The End.

Luke 21:25-38.

I.

            Jesus continues his teaching in the Temple, in this the last week of his mortal life.  He has just predicted the destruction of the Temple and the whole city of Jerusalem, and another horrible expulsion into exile for the people.  Here he says that it’s not just about Judea but all of creation will appear to be shaken, when the Human One, or the Son of Man, Jesus himself, comes.

            He is not making this up.  Most of what Jesus says here was said before him by prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures.  This would not have been news to his listeners.  The prophet Daniel foresaw the coming of the Human One.  Isaiah, Joel, Zephaniah, and others talk about the general destablization of earth and heaven at the end of all things.  They almost all predict that the current evil order will collapse with tremendous violence, and that a new order of blessing will be established. 

            Jesus is tapping into the long and deep Jewish tradition of mystical and apocalyptic thought.  These kinds of visions always emerge from people undergoing great stress.  The prophets wrote to warn the people about coming calamities which would descend upon them because of their wanton disobedience of God.  This disobedience invariably took the form of idolatry that spawned social and economic injustice contrary to God’s law.

            The leaders of the people would be seduced away from Israel’s God to worship other deities, the State gods of larger and more powerful nations, gods that were invented and projected by kings as a way to keep people under their control.  The message of these gods had to do with obeying the king, maintaining the inequalities of the caste system, and keeping the economy growing. 

            The message of Israel’s God is just the opposite and utterly incompatible with these other gods.  Israel’s God is about equality among the people all of whom, including the king, are under God’s law.  Israel’s God had liberated them from slavery in Egypt, and gave them a law to ensure they did not become an oppressive, exploitative, extractive, centralized, hierarchical State.  The Israelite kings tried to stick God into a specialized category, as a way to have more than one god at the same time.  But that didn’t work either.  Israel’s God had the annoying tendency to claim to be the only real God; this God demanded exclusive worship and obedience.

            When the kings of Israel and Judah, and therefore the people, fell into the worship of these State gods of other nations, they also adopted the unjust values and practices of these other nations.  That’s why the prophets almost all rail against the social injustices that idolatry invariably excretes.  The weak and the needy and the stranger are abused and neglected, the rich and powerful ignore or cynically twist God’s law, so that power and wealth accrue to the few at the top, exactly the situation their ancestors endured in Egypt that God wants the people to avoid.

II.

            The prophets come along and point out that Israel’s God is the Creator of the whole universe, whose law is also universal, and that disobedience of this God is to place one’s self at a variance with the whole creation and even with reality itself.  In other words, to disobey God is to live a lie; it is to base your whole social, cultural, political, and economic life on falsehood and delusion. 

            Such a system can be maintained by force of will and violence for a while, but it will inevitably fall, as must anything built on a foundation of pure fantasy. And when such regimes fall it is very messy, to say the least.  These are times of unspeakable horror, destruction, death, and chaos.

            Elsewhere Jesus uses the image of building a house on sand.  It can be done.  The house will stand… for a while.  But when a storm or earthquake comes, it crumbles.    

            Idolatry and injustice attract all kinds of catastrophe, from Noah’s Great Flood, to the ten plagues that fell on Pharaoh’s Egypt, to the invasion of ravenous locusts in Joel, to the war and exile predicted and then manifested in so many of the other prophets.  Idolatry and injustice always kick life out of balance.  They have awesome and terrible consequences.  Always.

            Jesus says the same thing in his own time.  “There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”  He is saying that creation itself will witness, with all the prophets, that this civilization we have built for ourselves on the shifting sand of sin, delusion, lies, fear, and ignorance, which is enforced and maintained by the ruthless violence and propaganda of the wealthy and powerful, for their almost exclusive benefit, is doomed, and is forever disintegrating under the weight of its own idolatry and injustice. 

            And deep in our hearts we know this.  “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”  We know we have abused and nearly destroyed the beautiful garden, the vineyard that God created and gently placed in our care.  We know, even if unconsciously, that there will be a reckoning.  The Creator will bring things back into balance.

            Just the knowledge that the earth would be doing much, much better without us humans, should give us pause.  God does not spare the chosen city, Jerusalem.  God does not spare the chosen people when they disobey and fall into idolatry and injustice.  Will God spare the generation that took this very good earth and mangled it almost beyond recognition out of sheer self-righteous avarice?

III.

            Jesus continues, reciting almost verbatim a prophecy from the book of Daniel.  “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud,” he says.  In Daniel it is part of the prophet’s vision of God’s triumph over a succession of empires.  The Son of Man, or Human One, emerges triumphant over them all.  Jesus has always referred to himself as literally the “Human Son”, a term that brings to mind this figure from Daniel; but it was also an expression that simply meant “human being.” 

