Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“The End of the Age: Apocalypse”
Rev. Rod Debs
April 25, 2010
Story: I found this acorn—this “oak seed” that fell from an oak tree in my front yard. Is this the end? It fell off the tree and was laying in the soil. What will happen next?…
I also found a seedling, this little oak tree in our front yard. Its roots and stem grew out of an acorn, with soil and rain. What will happen next?…
Some trees have flowers. The apple tree has spring flowers. What happens then? The flowers get fat at their base. They get fatter and fatter, and the fat part turns red and shiny. It grows into an apple. You can see a little of the dried up flower at the end of an apple. What happens then?
We might eat this apple. Is that the end? What happens then? We have energy to run around because we ate the apple. And you probably won’t eat the whole apple, right? Inside the apple are… what? Seeds. If we put the seeds in the soil, what happens then? The seeds will grow another apple tree.
What happens to the old apple tree? When it falls to the ground, what happens then? Is that the end? The branches decay and make soil. What happens then?
Scientists like to ask where the world came from and what will happen next. We have some children’s books that tell what scientists have found out about where our sun and earth and everything on the earth came from—the best we can tell. Great books!
Some people say, “The end is coming.” An asteroid might hit the world. The sun will explode some day. But you can always ask the question: What happens then? Every ending is a new beginning. We can always ask: What happens then?
Message: A former NASA rocket engineer, Edgar Whisenant, published a very influential pamphlet entitled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. At sunset on October 3, 1988, the Soviet Union would invade Israel thereby setting off WWIII. The Antichrist would emerge in the global crisis and, with his great following, would try to take over world government, leading to a thermonuclear war on October 4, 1995, and a nuclear winter would eliminate the world’s supply of food and water.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman writes that the Western world has given us a long line of apocalyptic prophets. In the 1970’s, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth gave best-selling notice of an impending thermonuclear holocaust. 28 million copies of his book predicted the end of the world to come in the late 1980’s. (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, 1999) In the nineteenth century, William Miller declared that Christ would return on March 21, 1843. In the thirteenth century, Franciscan monks used the calculations of Italian Joachim of Fiore to predict the end of the world in the year 1260. In the third century, prophetess Maximilla declared The End to be before her death.
Apocalypticism reaches back to the earliest Christian writings by Paul. Fewer than twenty years after the death of Jesus, Paul declared Christ’s return in current lifetimes. I Thessalonians 4:17 reads: ”Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them (the deceased) to meet the Lord in the air.” Written about twenty years later, the Gospel of Mark credits Jesus as predicting the “end of the age.” Chapter 9:1: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before they have seen the Kingdom of God having come in power.” Chapter 13:30: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place.” And in Mark 14:62, Jesus is credited with saying: “Truly I tell you, you will see the Son of Man… coming on the clouds of heaven.”
Liberation from suffering, the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, is the central story of Judaism. Although it was first written down by King David’s scribes around 1000BCE, the stories and songs of liberation had long lived in the oral tradition of tiny Habiru tribes conscripted to Egyptian military service or enslaved for Egypt’s magnificent public works. The mercenary King David had been able to unite disparate tribes into one people with that single story of glorious liberation. Like the Egyptian Pharaohs before him, King David built fortresses, a palace and temple by conscripted labor. The glory of King David’s reign mirrored the Egyptian empire, it’s monopoly of power, wealth and knowledge—militant, magnificent and brilliant by all measures.
Jewish prophets cried out against the monarchy’s trust in swords and chariots, their unjust treatment of the poor, the widow and orphan, and trust in their own wisdom. The Jewish kingdom’s utter defeat by Assyrians, then Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Syrians and Romans, slavery, exile and diaspora, did nothing to repudiate imperial injustice. Rather, the people’s longing for return to the glories of King David’s reign took shape as Jewish Apocalypticism, longing for the return of a warrior-king Messiah.
The last book of the Bible is called The Apocalypse or The Revelation to John. If you open the book, you will read of death and destruction, the bloody clash of supernatural forces in a cosmic battle waged on earth. Think Apocalypse Now. Let me challenge this violent connotation of the term. `Apocalypse’ literally means “unveiling” or “revealing”—nothing violent suggested! The great unveiling, when all will be revealed, would be the “end of the age” and “the beginning of a new age” (Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 2009).
