear the second coming of Christ and we picture a moment — the sky opening, the trumpet sounding, the event we’ve been waiting for finally happening.

The Greek word the New Testament uses for this doesn’t quite work that way. It carries a meaning English doesn’t catch. And once you can hear what the Greek was saying, the verses about Christ’s return start to mean something more than they did in English.

The word is παρουσία (parousia). And what it actually means — and what its first-century audience heard when Paul or Matthew or Peter wrote it — is the thing this chapter is about.

Start with the literal sense. Parousia is made up of two Greek pieces — para, meaning beside or with, and ousia, meaning being or presence. Put together, parousia literally means being beside. Being with. Presence. That’s the word’s primary meaning, the one the lexicons list first. Parousia is the state of being present somewhere. The opposite of absence. The word for being right there.

You see this in the New Testament outside the verses about Christ’s return. Paul uses parousia about himself — about his own parousia, his own presence, with the Corinthians and the Philippians. He uses it of Titus arriving and being present at Corinth. He uses it of his friends Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus showing up where he was. In all these everyday uses, parousia isn’t about the moment of arrival so much as the state of being there. The presence. The being-with.

So when the New Testament reaches for parousia to describe what Christ will do at the end — the parousia of the Son of Man, as the disciples ask about in Matthew 24:3 — the first layer the original audience heard was presence. Not just an arrival. The state of being with us. Christ’s being-there. The end of his absence.

But there’s a second layer that the first-century world heard immediately, and this is the layer English loses entirely.

By the first century, parousia had become a technical word for something very specific in the Greek-speaking Roman world: the official state visit of a king or emperor to a city in his domain.

Roman emperors didn’t stay in Rome all the time. They traveled. When the emperor visited one of his provinces — coming to inspect a colony, to be celebrated by the citizens, to display his power and his favor — the visit was called a parousia. And the city threw itself into preparing for it. Special taxes were collected. Roads were repaired. Public buildings were cleaned. Commemorative coins were struck to mark the visit (we’ve got many of these surviving — they sometimes used the Latin word adventus, which was the Roman equivalent of parousia, stamped onto the coinage). The city’s calendar might be redated to begin with the year of the emperor’s parousia. New eras started with these visits. They were the biggest events a city would experience in a generation.

And when the emperor finally arrived, the citizens of the city would do something specific. They’d go out beyond the city walls — out onto the road, often miles out — to meet him. To greet him. To welcome him. And then they’d escort him back into the city in a triumphal procession, with banners and trumpets and acclamations. Caesar is here. The lord is with us. Our city now has its emperor in its midst. That public welcome and procession was the heart of a parousia. The Greek word for the meeting part of this welcome — when the citizens went out to meet the arriving emperor — was apantēsis. And then together with him they came in.

This wasn’t exotic vocabulary. This was the standard cultural language for what happened when a major dignitary arrived in a Roman city. Every Greek-speaking person in the Mediterranean world of the first century knew what a parousia was, because everyone had either witnessed one or grown up hearing stories about the last one. It was familiar civic life. The word meant the official, ceremonial coming-and-being-present of a king or emperor in a city that belonged to him.

So when the New Testament writers reached for parousia to describe what Christ would do at the end — they were reaching for a word soaked in this imagery. The parousia of Christ wouldn’t be a quiet private event. It would be the public, celebrated, world-changing coming of the rightful King to the world that belonged to him. The trumpets, the welcome, the citizens going out to meet him — Paul uses exactly the apantēsis word in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 — and the lord taking his place in the midst of his people. Parousia was the imperial word for the king is here. The New Testament uses it of Christ.

The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright — whose work on Paul’s first-century Roman context shaped the kyrios chapter — has written at length about parousia in his book Surprised by Hope. Wright’s argument, which has become widely accepted across current New Testament scholarship, is that the church has often read the parousia passages in ways that strip them of their first-century weight. The Greek word doesn’t primarily mean an arrival from somewhere else in the sense of leaving here and coming from heaven. It means the public, royal coming-into-presence of the King who has authority over the place he is coming to. Christ’s parousia isn’t him swooping in from somewhere distant. It’s him taking his place — visibly, publicly, royally — in the world that has always been his.

And in the political world Paul was writing into, this language carried the same charge we saw with kyrios back in chapter three. The Roman emperor’s parousia was the imperial event. To say that Christ would have a parousia — and Caesar wouldn’t be the one whose parousia mattered — was an act of quiet but unmistakable rebellion. The early Christians used the imperial word for the imperial event, and they applied it to Jesus. The choice of vocabulary alone said not Caesar.

So when we read the passages about Christ’s return again — the parousia of the Son of Man, the parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ — we can hear what the Greek was already saying. Not just an event in the future when something will happen. The public, ceremonial, royal presence of the rightful King among the people who belong to him. The trumpets sounding. The citizens going out to welcome him. The lord taking his place in the city that has always been his. The end of his absence. The beginning of his being-with on a different scale than the world has ever known. Parousia. The English coming makes it sound like a moment. The Greek made it sound like the arrival of everything we’d been waiting for, in a procession we could go out to meet.

Reading this yourself

The next time you read a verse about Christ’s coming or return or second coming, slow down at that word. (You’ll find the word in Matthew 24, in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, in James, in 2 Peter, and in 1 John.) Try holding two things in your mind at the same time: presence, and the royal state visit of the king to a city that belongs to him. (You don’t have to be a historian to do this. You just have to remember that the Greek word the New Testament used carried both.) Then read the verse again. The promise stops being a quiet someday and starts being something more vivid — the king coming to a city that has been waiting for him, the people going out to welcome him, the lord taking his place in the midst of his people. That’s what the original audience heard. We can hear it again.

The text didn’t change. The Greek didn’t change. The first audience knew exactly what they were hearing when they read parousia — they’d grown up with imperial state visits, with cities preparing for the lord’s arrival, with the welcoming-out and the escorting-in. They heard Paul use the same word for Christ. They heard him say that the lord whose parousia mattered wasn’t the one in Rome. They heard him say that what was coming wasn’t just an event but a presence — a being-with that would put the king and his people in the same place at last. The English coming is a defensible word, and our Bibles will keep using it. But once you can hear the Greek underneath, the promise sounds less like a moment and more like the end of every absence we’ve ever felt. The lord is coming to be with his people. The trumpets will sound. The procession will form. And the parousia won’t be the end of the story. It’ll be the beginning of the part where we never have to wait again.