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Apocalypse Now
If
we died with Christ, we believe
that we shall also live with him.
Romans 6:8
The cover
story in last week’s issue of TIME magazine was devoted
to the current obsessive interest in the subject of the end
of the world and in the Book of Revelation, which comes at the
end of the New Testament. All churches which use the Apostles’
Creed profess each Sunday:
I
look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
But mainline
churches have usually not shown special interest in the rapture
or in the signs of the times leading up to Armageddon. We believe
that our energy is better spent in attempting to live out Jesus’
moral teaching in this world. Indeed, Jesus’ most distinctive
teaching, on love of enemies (Luke 6:27-36), seems quite opposed
to the bloodthirsty predictions of the destruction of the enemies
of the Christian church which permeate the Book of Revelation.
And yet
I think it would be wrong to dismiss the current interest in
apocalyptic as simply the result of the perilous times in which
we live, marked, as they are, by terrorism, the AIDS epidemic,
and an apparently insoluble conflict in the land of Jesus’
birth.
When I was
in New York, I spent about an hour with Father Norris Clarke
of Fordham University. Father Clarke was one of the greatest
teachers I ever had, and I had not seen him since he was removed
from teaching seminarians in 1955. Father Clarke remarked on
the essential importance of having a story. Without a story,
a person’s life is just one thing after another, without
meaning, and an invitation to despair. But a story has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. The importance of the end of our personal
story is what I take away from the current obsession with the
end of the world, about which Jesus said to his disciples, "no
one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only
the Father" (Mark 13:32).
Without
a story, life is a soap opera, usually without the titillating
episodes which make soap operas so popular. One soap opera,
"The Guiding Light," recently completed fifty years
of existence. But after the leading couple have gotten divorced
and remarried for the sixth time, the soap opera begins to test
the loyalty of even the most devoted viewer, and at some point
the network will pull the plug. No ending, just a blank TV screen.
What about
our life? Will our end be simply the cessation of vital signs
on a hospital monitor, or will it be the end of a personal story,
of which the recording angel will write:
It
is finished (John 19:30).
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Matthew 25:21
The difference,
it seems to me, lies in whether we live our lives intentionally,
whether we "press on toward the goal" (Philippians
3:14), or whether we live our lives as in a soap opera, with
each petty happiness or sorrow succeeding the last one, with
no progress or direction.
In our epistle
Paul exhorts us to see our personal story in relation to the
life and death of Christ and, indeed, in relation to the story
of the human race, as the phrase "our old Adam" (Romans
6:6) suggests. Then, indeed, in the words of our Collect, we,
loving God above all things, will obtain the promise which exceeds
all that we can desire.
July 7,
2002
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