Apocalypses

Propers: The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome to the apocalypse. How’s everybody doing so far?

When I was in high school, my English curriculum focused a lot on dystopian novels: Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, that sort of thing. And dystopian novels serve a very specific purpose. They present us with a dark vision of the future, or perhaps an alternate world, in which things have gone terribly wrong. Such books serve as a warning, as a social critique, addressing the brokenness of our own society, and where such brokenness may lead us if we do not acknowledge what is wrong and work together to fix it. Dystopian novels are just as important and just as popular today, as evidenced most prominently by The Hunger Games.

You have to know what you’re reading in order to understand it. Nobody’s supposed to read a dystopian novel and think, “Boy, that sounds great. I’d love to live in The Hunger Games.” We’re supposed to read it and think, “What does this say about us as a people and what’s broken in our society today?” The same holds true of the Bible. The Bible is not a single book but rather an entire library, inspired by the Holy Spirit but written down by more than 50 separate authors writing in widely varied genres. There are proverbs and poems, histories and prophecies, mythologies and epistles. And there are also books of the Bible, and sections of the Gospels, that we call apocalyptic.

Now, when I say apocalypse, chances are that a series of images and assumptions immediately pop into our minds: seas of fire, lakes of blood, tidal waves, meteor strikes, monsters popping up like Pokémon, zombie hordes roaming the streets! That’s because fundamentalist preachers, Hollywood moguls, and the Left Behind series have all taught us that apocalypse means the sudden and violent destruction of the Late Great Planet Earth. Our loving God is going to nuke us. Isn’t that special?

But this is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is that we’re reading. We don’t read poetry as if it were history, or science fiction as if it were evening news. And we shouldn’t read an apocalypse as though it were the end of the world. In point of fact, the whole purpose of apocalyptic literature as a genre is to reassure us that what’s going on in our lives today, and in the society around us, is not the end of the world, and that God has far greater plans for us and for a bright and glorious future yet to unfold.

When do you get apocalypses? People write them in times of terrible stress, when things are going wrong, societies are collapsing, enemies are at the gates. It seems like the end of everything, the end of the whole world! And people write apocalypses specifically to encourage those who are suffering, those who are scared, to show them that there’s still hope, that God’s ultimate victory is assured.

Apocalypses tend to draw heavily from prophetic symbolism. Great nations and empires are portrayed as beasts that reflect their character—ravenous or chivalrous, ponderous or swift. The world is often divided into ages to remind us that God’s people have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles before, and that in faith we will do so again. And then here’s the important bit: in an apocalypse, images of natural disaster and global cataclysm are regularly invoked to represent the overthrowing of an established political order. Mountains collapsing and fire from heaven are not to be taken literally but instead represent the end of an oppressive regime.

The Bible itself testifies to this. When the Holy Spirit alights upon the Apostles at Pentecost, Peter says that this is what Joel prophesied when he spoke of “the last days,” when “I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.” Now obviously the world wasn’t burning and the moon turning to blood while Peter said this to the crowds in Jerusalem. Rather, a new age of grace and mercy and truth and forgiveness was dawning. The old spiritual order, the order of the Jerusalem Temple and the High Priest and the Mosaic Law, was then falling in order to make way for the Messianic Age of the Risen Christ.

The world has ended several times, according to the Bible. The Day of the Lord has come again and again, whenever unjust order has been overthrown and supplanted by a new hope kindled in the hearts of the suffering, the fearful, and the oppressed. That’s the point of apocalypses, both in and out of the Bible: to show us that we’ve been through worse; that we will overcome our present troubles; and that when wicked ages arise in the future we will outlive those as well, all because God is with us. That’s right, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Of course underlying it all is the ever-present promise that someday the world will reach its natural end: not an end in the sense of termination, of God being finished with our story, but “end” in the sense of its purpose: the end of it all, the reason and meaning and fulfilment of it all. Someday Christ will come again in glory, the harvest will come in full, and God will be all in all. On that day God will dry every tear and heal every wound and bring every promise and prophecy to fruition. Maybe it will be tomorrow! Maybe it will be 100,000 years from now. Who knows? The timeline is not the point.

What matters is that the fate of the world, ultimately, is in God’s hands, the loving and crucified hands of our Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier; the same One who called us into being from nothing, granting us life as free and abundant gift; the same One who died upon the Cross at our hands, pouring out His life for love of the world, declaring our forgiveness even as we murdered Him.

In our Gospel today, we find Jesus’ disciples marveling at the Temple in Jerusalem. For our Israelite forebears, the Temple was nothing less than the house of God on earth, the place wherein dwelt His Holy Name, blessed with the Shekinah, the mystical cloud of God’s own presence. The Temple Mount also happened to be the largest manmade structure on the planet at that time, famous throughout the Roman world for its continual sacrifices and massive stones weighing up to 570 tons apiece. It was the very heart of their faith. It was how Israel knew and worshipped and dwelt with God.

And Jesus tells them: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down … When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately … Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom; there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven … But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

And so it was, some 40 years after Jesus’ Crucifixion—a single biblical generation—that these things came to pass. There were earthquakes and portents, great armies clashing, and Jewish sects arose who believed that sparking a war with Rome would bring about the End of Days. They were right, insofar as it brought about the end of the Temple, the end of the world as they knew it. Yet the followers of Jesus survived the destruction of Jerusalem, fleeing to the nearby city of Pella—fleeing because Jesus had warned them to do so, had told them that what appeared to be the end of the world was really just the beginning of a glorious new age. Apocalypse means revelation. And what is revealed in an apocalypse is that whatever disasters befall us today, it’s not the end of the world.

Let us recall this in our own lives, in an age when political orders rise and fall with shocking speed, when all of our societal and religious assumptions seem overturned and turned again every five to 10 years or so. Such convulsions can seem like the end of the world, the end of our hopes, the end of everything we think we know. But it’s not. God is still in control, still calling us home, still fervently working for the healing and salvation of the nations. There will be earthquakes and wars, portends and persecutions, riots and elections. Be not afraid. It will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.