On the Rapture (Yeah, That's Right!)

So let’s talk about the end times.  Seems like a strange thing read on an Episcopal priest's blog, but it's a  fascinating subject.  I suspect on some level that we all want to know the details about that time:  what will those days be like?   The early followers of Jesus believed the end times were coming much sooner, rather than later; in fact, nearly every Christian writer in the first century, including Matthew and Paul, thought this, and their writings  reflected that reality. 

Yeah....we're not.  Sorry.

'Jesus said, “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”'

--Matthew 25: 1-13

'We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.'

--I Thessalonians 4: 13-18

Throughout his ministry Jesus was met with question after question about what the end would be like, for most Jews believed that a day would come when God would break through human history and send the Messiah to reconcile both the living and the dead to God.  It's not just a Judeo-Christian idea, our Muslim brothers and sister also believe in such a day, meaning it's part of all the Abrahamic faiths.  That day has many names:  the eschaton, the perousia,  and the Day of Ressurection are a few examples. The people in Jesus' time wanted to know every juicy detail of that day:  When will it happen?  What will the signs be?  How can people prepare?  However, according to the Gospels, Jesus rarely gave specific details about the end.  It's true that he offered  some clues and helpful advice—keep awake, for example—but he did not dig into the kinds of details for which people were--and still are--longing.  He never said when, where, and how that day wiould occur; in fact, it not only says in this week's passage “you do not know the day or the hour” but just one chapter earlier, in Matthew 24: 36 Jesus proclaims that nobody, not even he himself, knows the details of the eschaton, only God the Father knows that.  It seems that Jesus did not think that details were all that important. 

The trouble with such details is that sometimes they can be wrong, or at the very least miscalculated.  Take Paul, for example.  His writings predate the Gospels, so in some ways we get an even better look at the thoughts and practices of early Christians from his letters than we do the Gospel writers.  Among those early Christian communities Paul wrote to was the church in Thessalonika, a city in the northern region of Greece.  Like Paul and most other Christians at that time the Thessalonians believed the eschaton was right around the corner, and their main concern was whether or not folks who had already died would experience the joys of Jesus’ return.  Paul, therefore, wrote to reassure them that, yes, the dead will rise first and that they themselves would be lifted up to meet Jesus in the air upon his return.  Paul then spends the rest of that letter, and the second letter to the Thessalonians, encouraging them with this hope, reminding them that Jesus is coming soon and that they will be with him; and he includes himself among them, saying "we who are alive," which indicates he thought they all, himself included, would be around to see that day.  It’s a lovely image, and certainly there’s nothing wrong with having that kind of hope that Paul gave them, but as far as the details were concerned, it turned out Paul was wrong; in fact, they all were.  Mark, Matthew, Paul, Peter, and John, all thought the eschaton would happen in their lifetimes. They got the details wrong.

When we go to the Bible looking for specific details, especially details about the future, we run into some problems, namely the fact that things which were predicted by the Scripture writers didn't always come to pass. Take Jesus’ statement from Matthew 16: 28, when he said that there were folks standing there in his presence who would not taste death until they saw the Son of Man coming in his glory; that is, until the eschaton.  Matthew felt pretty confident giving Jesus those words, but obviously, Matthew’s details were a little off because none of those folks are still around, and the eschaton still hasn't come.  When Christians today go digging for specific details like these we end up with theologies that are not necessarily in-keeping with what the Scriptures had in mind or with what the church has historically believed. 

NOT in the Bible!!

One of the best examples of this is the Rapture.  Yes, an Episcopalian is writing about the Rapture, how many times does that happen?!  The Rapture is NOT in the Bible, and it was not taught as church doctrine until the late 17th century, and even then only by a very small number of Protestant evangelicals who took sayings from the biblical authors to mean the same thing now as they did back then. They folks, who were generally those Protestants who had been kicked out of larger, established churches--or, in the case of the Puritans, our of an entire country--found Paul’s words to the Thessalonians, along with some of Matthew’s predictions and the Revelation to John, and they figured that the key to understanding God's plan for them was to figure out the details of how it all was going to come to an end.  By having a futurist mentality about faith and the Scriptures they could validate their own experiences, claiming that God was coming soon, and that they would be saved.  