            It is like Jesus takes this term from Daniel, and uses it to show how in himself “true humanity is realized once for all” (C-67).  It is true humanity, realized in Jesus, that triumphs over the power of ruthless, conquering empires.  That’s what Jesus is saying when he calls himself the “Human One,” or “Son of Man.”  

            In Matthew’s gospel, at this exact place in Jesus’ ministry, just before Passover, just before his Last Supper and his arrest, Jesus tells a parable about the Son of Man coming in glory, like in Daniel and here in Luke.  In that parable, the Son of Man sits on his heavenly throne, and he is asked by the nations gathered before him, “When did we see you?”  And the Lord answers that people saw him in “the least of these,” that is, the needy, the poor, the weak, and sick, and the imprisoned.  Some ministered to them, and therefore to him, and so entered God’s eternal Kingdom; others perpetuated the injustice of the world and did not minister to “the least of these.”  They end up… well, elsewhere.

            So in both Matthew and Luke, we hear about the Son of Man coming in glory and seen by the nations.  And it happens just a day or so before the Lord’s arrest. 

            In Luke, the nations are still on the earth, paralyzed by fear, bearing the consequences of nature’s rage, brought on by their own reflexive idolatry and its expression in injustice and oppression against fellow human beings.  And when they see the Son of Man, Jesus, himself the true and fully human One, the bearer of true humanity, coming in a cloud “with power and great glory,” what they see is One who identifies especially with the “least of these,” the losers, victims, failures, and scapegoats.  They look on the triumph and vindication of the One they have pierced (Zech. 12:10), whom the Romans crucified, whom they rejected as weak and not the king they were hoping for.    

            It is the losers who win.  It is the last who will be first.  It is the dead who are raised.  It is the hungry who are filled.  It is the lowly who are lifted up.  “Those who lose their life will keep it.”  “The Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”  “All who humble themselves will be exalted.”  We enter the Kingdom of God as a little child.  “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”  And so on.

            Jesus Christ, who is truly God and the truly Human One, our salvation and liberation, finds us in our own needy humanity and the humanity we share with the lowest of our sister and brother humans.       

IV.

            Jesus says, “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  When you can see the face of Christ, which is the face of God, in every human being, then you are becoming the people God wants you to be.  There is no need to hide.  Get up, stand up, hold your head up.  “Open your mouth wide that I may fill it,” like a mother bird feeds her chicks in the nest, says God in Psalm 81.

            God loves you.  God loves you at your lowest, most broken, most weak, most lost, most dead place.  Those are the places God heals, restores, recovers, and fills.  Those are the places into which God brings life and lifts you up.  What you deem to be failure, God re-deems as blessing.  Because it is only when we are empty of ourselves that we can be filled with the God who brings life to the dead, and light into darkness.

            And we can see this happening if we know where and how to look.  Just like we can tell when spring is coming by the buds on the trees, so our days of darkness are ending, says Jesus.  The more God’s light shines into the world, the more people live by the love and justice of the One who is truly human and truly God.

            Nothing is more important.  Nothing is more urgent.  Nothing is more profoundly necessary than that people live by the love and justice of Jesus Christ, who empties himself out of love for us and for the whole world.  Nothing is more imperative than that we cherish and care for the least, and minister to the suffering, and forgive the offender, and walk lightly on the earth.           

            Jesus knows he doesn’t have much time; he knows the end is near for him.  He is making these statements only a day before Passover, which was a celebration of liberation that must have seemed bitterly ironic given the context of Roman domination over Judea at that time.  And it was only about two days before he himself would be crucified.

            And he offers us a choice.  We can follow him to the cross, on the path of self-emptying, through the valley of the shadow of death, even to death itself, where we lose our selves, give up our ego-centric, personality-driven existence… and emerge on the other side enjoying the pure love and true life of resurrection.  Or we can continue to perpetuate cycles of violence, inequality, and selfishness that make life a living hell for billions of our neighbors, reduce this beautiful and abundant planet to a poisoned ruin, and will inevitably bring down upon us a catastrophe of, well, biblical proportions.

V.

            “Be on guard!” urges Jesus.  Don’t get consumed by the worries of this life.  Be alert!  Stay awake!  Be present and conscious.  Look alive out there!  “Pray that you have the strength to escape all these things that will take place and to stand before the Son of Man.”  Pray that we find our true humanity in him.

            The only way to escape all these things that will take place is to die to that dying world, and then to live together according to the values and practices of Jesus Christ, which is to say live in resonance with God’s truth, to dance to God’s deeper, bright, and gentle melody, and be jerked around no longer by the cacophony of the rat-race, with its falsehood, fear, lies, anger, violence, hatred, and shame that turn us against each other, against creation, against ourselves, and against our Creator.

            The Lord Jesus delivers these words in the Temple.  And then steps into the churning maelstrom of Jerusalem politics, which would arrest him and kill him before the week is over. 

            But he defeats death by death, and he returns to inspire his new community into a new future.  We are that new community when we live by our trust in him.

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