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   The sayings of Jesus fall into two categories: sayings which proclaim the coming rule of God are called apocalyptic; sayings which concern the rule of God within us or among us are sayings of holy wisdom.

Both Judaism and Christianity have been wary of apocalyptic: there are only two apocalyptic books in the Biblical canon – the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. There are good reasons for being wary of apocalyptic. The proclamation of God’s final victory over his enemies is often coupled with violent extremism of the type with which we are only too familiar today.

Those who assert that such extremism has nothing to do with religion are naïve, to say the least. Certainly, the signs of the times leading up to Armageddon (Revelation 16:16) have nothing to do with living out Jesus’ moral teaching in this world. His most distinctive teaching, on love of enemies (Luke 6:27-36), is utterly contrary to the blood-thirsty predictions of the destruction of the enemies of the Christian church which permeate the Book of Revelation.

Moreover, preoccupation with the world to come can make us neglect our present responsibilities. There were some in the Christian community in Thessalonica who, in their ardent anticipation of the rapture, had quit work (2 Thessalonians 3:6-15). To them Paul declares: “If anyone will not work, let him not eat” (v. 10).

Perhaps these negative aspects of apocalyptic are what have led some modern scholars to try to convert Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet of Albert Schweitzer’s pioneering study, into Jesus, the social revolutionary, whose authentic sayings are limited to teaching subversive wisdom, after the manner of Cynic philosophers.

But apocalyptic cannot be swept under the rug quite so easily. After all, Jesus was part of a religious culture which believed itself to be living in the end of days. E.P. Sanders places Jesus in an apocalyptic trajectory between John the Baptist and Paul. Jesus’ action in the temple (Mark 11:15-19 par) is interpreted as a symbolic gesture setting in motion the temple’s future destruction, a common motif in apocalyptic writing.

Moreover, I don’t think that we can do without a concern for how things will end. The importance of the end of our life story is what I take away from fundamentalist obsession with the end of the world, about which, as Jesus told his disciples, “no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).

Without a story a person’s life is just one thing after another, devoid of meaning and an invitation to despair. Without a story life is a soap opera, though usually without the titillating episodes which make soap operas so popular.
Will the end of our life 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 can write:

It is finished (John 19:30).
Well done, thou good and faithful servant!
Matthew 25:21

t all depends, it seems to me, on whether or not we live our lives intentionally, on whether, in Paul’s words, we “press on toward the goal” (Philippians 3:14), “redeeming the time” (Colossians 4:5).

July 3, 2005

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