This
time of year, it starts feeling that it’s all downhill until
Christmas. We’ve had half-term, we’ve had Halloween, we’ve had
Bonfire Night, we’ve had Remembrance Day. Next stop, Christmas!
Of
course, for us Christians that isn’t strictly true, as we have
Advent first, and the church is already in the countdown to Advent,
which is why our readings today are about the future.
Isaiah
is optimistic. He is looking far, far ahead to a time when people
will routinely live to be well
over a hundred, when there will be no more famine, no
more war, no more weeping and wailing. People will not have to slave
for others, but will work for themselves and live happy and contented
lives, with no illness or misfortune.
Well,
I don’t know what Isaiah was on when he wrote that, but his vision
is still very far from being fulfilled, in these days when so many
people are reliant on food banks, trafficking and slavery are a
thing, racism is prevalent, the future is so wildly uncertain. It
would be lovely if we were anywhere remotely close to what Isaiah
saw, but, sadly we aren’t.
We’re
much closer to what Jesus said about the future. He was with his
friends in the Temple, which was still a fairly new building then,
and they were marvelling at the beauty of it, rather as we might go
into a cathedral and marvel at its beauty, too. And, let’s face
it, our cathedrals and churches are, in many cases, very beautiful.
But
Jesus said that the Temple would be pulled down, and not one stone
left standing – and, indeed, by the time Luke was writing all this
down, this had actually
happened. Jerusalem had been overthrown and destroyed in AD 70 by
the Romans, who were clamping down on the rebels who had tried to
establish a provisional government there. I am reminded of Hungary
in 1956 or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, in 1968, when the Soviet
Union allowed rebellion for a short time but then clamped down. The
Romans came with their equivalent of tanks, and overthrew the city,
and destroyed it.
The
Temple has never been rebuilt. For us Christians, it didn’t need
to be, because Jesus had been the one, sufficient sacrifice, so
Temple sacrifices were now obsolete. But for the Jews, of course, it
was and has been a cause of immense sadness, especially as the site
is now a famous Mosque.
But
Jesus makes it clear that anything built by humans is only temporary
in the grand scheme of things. And that life is going to be anything
but peaceful, most of the time. There will be wars and earthquakes
and famines and plagues
– are we reading the Bible, or the newspaper? Even then, says
Jesus, it’s not going to be the end.
It is futile to speculate, to try to decipher a timeline of events.
Every generation, I think, has looked at these words of Jesus and
reckoned it applied to them. And it probably has! It applies to us,
of course – but it also applied to our parents and grandparents who
lived through the cataclysms of the last century. It applied to
those who lived through the Great Plague of the 17th
century and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It applied to those
who lived through the various religious persecution of Tudor times –
perhaps especially to them. Jesus said “They will seize you and
persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in
prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all
on account of my name. And so you will bear testimony to me.” I
am sure that both the Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary’s day and
the Catholic ones murdered by the other Tudor monarchs – well, not
actually by them, but you know what I mean – I’m sure they
reckoned that these words were addressed to them.
And
there was the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and, of course,
the various major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and
other natural disasters that have happened over the years.
We’ve
just been to Pompeii, last month, and visited the town that was
destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. It was fascinating to
see how they lived – you had the big houses, but most of them had
let out their front rooms to shops. You could tell which were the
shops, because they had had sliding doors, and you could see where
they had been. And some of the shops had sold hot food – the local
equivalent of McDonald’s or Burger King. There was a bakery, and
we have seen a loaf of bread – burnt to carbon, of course – in an
exhibition in Oxford about the food in Pompeii and contemporary Roman
Britain. The exhibition is fascinating – do go, if you’re ever
near Oxford, it’s on until 20 January. Anyway, the point is, they
had things just like us, even muffin tins! They were people just
like us, living lives similar to ours, enjoying the same kind of
things we do – and their world came very abruptly to a very
decisive end.
I think this is partly what Jesus was talking about. The end can
come incredibly quickly and unexpectedly. Of course, many people get
“notice to quit”, and know full well that they are going to die
very soon. Others, however – well, it’s the road accident, the
stroke, the heart attack, and “this night your soul will be
required of you”, as Jesus said in the story he told about the rich
farmer, who concentrated so much on gaining great harvests and making
loads of money that he forgot about the things that really do last.
That, after all, is what is important. Jesus said that we will face
persecution – well, we in the West don’t, just now, but that’s
not true of all the world. Although some churches in the USA say
they’re being persecuted, when they really aren’t…. they aren’t
likely to get put in prison, or worse, for meeting to worship, or for
telling other people about their faith and about Jesus. That, sadly,
is not true in some parts of the world today. And who knows what it
will be like here, in the future? We don’t know. We don’t know
the future, we don’t even know our personal futures. Yes, we
expect we’ll be leaving here and enjoying a good Sunday lunch, or
perhaps we’re planning on going out to brunch, as lots of people do
on a Sunday. We expect that tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off
to work or college or school, or whatever we usually do on a Monday
morning.
But things can change so quickly. A month’s worth of rain has
recently fallen in the Midlands, causing rivers to burst their banks
and homes to be flooded. In Australia, people’s homes, and,
indeed, their lives are being menaced by bush fires – I have a
friend who has spent the past few days on high alert, expecting that
she and her family may have to evacuate their home any minute. Thus
far, fortunately, that hasn’t happened, but….
The people in Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum were
enjoying their lives right up until the last few minutes, when the
volcanic ash started to fall on them.
It is possible – not very probable, but possible – that we are in
“the end times” and Jesus will return in glory, as we say we
believe he will, to judge the living and the dead. But it’s far
more probable that some natural or human-made disaster will intervene
first. But whichever it is, we are expected to carry on with our
lives as if they were going to go on forever. I
didn’t choose to have the reading from the Epistle today, but it’s
the one where Paul reminds the people of Thessalonia that they do
have to work, even if they are expecting Jesus to come back at any
minute. They still need to eat, and nobody is going to feed them!
They must go and earn their livings, and expect Jesus to find them
getting on with things.
Jesus
is pessimistic about the future, and with hindsight we can see that
he was right to be. Life is pretty good most of the time, except
when it isn’t. And we don’t know when it will suddenly switch
from being great to being ghastly. All we can do is trust Jesus, and
trust that we will be shown what to say and what to do in the face of
catastrophe.
And
we mustn’t lose sight of Isaiah’s vision, either. One of thing
things I specially noticed was that God is going to be there and
speaking with us - “Before they call, I will answer, and while they
are yet speaking, I will hear.” That contrasts with the dire
warnings in the Old Testament about how the heavens will be shut up,
and people will long and long to hear from God but it simply won’t
happen.
I
don’t know whether Isaiah’s vision can come true this side of
heaven. It probably can’t. Jesus’ vision of the future seems
really rather more probable. But does it have to be inevitable? I
don’t know whether we can do very much to change things, to bring
about the peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah foresaw, rather than the
disastrous world that Jesus did. But shouldn’t we be trying?
Shouldn’t we be doing what we can in the cause of peace and
justice? In the cause of trying not to destroy our planet? In the
cause of balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural
world? Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us did, it would tip the
balance. Amen.
