Hilton Head Island, SC – August 26, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 21:5-15; Luke 21:16-28
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place, but the end will not be at once.” – Luke 21:9 (RSV)
The subject of this sermon is likely something which very few of you think about very often, if at all. Technically, the object of this homiletic inquiry is what biblical scholars call “the apocalypse.” The word apocalypse is Greek in origin, and it literally means either “to uncover” or, conversely, “to hide.” However, that is so innocuous that unless you have never heard the word before, it probably wouldn’t mean anything to you.
Nonetheless, I suspect all of you have at least heard the word apocalypse, if only because of the very strange but graphically memorable Francis Ford Coppola movie Apocalypse Now. It starred Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, among others, and it depicted a US Army officer gone berserk in the War in Viet Nam. By his orders, immense firepower was brought down upon many innocent civilians, enemy and friendly soldiers, and upon himself at the fiery and horrific end of the film.
I mention this movie, not because it has anything to do with this sermon, but because it uses the word “apocalypse” in its title. The last book in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, is often called “The Apocalypse.” But I’m not going into that either, or at least only tangentially.
Instead, I want to begin with a period of history. The epoch of which I speak lasted for perhaps three or three and a half centuries, from about 200 BCE to 150 CE or so. During that time, the Jews in biblical Judea and beyond began to focus on what is called – again in Greek – the eschaton. That word literally means “last things.” Thus eschatology is the study of the last things, or in other words, the end of the world, or in other words, the apocalypse, the uncovering.
Between 200 BCE and 150 CE, the Jews fought three major wars. In 167 BCE they fought and defeated the Greek-backed Syrians who had been oppressing them for 150 years. Thus, for the first time in four centuries there was an independent Jewish nation. Exactly a hundred years later, however, the Romans came and conquered the Jews of Judea and everyone else in their neck of the woods. The Roman occupation lasted for almost five centuries. Then, between 68 and 72 CE, which is to say about forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jews revolted against the Romans. Their war proved to be a national disaster. Jerusalem and the temple were burned to the ground, and many of the Jews either voluntarily left the holy land or were driven out by the Romans. Then, sixty years after that, from 132 to 135 CE, the remaining Jews tried again to overthrow Roman rule, and once again they were crushed.
Probably because of these extraordinary political and military reverses, many Jews during that pivotal historical period became convinced that God was going to bring all of human history to an end. Exactly when and how this would happen most Jews did not know; that would have to be uncovered. But some of them became vocal advocates for eschatology and apocalypticism.
In case you have not already figured it out, this sermon is not going to be like most sermons you have heard me preach. It is very biblical and historical, and whatever application it makes to today will come only at the end of the sermon. But most people of whatever theological persuasion are aware of apocalyptic thinking, even if they don’t understand what it is. If possible, I want to help you think about it as rationally an un-emotionally as you can, because the apocalypse was a very frequent idea in the teachings of Jesus. No one can negate the fact that Jesus often referred to the coming end of the world, which he insisted would happen soon.
At various times throughout Christian history, people also concluded that the end was near, and they separated themselves from everyone else to await the end. In our time the Jonestown mass killings in Guyana and the David Koresh Branch Davidian debacle in Waco, Texas, are recent examples of this phenomenon.
What got into the biblical Jews that they thought God was about to destroy the world? And what got into the conservative Christians and biblical literalists who have thought the same thing over the last couple of centuries? Here is a brief answer: Wars. Wars don’t explain everything about apocalypticism, but they explain a lot. Wars turn the world upside down. Frequent devastating wars have tended to lead certain kinds of people to suppose that the end is near. In Europe, the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars and the Franco-Prussian War turned the Continent on its ear. In what became the United States of America, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and especially the Civil War were horrendous calamities for this country. Then, in the twentieth century, we had World War I, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, the Gulf War, 9/11, and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If enough blood is spilled and enough damage is done, there will always be people who believe that God is required to bring history to its close. In this apocalyptic denouement, they believe God will save all the good folks and condemn the bad folks to hell. They think it only behooves them to uncover what is hidden, and to tell when The End is coming. The Left Behind series of sixteen novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins graphically depicted what was soon going to happen. Now Left Behind has been left behind, because none of the catastrophes predicted has come true, and thriller-readers are on to other things.
As long as the Soviet Union appeared to remain strong during the Cold War, millions of western Christians and others thought a nuclear Armageddon was just around the corner. Furthermore, from 1948 on, with the establishment of the State of Israel, a whole new apocalyptic school of thought sprang up. By drawing some very clear conclusions out of some very murky New Testament passages, particularly from the Book of Revelation (“The Apocalypse”), eschatological zealots became convinced that the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon would literally be fought in Israel and over Israel’s very existence. For this reason millions of evangelicals around the world, but especially in the USA, strongly support Israel, even though they think Jews are hopelessly lost unless they accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Go figure.
The growth of apocalypticism in the past couple of centuries was also fostered by two 19th century English evangelicals who gave birth to what is known as millennialism. I won’t go into the details of this, because you don’t need to know them. In fact it’s probably better if you don’t know. But suffice it to say that many current fundamentalists call themselves pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, or a-millennialists. Briefly, they believe that Satan will rule for a thousand years, and then Jesus for a thousand years, or vice versa, and then The End shall come. It should come as no surprise to anyone that they think The End is just around the corner, although many of these folks have already gone past the deadline of when they said the world would end. But faulty predictions have never stopped them from continuing to predict.
