Can we pray for Jesus to come sooner? We can and we do: "lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil". This describes a desire for sanctity when temptation no longer is necessary for our justification and we have been delivered onto life everlasting. My friend iconographer Victor Krivorotov writes, in an article I have yet to publish in translation,
And finally, in connection with the petition in focus, how are we to understand the conjunction “but”?The passions are strong, and so man may fall into temptation even as he attempts to defeat them. In order that his resistance did not stop, the Lord gave us the sacrament of Penance. If man persists in committing the sin, the Divine Providence allows the influence of the Crooked One so that man realize that he is overpowered by the dark forces and come to reason. This is why we ask the Lord to not lead us into temptation, but at that, even if we fail, then at least protect us from the Crooked One, because that would be catastrophic and we acknowledge that by the words of the prayer.
Ordinarily we see this prayer in the context of individual salvation, but it is no accident that it is given us in the plural form. It is therefore primarily a prayer for us as a Christian nation to be saved as a society.
Do you agree?
Alex, I see what you’re saying.
There is an end of evil where good triumphs over it
A few good things from the Catechism on this...
681 On Judgment Day at the end of the world, Christ will come in glory to achieve the definitive triumph of good over evil which, like the wheat and the tares, have grown up together in the course of history.
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.574 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth575 will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.576
676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,577 especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.578
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.579 The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.580 God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.581