Advent and Apocalypse
First Sunday in Advent, 12.2.18
Jer 33:14-16
1 Thess 3:12-4:2
Lk 21:25-28, 34-36
New Testament scholars have been searching for decades for the Holy Grail of Biblical studies: “The Historical Jesus.” Scholars pore through archeological evidence, compare ancient textual archives, and examine archaic languages, cultures and civilizations to try to answer a question that Jesus himself posed to his disciples, which still remains unanswered: “Who do you say that I am?” A professor of mine in divinity school, Laura Nasrallah, remarked one day in class that she was deeply skeptical of the “historical Jesus” crowd. She evoked an image often attributed to biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer, who mused that those who try to reach back through nineteen centuries to locate the historical Jesus might as well be looking down into the bottom of a deep, dark well: All they see, inevitably, are dim reflections of their own faces.
People see in Jesus what they want to see, Schweitzer and Nasrallah argue. Over across town at Southeast Christian, Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior who gave up his life in order to save your soul from damnation. By the way, this Jesus also hates gays and loves unborn babies, wants you to be rich and vote Republican. Here at St. William, our Jesus is a social justice warrior, who gave up his life to stand in solidarity with the poor and resist empire. Our Jesus loves LGBTQ folks and immigrants, wants you to vote Democrat and pass single-payer health care. In both cases, we might say that our two communities have cast Jesus in our own image. We hear the Jesus we want to hear, the Jesus that aligns with our values. But although there is still no consensus in biblical studies about who Jesus actually was, Schweitzer and a growing number of biblical scholars today paint a portrait of a Jesus that would make both St. William and Southeast folks deeply uneasy. Jesus, they argue, was an apocalyptic preacher who believed that the end of the world was imminent and urged his hearers to get right with God to prepare themselves.[1] “The Kingdom of God is at hand” means, God will soon come to earth and end human history. God will destroy human empires, especially Rome (this seems to be what the book of Revelation is about); and all living people will be called to account. Those who have lived rightly will be saved; the rest will be cast into the everlasting fires of hell. And Jesus not only believed that this was literally going to happen—he believed it would happen soon. And he taught his followers that. The earliest Christian communities believed it. And they were wrong.
When we stop searching for what we want to see and consider the texts before us, the portrait of the apocalyptic Jesus starts to look a lot more plausible. Listen to Jesus in our gospel today: “People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the earth. The powers in the heavens will be shaken. After that, people will see the Promised One descending on a cloud with great power and glory. […] The great day will suddenly close in on you like a trap. The day I speak of will come upon all who dwell on the face of the earth, so stay alert at all times.” That doesn’t sound much like a personal Savior or a social justice warrior—it sounds more like someone standing on a street corner raving that the Mayan calendar predicts that the world will end on the morning of December 2, 2018. It sounds like Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Pulp Fiction working himself up to blow someone’s head off. And our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is set within the same context: Although the passage we heard today doesn’t give us much, Paul goes on in that fourth chapter to reassure the community not to worry that some of the baptized have died. He assures them that when Jesus comes back, those who have died will be taken up with him first, and “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). You see, the community was worried that baptized Christians were dying, and Jesus hadn’t come back yet. They expected his return any moment. Paul is asking them not to lose hope—but as they continued to wait for Jesus, through decades and centuries, Christian leaders had to scramble to spiritualize the coming of the Kingdom and push the expected date of the eschaton further and further into the future.
So, what do we do with all of this, two thousand years later and still no Jesus in sight? How do we make theological sense of the apparent fact that the central figure in our religious tradition preached incorrectly that the apocalypse was imminent? Does it make Jesus, after all, a doubly failed Messiah? One who not only failed to restore the kingdom of Israel, but who also failed accurately to predict the coming of the Kingdom of God? If so, is Christian faith a hoax?
In the time I have remaining, I will try to sketch a somewhat satisfying answer in the negative to that troubling question. Let me begin by agreeing with Schweitzer that when we look at Jesus, we inevitably see ourselves instead—but perhaps this is just what it means to be human. We never stand anywhere but in our own shoes, never live anywhere but in our own heads. Even the person whom we know best in the world is largely unknown to us, contains an inner world of their own and a life that only merges with ours in tantalizing tangents of synchrony. But just because we cannot really know another person fully does not mean that relationship is not possible—through empathy, through listening, through solidarity. So it is with Jesus. Yes, Jesus lived two thousand years ago and when we try to drag him into the present we misrepresent him. However, neither the St. William nor the Southeast interpretations of Jesus are invented from whole cloth. Jesus of the gospels, like our Jesus, did spend his time caring for marginalized people, especially the poor, women, the disabled, children, and foreigners, and speaking truth to the rich and powerful. And Jesus, like the Southeast Jesus, does insist (especially in John’s gospel) on belief in his own personal divinity, on salvation, and on being born again. The Bible is a big book. In fact, it is very many books, written by very many people across hundreds of miles and years. It contains a plurality of messages that stand in tension, often in contradiction. This is why that same professor of mine astounded me once by remarking that to be a Christian means to be “in dialogue with” the texts, rather than simply “believing” in them. For it is not possible to believe the whole Bible. It stands worlds apart from us—and from itself. Moments of dialogue, of connection, of sacred touch or of prophetic resistance, are the biblical faith available to us.
