Well, in Joel we're preparing for war, and in Matthew for the coming of the Son of Man. Neither one sounds particularly comforting or particularly pretty. As a pacifist, I willingly admit I do not "get" war. It doesn't make sense in my head. Regarding the coming of the Son of Man, I must admit I don't "get" this passage either. I cannot wrap my brain around what it is to kill another for the sake of the safety of my neighbors, and I cannot wrap my brain around what it is to read passages that involve mass destruction of that which God has created.
"The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken."
Reading Matthew 27:45-54, I cannot help but wonder if darkness coming over the land, the earthquake, the curtain of the temple being torn in two, the resurrection of the saints who died, and all of these entering into the holy city relates to this verse. So often, we hear any notion of the "loud trumpet call," and we find ourselves linking this text with the text of 1 Thessalonians which, to be sure, bear a similarity in their description. To relate this to the end times, to make it prescriptive of the unknowable, of the hour "no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, or the Son, but only the father," (Matthew 24:36) risks placing humans in control. Our predictions, our beliefs of who is "in" and who is "out" points to our propensity to desire the driver's seat, to fashion God's will after our own.
To be sure, when humans are in control, we answer violence with violence, war with war, power with more power. It hardly conjures the relationship with God we read of in Psalms "Your steadfast love is better than life... My soul clings to you..." At the end of this Psalm, it is not the Psalmist who fights, but God. It is not the Psalmist that seeks his or her own justice, but God. We often superimpose our ideas of justice upon God, our ideas of what is right upon God's morality, our thoughts for what an ordered society looks like upon God's preference for society when God's continual instructions call us to care for the poor, the marginalized, the widows, the orphaned, and the least of these. The world looks a lot different, I think, when we focus on these things and allow God to be in control of the uncontrollable.
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