Let us now turn our attention to Jesus of Nazareth, who most definitely was an apocalyptic preacher and prophet. It is impossible to know exactly what Jesus said and did during his lifetime, despite what the four Gospels and the many other non-canonical Gospels claim. But if even a tenth of what the Gospels say he said and did is accurate, he too, like many other believers through history since 200 BCE or so, thought that God was going to bring history to a close within a few months or years of his crucifixion.
If that is so, why is it so? It is, because like anyone else, Jesus was inevitably a product of his own time, and his time was the Golden Age of apocalyptic thinking. Many Jews of his day, perhaps most Jews, thought that because of the Roman oppression, God was bound to bring this world to some sort of cataclysmic halt, and God’s chosen people, mainly if not exclusively Jews, although not all of them, would be saved, and everyone else would be damned.
There is something about cataclysm which is cerebrally compelling. Many people are simply captivated by the contemplation of the end of the world. It is astonishing how many computer-generated thriller movies are woven around this theme. These ridiculous films make money hand over fist, while serious cinema languishes for want of ticket sales. Again, go figure.
But to come back to Jesus, in numerous places in all four Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as insisting that The End was near. In our two scripture passages from the 21st chapter of Luke, Jesus made some apocalyptic observations which were prompted by nothing in particular. Perhaps he felt that his own death was so close that he wanted to get these things off his chest. Apropos of nothing, Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple. Did he foresee the coming Jewish Revolt, which occurred forty years after he died? I strongly suspect so. He didn’t necessarily predict it on the basis of divine clairvoyance, but rather on the basis of being a very astute observer of the political and military realities of his time. If the Jews rebelled against Rome, they would be smashed, and Jesus, and every other rational Judean, knew that.
But to what kind of thinking would such a revolt lead? Jesus warned his listeners, “Take heed that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them. And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place, but the end will not be at once” (Luke 21:8-9). In other words, don’t get bent out of mental shape by conflicts, for conflicts have always characterized human societies. Wars and battles and bloodshed happen. They always have, and they always will. “Nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus told his followers. And when it happened, he said, they would be persecuted. And they were persecuted – badly.
Then Jesus launched into some very deep and heavy apocalyptic proclamations. Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies (Roman armies? He doesn’t say), and the Gentiles would triumph. (Did Jesus actually say this, or did the Gospel writers insert it, a few years after 72 CE? I think probably Jesus did actually say it.) But then, he said, they would “see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:27-28).
Christian people: If Jesus meant all that in an historical-cataclysmic sense, he was wrong! It didn’t happen! It has never yet happened. It is certainly possible that the end of the world is near. We might be struck by a huge asteroid, or the kind of climate change brought on by human folly might destroy the ability of the planet to sustain any kind of life, or there are still far more than enough nuclear weapons which, if all were detonated in a very short time, it would create a nuclear winter from which the natural environment would never recover. Furthermore, at some point, a few billion years from now, the sun will burn itself out, and Planet Earth will cease to exist. But there is not likely to be an imminent theological apocalypse, if ever. If Jesus was talking about a literal end of the world, it didn’t happen soon after he said it, and it isn’t likely to happen for the foreseeable future.
There is, however, another way of looking at the apocalyptic teachings of the apocalyptic teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. I don’t think this is what he intended, but it does make sense, at least to me, and it makes sense on the basis of other non-apocalyptic teachings of Jesus. Is it possible to conceptualize “The End” as being near for all of us? Might “The End” be death, not the death of the planet, but our own individual death? What if “The End” is not a planetary death, but the individual death of each one of us? And in terms of the great scheme of things, isn’t death relatively close to everyone, even to newborn infants? What is a life of seventy or eighty or even a hundred years compared to eternity? Such a life literally is not even in the same ball park! Maybe eternity isn’t even in the same galaxy, but is outside time and space and physicality. Temporality and eternity are two totally different conceptual and philosophical entities.
Every day, several thousand people die around the world. Every day. For them, “The End” came, just as for all of us, “The End” shall (relatively) soon come. We are all going to die. But that is where God brings the resurrection of Jesus Christ into the picture. Jesus died and was raised from the dead. Easter is the answer to The Apocalypse. We don’t know how; we can’t know how. It is apocalyptic; it is hidden. Its meaning will be uncovered for all of us, and the unknown shall become known, but we won’t fully know what it means until after we die, if we even shall fully know it then. As the old spiritual implies, “in that great getting-up morning” we shall encounter a fine fare-thee-well, and many of the questions and uncertainties which have plagued us or at least gnawed at us will be explained.
I have become convinced that “The End” is now. For every one of those thousands who die each day, God is there at the end to usher them into a new beginning which never ends. For all of them. And thus The End is not really the end at all; it only currentlyseems to be the end.
It is fruitless to spend much, if any, time cogitating upon the end of the world. But for all of us, the world ends for us when our life ends. That we should think about. And yet, paradoxically, our lives won’t end. Instead, they will enter a new and for-now-incomprehensible state of being.
Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God. It was both present and future, he said. The full manifestation of the kingdom of God is what awaits us in the life-after-life. Jesus said it, and I hope all of us believe it.
The End is NOW. Rejoice. And fear not.