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Apocalypse now: why we shouldn't fear if the end is nigh

By Peter Sellick - posted Wednesday, 9 November 2005


Strictly speaking, a sermon is not an opinion piece because it does not arise out of the opinion of its author but is written, as it were, under orders. Preaching is an act of obedience to the Word. It is the preacher’s task to wrestle with the text, be confronted by the text, and let the congregation know the results. Sermons cannot really be torn from their context of Christian worship without doing them some damage. So it is with some hesitation that I present a sermon preached on October 16 for your consideration. I do this because I think that this particular sermon is useful in clearing up some common misunderstandings about the nature of the gospel.

We Christians have to bear any number of jokes at our expense that we bear with graciousness and good humour. There are all those jokes set before the pearly gates and St Peter, those about the Rabbi, the Priest and the Minister, those about what Adam and Eve said to each other. Indeed, jokes about religion are an absolutely necessary way of bringing levity to a subject that so often becomes too serious for its own good.

One of the jokes against religion appears in cartoon form, a little raggedy man holding up a sign that says, “The End is Nigh”. There have been a large number of real life doom-sayers in our history, even famous ones like Isaac Newton, who spent years calculating the exact date of the end of the world from biblical texts and came up with the year 2060, so we still have some time left.

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Well, he was right about gravity!

So many predictions have come and gone, all of them wrong. So it is understandable that anyone predicting the end of the world is greeted with some scepticism. However, in 1 Thessalonians, we get a hint that the end of the world did loom large for early believers.

For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.

If we investigate further we find that this is more than a hint in the New Testament. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, believed that the end of the world was imminent.

But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 1 Cor. 15:23,24

When we look at the gospels we find that they all contain this theme. One of the earliest is the little apocalypse in Mark 13.

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But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.

We must admit that the whole of the New Testament is directed towards the end of times and that little man with the placard cannot be as easily dismissed as a religious fruit cake. The technical language for the end time in theology is eschatology - the study of the eschaton, the last things. So we must say that the New Testament is thoroughly eschatological, thoroughly focused on the end of history.

Now this has been a somewhat embarrassing discovery in the church because it associates us too readily with the little man with his placard, too readily with the apocalyptic, too readily with religious enthusiasts waiting on mountain tops for the coming disaster. And so in most of the 18th and 19th centuries the study of eschatology was pushed to the background and was thought to be an embarrassment. But without this understanding, the New Testament, and much of the Old, is indecipherable.

What are we to say about all of those parables of the kingdom? What are we to say about the writings of Paul in which the apocalyptic is central? And what are we to say about all of those texts in the Old Testament that talk about the dread day of the Lord?

To understand this subject a little better, we need to examine what the Bible says to us in more detail. First, the end of the world is not understood as a natural disaster in which all life will be wiped from the earth as in those disaster movies, even though descriptions of the tumult of nature are prevalent in the texts. This has nothing to do with nature, it has nothing to do with the impact of rogue comets, or global warming or the end of the sun’s life. Rather, the eschaton is associated with the coming of the kingdom of God, or the coming of the crucified and risen Jesus or, most gently in the gospel of John, of the Father and the Son dwelling with men.

It is associated with the resurrection of the dead, the awakening of those who sleep, and indeed the end of death itself and the end of suffering. The world that comes to an end is not the natural world but the world of sin and death, the world that is dominated by the powers that steal away the lives of men and women. It is the end of our rebellion against the grace of God and the initiation of the reign of that grace in the world.

So the apocalypse, the end of the world, the coming of the kingdom of God marks not the end of the world that produces a vacuum or a nothingness, but a new reality. For the new heaven and the new earth to dawn, the old must pass away. The kingdom of the lie is replaced by the kingdom of the truth. The kingdom that we would build for ourselves is replaced by the kingdom that only God can bring about. The kingdom that is built on violence is replaced by the kingdom that is built on peace.

The kingdom that is built on our own fear of death is replaced by the knowledge that even in death we are safe in God’s hands.

This understanding of the centre of the gospel has the power to transform our view of what the church does and how it lives. It is tempting to understand the gospel as just so many useful hints about living, pastoral insights to ease us through the hard times, wisdom to enable us to plot our path through life. I am not saying that these things are not present but the problem is that the church that lives from this, lives from the past as if all it has to do is to mine a once-given deposit. This approach easily produces a church that can do all kinds of good works and even seduce itself into thinking that it thereby ushers in the kingdom of God, by reducing its role to enhancing the living conditions of men and women. Indeed there have been long stretches of time in which this was the understanding of the Church, the Church was there to make us better!

But the reading from 1 Thessalonians reminds us that we do not just remember the wise words of Jesus - the Church lives in eager expectation of His coming that will bring a radical disruption between the past the present. Far from living on the memory of a dead man, the Church is accompanied by its risen Lord into the future. This is the meaning of the resurrection, that Jesus goes with us on the way, He is the One who comes, He is the living Lord who summons us into a future marked by obedience and faith, a future that we do not perceive.

Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. (1 John 3:2 NRSV)

The one who we believe in is not the one who was in the past but the one who was in the past but also comes to us as a living spirit. We are called to deal not with a closed and completed tradition of insights about the human condition but with a living and evolving relationship with the one who comes. This changes the life of the church from passive obedience to a past revelation to an active meeting with a living spirit.

It is now clear why the readings in Advent are so dominated by the apocalyptic. Advent is the season in which we await the One, born in a stable, for whom no room was found, surrounded by the lowly of society, destined to bring about the end of the world. Our hope is in the coming of the kingdom of God that is not to be confused with technological or social progress, that is not a work of our hands, as if we know what the kingdom would be like, but one which breaks into our present and glimmers on the horizon, as a reality that is now but not yet known.

When our hope really does reside in the coming One, we may abandon all other false hopes and all other allegiances and all temptations to name good and evil. We may abandon the notion that the improvement of the world is all down to us. Rather, we are to understand ourselves as being caught up in a movement that has already been initiated in the cross of Christ and which has transformed and is transforming the world. The Christian hope lies neither in the extension of life on this earth via medical technology nor the extension of life after death in an “afterlife” but in the fulfillment of all things.

So next time you see that little man with the placard saying “the end is nigh”, think about that other man, friend of sinners, brother to us all, nailed to the cross, the one who really has brought about the end of the world.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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