Unto the End of the Age
Lenten Vespers, Week Five
Homily:
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Over the course of our Lenten vespers these past several
weeks, we have spoken of the Six Ages of the World. For simplicity’s sake, I
have called these thus far the Age of Myth, the Age of Noah, the Age of Heroes,
and the Age of Kings. Now, it’s important to remember that these ages are
rather arbitrary. They were sketched out by St Augustine as a teaching method
to tell the story of the Bible, with the Six Ages of the World echoing the Six
Days of Creation.
On this, our last vespers service before Holy Week, we begin
with the Fifth Age of the World, which covers the time between the Return of
God’s people Israel from their Exile and the advent of the Messiah some 500
years later. The Fifth Age is one of my favorites, in part because there is so
little of it in the Bible. It’s what we call the Intertestamental Period, the
centuries between the closing of the Old Testament—that is, the Hebrew
Scriptures—and the penning of the New.
A lot happens in that gap. Most notably, the Greeks show up.
Alexander of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, comes in like a
wrecking ball, conquering Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and India—in short, the whole
of the known world. Israel gets swept up in the tide. The Exiles came home from
Babylon speaking Aramaic, but by the time of the New Testament we find
everything written in Greek. Indeed, we might well name this the Age of Alexander.
So strong is the pull of Greek culture that a civil war
breaks out in Israel, between those who would remain loyal to the traditions
and Covenants of their ancestors on the one hand, and those who would
assimilate and become Greek on the other. This clash is recorded in the Books
of the Maccabees, which may be found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not
often in Protestant ones, which is unfortunate. The Israelites triumphed, by
the way, briefly setting up an independent kingdom, their first in centuries. And
the holiday celebrating this victory is, of course, Hanukkah.
The Greeks can be tenacious, however, and in order to keep
them at bay, the Israelites allied themselves to a new and rising power from the
West: Rome. As it ends up, this is akin to shooting yourself in the head in
order to cure a headache. Once they had their foot in the door, the Romans took
over the entire Middle East, Greek and Jew alike. If there’s one thing Rome
hates, it’s disorder. And the most effective way that Romans found to establish
and maintain order was to make everything Rome. In Israel they eventually set
up a puppet-king named Herod.
So if you’ve ever read through the Bible and found yourself
wondering how the Old Testament ends with happy Hebrews heading home, while the
New begins with everybody speaking Greek and grumbling about the Romans, now
you know. There are Greek books of the Old Testament that cover much of this
gap, but as I mentioned, they’re rarely found in Protestant Bibles. Luther,
however, said we ought to study them, and I happen to concur. Read the
Apocrypha. It’s good stuff.
The Sixth Age of the World is inaugurated by the birth of
Jesus. It is the Age of Christmas, the Age of the Messiah. In Jesus, all the
promises given by God to His people—from the prophecy of the crushed serpent in
Genesis, to the messianic visions of the Prophets in Exile—are now at last
fulfilled. On the Sixth Day of Creation, God fashioned humanity in His own
image as the capstone of Creation. In the Sixth Age of the World, God brings
about His New Creation in this New Adam, Jesus. We are all of us given new
birth in the New Covenant.
With Jesus’ Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, God pours
out His own Life for the life of the world. With His Ascension and the sending
of His Holy Spirit, Jesus draws all people to Himself and makes us one in Him:
one in Spirit, one in Body, one in Blood. We live now in the Sixth Age, the Age
of Christ and of His Body the Church.
Every year the Christmas Proclamation reminds us of our Lord’s
birth “in the 194th Olympiad; the 752nd year from the founding of Rome; the 42nd
year of the reign of Emperor Caesar Augustus; in the Sixth Age of the World, when
all the earth was at peace.” Now you know why we call it the Sixth Age—even if
that peace was the infamous Pax Romana.
Yet even as we end this Lenten homily series, let us recall
that the Six Days of Creation culminated in the Sabbath, the day of holy rest.
Likewise the Six Ages of the World look forward to the seventh, the Age of the
world to come, when Christ shall return in glory and God at last will be all in
all. Then shall every tear be dried, and every wound healed, and all the dead
restored to life. The word we commonly translate as eternal is in fact aeonian,
which means of the Age, that is, the Age of the world to come, the Age of God’s
Sabbath rest.
The End of the World doesn’t mean that the world suddenly stops.
Rather, it means that in Christ the world reaches its end, its purpose, its
intended and perfected fulfilment.
God is still working out His New Creation in and through the
person of Jesus Christ. As we are joined to Christ in Word and Sacrament, we
are graciously made agents in His redemption of this world. We are to be Jesus
for the sake of the cosmos. Someday this Age will close. Someday all sorrows
shall draw to their end, and the new Age at last begin. Until then, we proclaim
the Lord’s death until He comes.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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