For an oppressed people, for many today who find hope only in imperial power, wealth and knowledge, the “end of the age” can only be imagined as an exercise of superior power, wealth and knowledge. For Jews who had experienced generations of brutalization by empires, from Egyptian to Roman, the “end of the age” liberation could only be imagined as greater imperial power, led by a warrior-king like King David.
When Paul and the four gospel writers claimed that Jesus had been seen alive after his execution on the cross, that was not so difficult to believe at the time. People were reported to have been raised from the dead before. What was absolutely laughable to Jewish apocalypticists, was their claim that this peasant who was hanged on a cross along with criminals was the Messiah. The longed-for Messiah, the embodiment of King David, the warrior-king who would conquer the Romans and drive them out of Palestine, must be entirely different from this humiliated peasant criminal Jesus!
The challenge facing Paul and the Gospel writers, twenty to forty-five years after Jesus’ death, was to convince fellow Jews that the Messiah could actually be executed by the Romans and still be a conquering king like King David. Each Gospel writer had their own angle. Each is different from the others, and yes, there are undeniable discrepancies of fact among the Gospels. But remember, the Gospels were not written as historical accounts, but as theological arguments to convince Apocalyptic Jews that the liberating, warrior-king Messiah, could conquer by dying and rising from the dead.
The Jewish followers of Jesus, were apolcalypticists in the conquering sense. They dreamed of an imperial Messiah. The Gospel writers believed that God’s Kingdom would be implemented forcefully, Jesus returning in grandeur and power to overthrow the Roman oppressors. Matthew and Luke have Jesus telling his disciples: “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28; see also Luke 22:28-30, quoted in Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted).
The challenge of Biblical scholars is to distinguish the dissimilar teachings of Jesus from the views of his followers, in this case apocalyptic Messianic Jews. They expected a warrior-king, an imperial monarch with overwhelming power, wealth and knowledge who would conquer their Roman enemies and introduce the Kingdom of God on earth—in the later Gospel of John, the Kingdom would be in heaven. Either way, they imagined an imperial hierarchy.
What doesn’t fit are the non-violent, non-judgmental, egalitarian teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Love your enemies,” rather than conquer them; “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” not judged as sinners or outcasts nor cast into the fire; “Sell all you have and give to the poor,” rather than some being enthroned in glory and others cast out. Jesus’ great commission welcomed all to the common table, sharing power, wealth and knowledge. No mighty kingdom of overwhelming power and glory.
The apocalypse “unveiling” in the words of Jesus tell of a radical sense of mutual relationship, of grace and universal compassion, a message greatly dissimilar to that of the Jews of Jesus’ day including his Jewish followers. The apocalypse “revealing” we find in Jesus’ followers’ words (attributed to Jesus) reflect an imperial apocalypticism of a long-oppressed Jewish people, longing for a reversal of power and domination with them finally on top of the heap. I do not believe that the historical critical method supports this imperial apocalypticism as an authentic account of Jesus’ teachings.
There is a popular tune by the Semisonics with these lyrics:
“Closing time, time for you to go out to the places you will be from…
Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,
I know who I want to take me home…. Take me home.” (Semisonics)
When we speak of apocalypse unveiling the “end of the age,” we know: “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Perhaps we should speak of the apocalypse revealed by Jesus as, not the end of an age, but as the beginning of a new age, an apocalypse unveiling of universal compassion, without judgment, sharing of power, sharing of wealth, and sharing of knowledge in shared decision-making.
A Messiah in the image of King David is no liberator, but the same old enslavement we suffered in Egypt. At the end of days, I want to find my way home with a Messiah whose anointing is compassion and love, giving and receiving in turn. That would be true liberation.
Coleman Barks, translator of Rumi’s poetry, tells the following story of discovery:
“A man in prison is sent a prayer rug by his friend. What he had wanted, of course, was a file or a crowbar or a key! But he began using the rug, doing five-times prayer each day: Before dawn, at noon, mid-afternoon, after sunset, and before sleep. Bowing, sitting up, bowing again, he noticed an odd pattern in the weave of the rug, just at the qibla, the point, where his head touches it. He studied and meditated on that pattern, and gradually discovered that it was a diagram of the lock that confined him in his cell and how it worked. He was able to escape. Anything you do every day can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom.
Although we may desire apocalyptic liberation as a glorious reversal of the oppressive conditions of our lives—the oppressive roles and relationships to which we have become accustomed, even so, may we instead be open to greater wholeness. May we find ourselves at home in a healed and healthy world at the end of our days.