03.12.06 Kathy Galloway Advent 1 Jeremiah 33,14-16, Luke 21, 25-26
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It’s not really what
you expect when attention turns to thoughts of journeying towards
Bethlehem, to unplanned pregnancies and unexplained stars. I always
associate Advent Sunday with luminous passages in Isaiah and the
Epistles about darkness and light, and about beating swords into
ploughshares and I forget that the gospel, whatever the year, is
always one of the chapters rather gloomily headed ‘Troubles and
Persecutions.’
It would be quite easy to look around the world and see in our times the troubles and persecutions described in today’s reading (and you really have to read the whole of Luke 21 to get the full effect). Countries and peoples at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Central Africa and in dozens of low-level conflicts all over the world. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, famines in the wake of all of these, and diseases thought to have been eradicated, such as smallpox and tuberculosis returning on the backs of poverty and malnutrition. The tsunami two years ago raised the bar on what we even notice now. One can readily imagine that for a Lousianan, Hurricane Katrina fits the description of a strange and terrifying thing coming from the sky; or indeed that ordinary Palestinians even now are waiting with fear and trepidation for other strange and terrifying things coming from the sky.
It is a well-established
fact that the turn of millennia have a strange effect on the
collective psyche, that a kind of madness breaks out, particularly
evident in the mushrooming of sects and cults of many kinds who
anticipate the end of the world. They are to be found in every
religion, and in those of extremely obscure beliefs. At the end of
the first Christian millennium this tendency was multiplied many
times.
On the other hand, you
don’t need a somewhat random date for people to have had this
feeling. The signs were there in 17th century Europe
during the 30 Years War, interminable religious conflicts that raged
back and forth across Europe, rendering much of it a blackened
charnel house in which millions, not just soldiers, were butchered,
starved, burned as witches, frozen to death, or perished in one of the
periodic outbreaks of the Black Death. There were many then who
thought they were living in the end times. Historians tell us that
one of the main factors which brought about the Enlightenment in the
18th century, which saw the value of freedom of
conscience, religious tolerance and the move towards democracy, was
that Europe was simply exhausted, nauseated to the point of death by
a century of religious wars and the destruction of habitats, and
something like common sense finally prevailed. The value and
importance of simply being human, of the right to life, broke through
the culture of death and the competing ideologies.
And the carnage of the First World War, millions of young men, a whole generation of European youth, dutifully lining up and mowing each other down, led many then also to believe they were living in the end times - all the biblical signs were there, and perhaps even more so after the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the devastation of the Second World War.
So what are we to make of this passage, at the start of this season of hope and expectation. Some context is important here; Luke 21 and its equivalents in Matthew and Mark, is the last speech of any significant length Jesus makes before his passion, and it is notoriously difficult to interpret. It contains much apocalyptic material, that is, material that refers to the expected end of all things, the final judgement, the so-called ‘Day of the Lord.’ Apocalyptic writing is always an attempt to express the inexpressible, uses much pictorial and metaphoric language, and there are dangers in taking it literally. Furthermore, these speeches are addressed to at least two different sets of listeners. The original words of Jesus to his disciples are here reinterpreted to the gospel’s first hearers, living at least one generation away from the original context, and with their own contextual agenda.
This later agenda belongs to the years around 66-70 CE, and Luke’s gospel was probably written just after the fall of Jerusalem in 70CE, when the iron fist of Rome came down heavily against the Jewish revolt. So Luke 21,20-24 is not just a prediction. It is a description of what has actually happened, and the advice not to hang around in Jerusalem but to flee the city is a reading back from a context of ongoing devastation. The early Christians are doing here what Christians have always done, that is, contextualising the gospel to their own situation.
In Luke, Jesus himself, like the prophets before him, warned the disciples against apocalyptic thinking, against believing they could predict when the end times would come. The knowledge of that would be God’s alone, even the Son of Man did not know the hour. And he warned them further of even harder times to come. Like the prophets, Jesus foresaw no rose-strewn path for the people of God. But despite disaster, persecution and chaos, his followers were neither to panic, nor to become fanatical and obsessed. Rather, they were to understand such circumstances to be a chance for them to proclaim the good news of deliverance. So, even in the face of hatred, betrayal and the threat of death, they were to stand firm, remain faithful in prayer and attentiveness and speak the words that Jesus would give them.
