Mark 12:38-44
38 As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces 39 and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! 40 They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
41 He sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43 Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. 44 For all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
You may know that there was a recent election in the US, and you probably know that some people are very happy about the results while other people are very unhappy about the results. One striking aspect of the campaign is that both parties described the choice before the voters in apocalyptic terms. Remarkably, both declared that the other party, if elected, represented an existential threat to democracy, even to America itself. The election was less about choosing a positive vision for the future than about rejecting a dangerous alternative, more like a stay of execution than a liberation. And while the main characters will be different next time around, the drama will likely essentially be the same. Every four years the apocalypse is upon us.
This isn’t to say that elections don’t have real consequences, that one administration wouldn’t bring about very different outcomes than another, that for some people their flourishing and/or suffering depend on who’s in charge. But it also seems to me that the kinds of people most prone to apocalyptic rhetoric are the ones least affected by the result. For many, life goes on more or less the same irrespective of who’s the President. It may just be that we’re inclined to hype the significance of politics precisely because it’s the only thing that seems to matter in a world where nothing really matters. We’ve eliminated most other sources of meaning, identity, and belonging, leaving politics to fill the void. We’ve got to find existential drama somewhere.
I don’t want to suggest that apocalyptic thinking is new - quite the contrary, humans demonstrate an abiding fixation about how this story ends, and a penchant for assuming that we must play a central role in that story. Everyone who predicts the end of the world tends to fix the date within their lifetime. Such predictions have always been wrong, and I kind of hope the end won’t come until we stop making such predictions just so no one will have the satisfaction of thinking they figured it out.
Apocalyptic thinking may be as old as time, but Western civilization does not seem to be especially hopeful about the future right now, irrespective of who wins an election.
One subject that has recently received a fair bit of coverage, even the New York Times, is the precipitous decline in birthrates throughout the Western / “developed” world and the various issues this decline raises. Although demographers see trouble on the horizon - who will support the elderly if there are no young people? - the articles and the commenters, especially, generally greet the diminishment of the human population as welcome news. Among the explanations offered for the decline in birthrates are economic pressures, lifestyle choices, and liberation from the patriarchy, but the most common sentiment seems to be that, given the state of the world and the impending calamity from climate change, avoiding reproduction is the most rational, most humane decision.
I want to be very clear that it is entirely inappropriate to criticize people who don’t have children, whether they be single or a couple. We do not know if they wanted children but couldn’t, or whether they have quite good reasons for deciding against children. We are in no place to judge. I do think though, that taken in aggregate, the declining birthrate across the developed world reflects declining hope for the future, declining belief that existence is good, declining faith that life itself has meaning. For centuries people have brought children into situations much worse than the anything we face, and while this is certainly attributable in part to the fact that they lacked birth control or, even more important, that woman didn’t have much of say, more fundamentally I assume people in the past had children because they thought those lives would be worth living. Now we’re not so sure.
I mean, who has children in the face of an impending apocalypse? Well, Christians do.
In the passage from Mark, after the disciples bring attention to the impressive building in the temple precinct, Jesus declares that these will all be torn down stone from stone. The disciples ask when these things will happen, and Jesus responds that, though many will come in his name claiming the end has come, and though there will be wars and earthquakes and all manner of signs, the end has not yet to come. The thing is, it sure seems everything Jesus predicted took place not long after Mark was likely written, in 70AD when, following a rebellion which briefly established Jewish independence, the Romans destroyed the temple, leaving only the Western Wall which remains today. For Jews, and for Jewish Christians this was the apocalypse, the surest sign that end of history was at hand, and Christians lived in the expectation of Christ’s imminent return.
But, to the surprise of just about everyone, history continued after that apocalypse and continues still. There have been many times and places since where people probably thought they were living through the apocalypse only to discover that the world kept turning. And perhaps you’ve even been through our own kind of apocalypse, a time when you were sure your world was ending, but reached the other side. There really is nothing new under the sun, however special we want our life and times to be.
While there may have been many apocalypses, so to speak, Jesus does tell of the final apocalypse when history really will end, and this anticipation surely fostered the apocalyptic imagination in Western Civilization. Jesus warned us to live in light of the judgment that was to come, but he also warned us against living with our eyes up in the sky, preoccupied with the end, which is no way of living at all. The author of the story will bring about a fitting end, but it’s not the role of the characters in that drama to conclude the story, but rather simply to play their part.
Putting it this way can make it sound as if we are simply prisoners of fate, that we should resign ourselves to our inability to affect the outcome, that God is going to do what God is going to do irrespective of our input. And this might seem to lead to a kind of Christian fatalism, where nothing we do really matters. Our work is simply to secure our souls and await judgment. We might join those who think the world is going down the drain and just wait for the apocalypse.
But for Christians, the confidence that history belongs to God leads not to resignation but to liberation, like someone who has faced death but is still alive. We believe that the apocalypse has already happened in Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection, that the meaning and direction of history have been disclosed precisely because the character of God has been revealed in the one who assumed our humanity, suffered, and rose again. In a real sense, the end of history - Christ’s return - is just the epilogue of the story that has already been written.
Exactly because the truth has been revealed in Jesus, we are free to live in the present in the hope that the future belongs to God. This does not mean, to be clear, that everything which happens is part of God’s plan; in fact, it means just the opposite, that so much of what happens is contrary to God’s plan, but that God’s plan will ultimately prevail, that unjust suffering like Christ’s own can and will be redeemed.
What this means is that we neither need to take on the impossible burden of trying to make the story turn out right, nor do we despair that the story is meaningless, or worse. To reiterate where I concluded last Sunday, the task of Christians is not to change the world nor to condemn the world, rather our task is simply to be faithful to Jesus, trusting that this is not only what God wants us to do, it’s exactly what the world needs too. Every Sunday we ask God to, “free us for joyful obedience”, that “we would be for the world the Body of Christ redeemed by his blood”, we ask God to, “Grant that we may go into the world in the strength of your Spirit, to give ourselves for others”. Whenever we worship we gather in the hope that God will make us the church the world needs, the church that we need. It seems almost impossibly foolish to think that church could be the answer given how uninspiring church typically is, but then perhaps that’s simply because church is so often tempted to some other form of “relevance” besides following the way of Jesus. Jesus didn’t seem to have a very effective strategy for redeeming the world, and we may not appear very effective either. But God has shown us that faithfulness always bears fruit, and that we’ve got all the time we need.
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