Luke 21:25-36
All an advertiser has to do to attract our attention is to put up a big billboard that reads, "It's Coming." We don't even need to know what "it" is; we want to see it, if only for curiosity's sake.
In Advent, we know what's coming. The traditional texts remind us of it. When it's Jesus who's coming, we can anticipate it with joy.
Or can we? Jesus' coming is prefigured by dread signs -- by the end of the world, even. What kind of twisted person yearns for that kind of coming? (Maybe one of those crazies with a "Repent! The end is near!" sign, but not us!)
But stop and consider. Stop and consider the pain of this world. Isn't there a part of you -- even a little part of you -- that has yearned, on some occasion, to see the coming of the Lord, after all? It's the part of you that looks at the headlines and winces, that aches with pain for the family of Sgt. Patrick King [the Long Branch, N.J. police officer who was blown away this week in a random act of violence], that cries out in righteous anger at the injustice of it all.
One of Sgt. King's fellow-officers expressed the anguish of many. He was talking, at the funeral, about the murderer -- who shot King in the back of the head for no apparent reason while he was waiting at the counter of a Chinese restaurant, then hijacked several cars and led police on a high-speed chase, finally shooting himself with King's service revolver as police were closing in. "This is probably not right for a Christian to say," Detective Ralph DeFilipo Sr. the told the Asbury Park Press, "but that guy went straight to hell Thursday night, and Pat went straight to heaven."
That's apocalyptic talk. It's the voice of someone in pain -- pain so intense that he's willing, in all seriousness, to damn another human being to hell. Someone feeling pain like that might, for a moment, even welcome the end of the world -- if, with it, the end would bring justice and redemption (and for Patrick King, and his wife and kids, the opportunity to embrace once again).
There's something wrong with us if, as Christians, we don't feel some sense of unease in the world. God has promised us much better.
In this human life of ours, in this fallen world, we live in the tension between the now and the not-yet. In the midst of that tension, Christ's command to us is to "raise our heads."
Don't let yourself be bowed down by troubles. Look up! Raise your head in pride, for you are a child of God, and God intends much better for you than you are now experiencing.
Ultimately, what Christians, during Advent, are looking up to see is not the world's destruction, but the world's redemption. "Redemption" is apolutrosis. Originally, the word refers to the freeing of a slave, with a ransom payment. Try to imagine what that experience must have been like, for a slave: what a simultaneously world-shattering and world-renewing experience it must have been. *That's* how we're meant to see the apocalyptic passages from the Bible -- not as world-denying, world-destroying experiences, but rather as world-renewing experiences.
Nothing changes in the world without some pain, some dislocation. Neither babies nor nations are born without pain. We do not mature in life without experiencing hurt, and learning from it.
It's accepted as commonplace that teenagers rebel against their parents. Everyone knows this, but that knowledge doesn't make the experience any easier, when it happens. Adolescence is an apocalyptic experience -- a death of the old and a rebirth of the new. It's a multi-year process of redemption and renewal, and that has its disorienting and painful aspects.
So, too, with marriage. Marriages are not born on the wedding day into the form that they are ultimately to be, persisting unchanged until the golden anniversary (or beyond). The strongest marriages are those that include, in their intimate history, some apocalyptic moments, some birth-pangs of the new. Frequently they include some pain, even some betrayal -- because what strong, redemptive marriages are really built on is not the first blush of mutual attraction, but an enduring sort of love, forged in the fire of struggle and tempered by mutual forgiveness.
Those who raise children experience the adolescent apocalypse from the other side-- and it's no easier from that angle. Then the day comes when the son or daughter leaves home, and the "nest" is suddenly empty. That experience, too, brings with it its own unique grief -- even as there is vicarious joy for the child, now grown and joyfully soaring on the thermals, testing his or her wings.
At other times in life, we may experience setbacks and failures. We may know bereavement, or chronic illness. When eyesight fails, or mobility is suddenly limited, or the doctor's diagnosis is dire, it may seem for a time that we are "confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves," in danger of going under. Yet we can also see events like these as signs that God is slowly, meticulously, working redemption in our lives. No one welcomes the pain of such signs, but the biblical witness encourages us to see them as hints of a coming redemption -- of a reality so new and great and wonderful that we cannot comprehend it.
Scripture tells us that what is true for our individual lives is also true for the whole of creation. Paul speaks, apocalyptically, of "the birth-pangs of the new age," of "the whole creation groaning in labor-pains." I think Jesus, here in Luke, is poetically telling us what is to come, not so we can spend all our time with "heads raised," gazing up directly overhead -- but rather, so we can proceed through life with "heads raised" in confidence, no longer bowed down by the setbacks life sometimes deals out.
"Redemption is drawing near." We are to seek neither to ignore its inevitable coming, nor to hasten it -- but simply to know that all creation is in God's hands, and that one day the lion shall lay down with the lamb, the great banqueting-table will be set up upon the highest mountain, and every tear will be wiped away. (Comments to carlos.wilton@ecunet.org)