The disciples, the early Christians, perhaps even Jesus himself, thought that the day of the Lord was upon them. In the event, like so many after them, they were wrong. But what does this passage say to us in our context. Trouble, as Jesus implies, may be normal, but we are in the throes of unprecedented change. The familiar disruptions and upheavals are still with us – only now they happen at a vastly accelerated pace, and on a scale magnified beyond our capacity to comprehend. Uprooted and migrant peoples now run into the tens of millions. Epidemics have become pandemics. Armaments easily possess the capacity to destroy the earth many times over. Culture, education, communications, economics, human institutions are all in rapid transition. Not only the scale and pace of change is new; so is its interconnectedness. Because whether we like it or not, we are all globalised now, we are affected by changes that originate far from us. ‘All, all is in flux; turn but a stone and an angel moves.’
And as if this were not enough, there are changes taking place which threaten the whole fabric of life on earth. In the last 25 years alone, human beings have destroyed one third of our natural habitat, one-third of our non-renewable resources. The effects of ecological devastation across the globe are well-documented. The nature of matter itself is facing potential change. Genetic engineering, cloning, all of the things that were once the stuff of science fiction seem to be coming closer, raising huge questions and fears. The responsibility for this falls very heavily on the wealthy countries of the West. Our great-grandchildren may live in a very different world from us, a hotter world, where wars may be fought over water and other natural resources. They will inherit our legacy. There is no guarantee that they will inherit the earth.
Is this, then, the apocalypse? Are these the signs of the end times? It would be a foolish person indeed who ignored the signs of our times, regardless of whether they are the end times, who continued on in blind optimism. Equally, I think it would be foolish to think we know the mind of God, which even Jesus did not claim, and to compound dangerous times by reckless fatalism or apocalyptic sado-masochism of the kind we have come to recognise in fundamentalism of many brands, secular as well as religious. The purification of the earth, if we really believe that Jesus reveals the nature of God to us, is not to be equated with the mass murder of Armageddon.
So, as Jesus more or less said, it’s a time to keep the heid! Or to keep the faith, which might be the same thing. In this morning’s other reading, the prophet Jeremiah, writing after one of the many falls of Jerusalem and during the Babylonian exile, and seeking to revive faith and encourage those growing faint of heart, offers a promise and a hope. The promise is one of deliverance and justice, of a new covenant, the hope is of restoration. For those of us who love the prophetic promise and believe that the new covenant was made real in Jesus, I think it’s worth looking again at how the restoration was envisaged and the covenant was expressed .
In all the biblical prophecies of restoration (and there are many of them) the vision is remarkably simple and gentle. A home, good health, a way to make a living and enjoy modest fruits, the well-being of one’s loved ones, harmony with the natural world and peace. This is not an unattainable vision in a world so full of riches. We know that. Jesus himself was clear that we know how to read the signs of the times. And threw the challenge back – ‘you know what needs to be done; why don’t you do it?’
Oh but there is the cost, and there is our own comfort, and the fact that the good that we would, we do not. And how does the new covenant that will save us from our failure and frailty show up? Not as a wise environmental adviser – we have plenty of these. Not as an apocalyptic warrior –we have too many of these. Not as a powerful politician or leader – in the face of the complexities of the human heart, they are powerless. What we get is a baby, born in weakness and poverty, living on the margins, dying in pain and humiliation, a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris.
At the heart of the Christian gospel is an identification with all living beings, and a different way of transcending limits, not by rolling over them, but by embracing and transforming them. This is as much true of our relationship with the earth as with our fellow human beings. I have absolutely nothing new or original to say about the ecological crises and choices facing us today. But I do believe that Jesus encourages us not to give in to despair or fatalism or hedonism or the myth of redemptive violence. These are all fearful strategies for avoiding faithful and hopeful living. In our means is our end. Jesus did not voluntarily seek out suffering and self-sacrifice, and did not glorify it, but he chose to bear it rather than inflict it on others. At the centre of the new covenant is the promise that grace and transformation are the fruit of sacrificial love. And the promise is for the whole creation. The bread and wine on the table are a reminder to us that apart from all living beings we have no life, that we are creature not creator, and that what is given, and given up, in love, is never lost or wasted.
I will not live an
unlived life
I will not go in fear
of falling or catching
fire.
I choose to inhabit my
days,
to allow my living to
open to me,
to make me less
afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
Until it becomes a
wing,
A torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my
significance:
to live.
So that which came to
me as seed,
goes to the next as
blossom,
and that which came to
me as blossom
goes on as fruit.
(Davna Markova)
© Kathy Galloway