You have this guy to thank for the Rapture.

One person in-particular named John Nelson Darby, who was an ex-Anglican priest that helped found the Brethren Church in Ireland in 1827, wrote extensively on these kinds of details, saying that the Bible was one single, continuous narrative—rather than a collection of Scriptures—and that by searching the details of end times passages in places like Matthew, I Thessalonians, and Revelation, and putting them all together, Christians could clearly know what was going to happen. Darby went on to say that God had dispensed human history into six periods, and that we are currently in the next to last one.  At the end of this period, we will all be raptured into heaven, he said, after which time a great tribulation will occur on earth for seven years, and then Jesus will return to usher in the final period called the Millenial Kingdom, his 1000 year rule on earth, and then human history will end.  This theory is called premillenial dispensationalism, and it comes from the school of thought that our true meaning, and the true purpose of the Scriptures, is in the fine details.  If we go searching, we will find  clues to how this whole thing will play out.  It might sound quirky to some of us, but it has become an essential part of many evangelical Christians' thoughts and practice. What's more, it's become a booming enterprise. The Left Behind series is premellenial dispensationalism at its finest!  It’s not grounded in any actual biblical scholarship or church doctrine, but it’s obviously had a huge impact on western Christianity because many believe it fleshed out the scriptural details of how the end times will occur.  I guess no one told series creator Tim LaHaye, or the folks who have predicted that the Rapture will occur nearly every year for the past century, that when Paul, Matthew, and the other Scripture authors paid too much attention to the details, they ended up with miscalculations and botched predictions of every kind. 

False theology at its best, folks.

But if the details of Scripture aren’t that important, and if we’re not supposed to pay all of our attention to them, what are we supposed to pay attention to?  Why read Scripture at all.  This is a question at the core of all biblical scholarship, and while the answer isn’t simple, it is worthwhile, because it's deep and requires us to wrestle with some hard truths of Scripture.  One of those truths is that  the Bible is not a single narrative meant to give us details on the end times.  It's not a book.   It is a library—that’s what the word Bible means—made up of poems, prose, letters, and stories about God and the everlasting promise of God’s love for God's people, written at various points in history and spanning more than 1000 years.  Our task as biblical scholars is to search for the deeper meaning behind the Scriptures, to contextualize them,  rather than take them literally or at face value, as folks like Darby and LaHaye have done.  When we do that we find the deeper meaning behind all of the Scriptures, even the hard ones, is that very promise of God's love for God's people.  Thus, our study of the Bible serves not to predict the future, especially given that so many of the prophecies the biblical writers were certain would come true either didn't or haven't yet.  Instead, it is to remind us of that promise.  The deeper meaning of Paul's letter isn’t in the details of how we will be with Jesus or when, it is the promise of God’s love made clear in the simple fact that we will be with Jesus.  The deeper meaning behind Matthew’s predictions isn’t how Jesus will return, it’s how we can live into lives reflective of God’s love here and now,  and since we've been reading Matthew's gospel this year I'd say remembering and living out the Beatitudes would be a good start, so that when he does return Jesus will find us doing the very work he himself did.  It’s not about the details, it’s about the deeper meaning of God’s love. When I was in the Holy Land years ago our tour guide told us that if we came looking for facts we would leave disappointed, but if we came for truth, we would find it. Facts are about details. Truth is about someone deeper.

So for us, as we pick up our Bibles at home and search for hope and encouragement, may we remember that the details are not what matter most.  What matters most is that we find that promise of God’s love, poured out in creation, reiterated by the prophets, given flesh in Jesus, and taught and preached by Paul, and lived by us all these years later.  Even when we talk about hard stuff like the end times, that deeper meaning of the promise of God’s love is there.  That’s all that matters.  The rest is just details.