One of the themes of Matthew 24:36-44 is that having things can be normal one day and apocalyptic the next. What happens the day before the world ends? People marry and have kids. Students enrole in four-year degree programs. Banks sign 30-year loans. The inverse is also true. Total chaos in the present does not guarantee things returning to normal soon. This past week (ending 11/23/2023) has been brutal in Washington. The Epstein saga is about to hit the fan. Tariffs are sucking the tinsel out of Black Friday. Ukraine has lost the support of the US. Meanwhile, the president responds to a sober appeal from one group of soldiers to other soldiers to be careful and check the legitimacy of their orders before following them, by calling the six of our elected officials traitors. He redefines the word sedition in order to advocate hanging them. Violence follows. All of this, and I haven’t yet mentioned AI. Nothing that troubles us today has any impact on God’s timeline for human history.
A bumper sticker on my neighbor’s truck says he’ll be a first responder in case of a zombie apocalypse. The movies, Ender’s Game and Hunger Games, are not about games, but about the loss of childhood innocence in a post-apocalyptic world. One of the unexpected consequences of the shift to a secularized/post-religious worldview is that the end of days is often spoken about with no reference to the Book of Revelations or Judeo-Christian prophesies. What is missing from today’s discussion is hope. What is missing from most of our Advent is faith.
[People will one day say,]
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more.
The biblical prophets are confident that a day is coming when peace will replace violence, honesty overtake lies, law dispel disorder, and instruction in God’s ways become the most valued education. Meanwhile, Jesus assures us that those who are poor now already possess this coming kingdom (Luke 6:20). We should think in terms of realized eschatology, even if we don’t buy into the social justice theology of the 1960s. The more we live as if this new kingdom is ours already, the less the current ways of the world will drag us down. We should live as a people who already recognize the widow, refugee, and ostracized as saints living among us. We are like Ruth, choosing to travel with the impoverished Naomi as she returns to the land of her people. On the surface, Naomi has nothing. By faith, though, we who travel with her have all things.