Second, as some of you will have noticed, Jesus’ apocalyptic language is not exactly far-fetched in 2018 America. In fact, I just participated in a conference panel organized around the theme of apocalypse. It’s a hot topic in theology and for good reason. Jesus says we will see “the roaring of the sea and the waves”—meanwhile in America, hurricanes engulf coastal lands, wildfires rage through forests and consume lives and homes, and the foremost scientific body on climate change reports that its worst effects will be irreversible within 20 years. In the passage directly before today’s reading, Jesus also predicts wars, earthquakes and famines. Meanwhile, in Yemen nearly 18 million people are food insecure, more than 8 million are on the brink of famine, 84,000 children have died from severe malnutrition since 2015, there have been more than a million cases of cholera in the last eighteen months although more than half of the country’s medical facilities have been closed, and two million people have been displaced by war.[2] At home, as the Border Patrol fires tear gas at children, and as investigators close in on our paranoid president, he boasts that his big red button is bigger than the North Korean leader’s, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently advanced its “atomic clock” to two-minutes-to-midnight.[3] So Jesus’ call to his hearers to heed the signs falls today on the doorstep of a social world in utter chaos.
And third, this apocalyptic call carries radical political implications. To say that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher is not at all to say that he was apolitical. Instead, as many commentators have argued, to claim that the kingdoms and rulers of the earth stand under the judgment of the sovereign God of righteousness, and to further claim to be God’s representative come to Earth to prophesy deliverance to the powerless, is a radical political statement. Certainly the Roman authorities seem to have understood it that way, for they executed Jesus in a manner reserved for “lowlife criminals and enemies of the state.” Jesus fell in the latter category.[4]
What is most radical about apocalyptic language, it seems to me, is that it is an invitation to hearers to live as if the world were about to end. Which means, to live as though you have nothing to lose. To live courageously and dangerously. At the moment when the world is listing in the storm, bursting at the seams, rushing headlong toward crushing collapse—just then, “Stand tall and lift up your heads,” Jesus says. Whether we stand tall in body or rise in spirit, this is an unmistakable call to action. Such apocalyptic language indeed is a cry for social justice warriors, rather than for seekers of selfish spiritual salvation. The kingdoms and empires of the world of Jesus were in fact doomed to collapse, if not as soon as he thought. And the kingdoms of our own day are likewise passing away. But this word, “apocalypse,” does not mean destruction. Does not mean annihilation. It means “revelation.” It means, literally, “uncovering.” At this moment, the truth, the awful truth about American society, with its racist, sexist, imperialist foundations, is being revealed, uncovered, to us. Simultaneously we are facing the horrid reality of rampant child sex abuse covered up by our institutional church, the hideous consequences of its patriarchal, anti-body, sexually repressive theology and hierarchical structure. The moment of uncovering is a moment of truth. Our own parish too is facing such a moment. And over the coming weeks in Advent, we have the opportunity to reflect together on what kind of community we are called to be amidst apocalypse. The truth can crush us or the truth can set us free. It is up to us. I pray that the apocalyptic witness of Jesus might inspire us to live, speak and act together as if the Reign of God were at hand—that is, as if we truly had nothing to lose. Amen.
[1] Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016); Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, 1 edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[2] “5 Brutal Facts about the Saudi-Led Coalition’s War in Yemen – Business Insider,” accessed November 30, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/7-reasons-us-lawmakers-stop-supporting-saudi-led-war-yemen#5-the-united-arab-emirates-which-is-also-a-major-player-in-the-coalition-has-been-accused-of-arbitrarily-detaining-disappearing-and-torturing-people-even-children-thought-to-be-political-opponents-or-security-threats-7; “Yemen Refugee Crisis: Aid, Statistics and News | USA for UNHCR,” accessed November 30, 2018, https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/yemen/.
[3] “Read the 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 25, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement.
[4] “Why Romans Crucified People,” The Bart Ehrman Blog, accessed November 30, 2018, https://ehrmanblog.org/why-romans-crucified-people/.