The Proclaimed Word
Preached by the Reverend Canon Durrell Watkins at
the Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, November 18, 2007, at the 9:50
am service.
Context is everything… not everyone understands what we mean when we say
things. Our intent does not always match our impact. When I was doing my
internship to become ordained in Metropolitan Community Churches, Shawn
(another young intern) and I decided we would do a bit of street ministry
one day. So we painted signs that said, “The end is near” and we stood on
the side of the road to warn people of very real danger. A car came racing
by, saw us standing there with our signs and yelled at us, “Go home you
religious freaks!” Ten seconds later we heard screeching tires and big
crash. Shawn turns to me and says, “Instead of saying the end is near,
maybe our signs should say, ‘the bridge is out!’”[1]
Our signs were not understood in the way we really intended.
Of course, there is a long tradition of people predicting the world’s
end. In the year 90, St. Clement predicted the world would end at any
minute. He seems to have been mistaken. A fellow named Hippolytus
predicted the end would be in the year 500. Many Christians in Europe
thought the year 1000 would usher in doomsday. Pope Innocent III declared
the year 1284 to be the magic date. Benjamin Keach, a Baptist, picked the
year 1689 to be when it would all come to a screeching halt. Charles
Wesley seems to have thought 1794 might be the year. One of the founders
of the Seventh Day Adventists picked a few dates in the 1800s and the
Jehovah’s Witnesses have guessed at several dates in the 1900s.
What each of these predictions have in common is that none of them came
true! But why were these people even trying to make such grim and macabre
prognostications? Apparently, they were using some creative and vivid
passages of the bible without considering or even knowing the historical
context of those passages, trying to decipher them. The passages seem to
predict some bloody conflicts, and over the centuries, futurists have
tried to guess if the future is now. Revelation is the most famous of
those bizarre texts, but segments of the gospels also qualify. Luke 21 is
one of those doomsday passages but we may want to look a little deeper to
see what it’s really saying.
Sixty or so years before the birth of Jesus, the Roman Empire occupied the
land of Israel. Israel and Judah had been subject to various empires,
such as the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians. There isn’t time
today to focus on the Isaiah passage, but that reading is a kind of
resistance text written in opposition to the Babylonian empire. And by 63
BCE, the Romans decided to invade and conquer the area we often call the
Holy Land.
As is almost always the case with imperial and military conquests, the
conquered responded with resentment. And over time, the people of Israel
experienced Rome to be more and more onerous. They especially found the
system of taxation to be unfair (and so you’ll notice in the gospels tax
collectors are not spoken of fondly).
What many people found even more annoying than the tax burden though was
that Rome took over the appointment of the Temple’s High Priest. Imagine
the Chinese government deciding to appoint the Dalai Lama or the Russian
government deciding to appoint the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, or the
Governor of Alabama deciding to appoint the president of the Southern
Baptist Convention, or the Italian Prime Minister deciding to appoint the
Pope. One wouldn’t need to be Nostradamus to predict resistance in those
cases, and yet that is what Rome was doing… choosing the High Priest for
the Jewish Temple. It was a scandal. It was an insult to an entire
people’s heritage and identity.
The result of this government take over of the Temple administration was
that the highest religious official who led the most sacred ceremonies,
increasingly was someone who willingly collaborated with Rome. The Jewish
Temple was more and more a Roman institution, led by people appointed by
Rome who earned the appointment by being friendly with Rome. And more and
more, the people were outraged.
Early in the first century, a new group formed to express discontent with
Roman rule. These new revolutionaries called themselves Ka-na-im…
the Zealots. You will remember that at least one of Jesus’ disciples was a
member of this group — Simon the Zealot!
The anti-Roman rebels, these Zealots were active for more that 60 years,
and they finally instigated the ill-fated Great Revolt of 66 CE. They
believed that all means were justified in the pursuit of political freedom
and religious liberty. In the year 66, when the Roman procurator Florus
stole vast amounts of silver from the Temple, the revolutionaries viewed
that as the last straw and they responded with violence and launched a
revolt against Rome.
For various reasons, Rome didn’t respond with full force at first, but in
the year 70 (four years into the revolt), that changed and mighty Rome
unleashed its fury on the Jewish people and breached the city walls of
Jerusalem and destroyed the city and its Temple. The Jewish world was
devastated… an era had come to a violent end. And thereafter, writers
would sometimes write about the end of time or the end of the age, and
those writings about the “end time” are part of literary genre we call
apocalyptic literature.
Scholars can’t seem to agree on the actual date that Luke was written,
but we can be pretty certain that it was between 85 and 120 of the Common
era. So, at least 15 years after Rome has decimated Jerusalem and
destroyed its holy Temple, someone we are calling Luke writes this
gospel. And the 21st chapter of Luke’s gospel begins by
recalling the Temple. In the first four verses we see a faithful widow
giving to the Temple treasury, supporting the Temple with all she has. And
that scene leads immediately into the story we read this morning.
So when we read Jesus predicting the end of the Temple, what we are
reading is Luke remembering the end of the Temple, and using Jesus as a
symbol of hope and healing in the aftermath of that terrible time of
destruction. Knowing what has happened, we hear very differently these
words attributed to Jesus, “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do
not be terrified…” When you hear of wars and insurrections? Hello, of
course you are hearing of them, because we are suffering the results of
them. And in the midst of this calamity and heartache, Luke in the spirit
of Jesus using the memory of Jesus says, “Don’t be terrified!” And he
follows that by saying, “Don’t give up.” Verse 19, “By your perseverance
you will secure your lives.”
These texts “predicting” an end are not telling us what is to come, but
rather what has come to pass. The futuristic language is in response to a
present feeling of helplessness. They dare not name the situation directly
for fear of reprisal, so they write as if they are telling the story
before it happened, predicting it and promising healing beyond it. They
are not warning future generations of destruction, they are attempting to
console people who have already lived through destruction. They aren’t
meant to terrify the comfortable; they are meant to comfort the terrified.
And the message beyond the startling imagery is, DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE. When
you have nothing else, don’t give away your hope.
The point of the apocalyptic imagery isn’t that calamity might happen, or
even that it will happen, but rather that it HAS happened and people of
faith are to face the difficulty and dare to resurrect hope within
themselves and continue forward. The point isn’t that harm will come, but
that ultimately the forces of destruction cannot prevail; not that
destruction is near, but that construction is possible; not that there
will be an end, but that the end we have already suffered is being
followed by a new beginning.
Apocalyptic literature isn’t meant to cause us to throw up our hands and
wait for destruction… it is meant to cause us to roll up our sleeves and
get to work making things better again. We’ve all faced an end… it may
have been scary or difficult or uncertain or overwhelming… but we learned
that “by not giving up, we gain life.” Keep going… don’t give up hope…
don’t give up, period.
“Behold I I have left an open door before you which no one can close!”[2]
“They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength, they will soar
with eagles’ wings; they will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow
faint.”[3]
“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”[4]
In the moment of grief, don’t give up.
In the grip of addiction, don’t give up.
In the hour of loneliness, don’t give up.
In the moment of betrayal, don’t give up.
In the struggle for equality, don’t give up.
In the journey toward health and wholeness,
don’t give up.
We aren’t saying the devastation of the past wasn’t real, but our sacred
texts tell us that the difficulty behind us or even at hand need not be
the last word in our story. Be encouraged; don’t give up. The end we have
lived through is also the opportunity for a new and wonderful beginning.
This is the message of these apocalyptic texts, and this is the good news.
Amen.
[1]
Copied/adapted from the Internet
[2]
Revelation 3.8
[3] Isaiah
40.31
[4] Psalm
30.5