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Mark A. Lewis,
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MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
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This page revised 6
Dec 00
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A Better
Look
Reflections on the
lessons for the First Sunday of Advent
3 December 2000
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Zechariah 14:4-9 / Psalm 50:1-6
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 / Luke
21:25-31
Our Saviour Church attendance would drop off drastically, I think, if every week the gospel reading -- and others -- were whole chapters, sometimes even whole books, of the Bible. Rather than just pointed selections. However, the people who actually would come around for these marathon readings would learn quite a bit more than we do now.
Taking today's gospel as an example, it would be a good idea to read two chapters from Luke, 20 and 21, at one sitting. But today we only hear the very end of 21. The long passage is Luke 's account of a supposed day Jesus spent teaching in the Temple.
That's a common literary strategy in the Bible. When a writer had a lot of "sayings" of Jesus he wanted to plug in, but not much story to go with them, he would weave them into an imagined event. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew; in Luke it's the Sermon on the Plain, and later these "Temple Teachings"are good examples.
In the Temple passage from Luke, Jesus speaks all day long to various groups of people he encounters in the courtyard of the Temple at Jerusalem -- mostly to people who pose particular problems or questions to him.
Sometimes he turns his attention to the group of disciples who are with him but still he speaks "in the hearing of all the people". Much of those times, Jesus starts speaking about the "end things", the dust-up coming on down the line if things keep heading in the direction he sees them going.
That's what prophecy is: Less like fortunetelling and more like an inspired critique of the present situation with an eye to the future.
He's speaking in familiar code words and shorthand to the disciples in-the-know, but what on earth must the outsiders have thought when they heard him -- especially if they only heard bits and pieces of what he said over the course of the day. They must have thought him dangerous, or crazy, or brilliant. Who knows? Luke doesn't tell us a thing.
I think modern readers like us must feel more like those outsiders when we hear about signs in the sun and the moon and the clouds and distress on the earth. When we hear Jesus talking about feeding the poor, or loving your neighbor, or relaxing into peace and wisdom, it seems to us that we are supposed to be (or at least try to become) like the inner circle of disciples he addressed.
But listening to this apocalyptic language is something else. When Jesus talks about the end of the world" I usually feel positively outside the circle of the disciples, as much as the folks milling around the Temple must have felt. I just don't get it. And I just don't like it much.
But, like it or not, Jesus says, there will inevitably be a day of judgement sooner or later. Call it what you please; or ignore it. Use the symbolic language Jesus picked; or make up your own. But a time is coming when God's perspective on human behavior will take center stage and become the only reality. And then the world as we know it will fall apart. I don't much go for the way Jesus expressed the idea, myself. But I do think he's right about it.
How do I think I know that? Because it happens all the time: In history, in national life, and in our own daily lives. It's judgement day whenever human beings -- who seem to be trying to wear out God's compassion -- finally succeed at it and we suddenly find ourselves let loose into our full capacity to destroy ourselves and each other and creation itself.
Judgement day is not about God's intentional punishment. It's about people wriggling out from under God's mercy and into the turbulence that we're being sheltered from. It's our own doing. We jump into the whirlwind. But through it all -- Jesus teaches - God keeps looking on. And when we finally get what we thought we wanted, to our horror, God's compassion is still there to start helping us back out of the whirlwind.
As I said, Jesus uses some images that don't work for me. But I think he is just restating in his own way a theme that runs through the whole Bible: setting an example for all of us to find ways to understand what he's talking about and then restate it ourselves in ways that can make a difference in our own lives.
For me, the thing that scripture calls the judgement of God is what happens whenever we are able to see our world and ourselves from God's point of view. When it registers with us what infinite dismay and anger and sheer frustration the All-knowing One, the Creator of the Universe, the Source of Love, the Ground of Being must feel when looking at the way people insist on running things here on earth. And then to see at the same time how an equally infinite love and faithfulness matches that wrath.
Stepping into judgement day is scary. It's worse than the sky falling down and people wailing and gnashing teeth. It's a dumbfounding vision of exactly how blameworthy we are for terrible wrongs set beside an equally stunning revelation of God's complete forgiveness. And it's also an opening scene for a whole new chance at doing things differently: chapter one of a new life.
Advent confronts us with a theology forged in real events and disasters and betrayals, terrible suffering and immense sadness all groping in the darkness for reconciliation. At no time is the message of the church more different from the message of the secular world than during the run up to the holidays. The mall tells us how many shopping days we have left to get ready for Christmas. In Advent, the church tells us to get ready for destruction and re-creation. It's a sharp reminder that God is doing business in the arena of international events and natural disasters and politicians and policies as much as in the corners of my life and yours.
Jesus wanted his followers -- including us -- not to get too cozy with an easy, personal God who always aims to please. Doing that means forgetting to keep searching for ways we can get to know the way God sees things and then try to see them more that way ourselves. And when God looks at the world, it looks good -- of course -- but it looks pitifully out-of-whack, too.
Looking at the world with that kind of judgement day mentality sets us up to continue the work that Jesus set out for us to do: Carrying on with the redemption of this world. Continuing to bring God's perspective on creation into focus everywhere until it finally clicks everywhere and judgement day ends with the dawn of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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