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.
