C4CC(27): The end of the world (3)

Nearly done… one more segment, after this one, from this chapter, which finishes the book proper, then a bit of a rant about the failures of the church in my conclusion - but this process has achieved its purpose. I am writing again.

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Yet it is the third split which is most important for our purposes here, for what Jesus is doing is bringing “the end of the world” to bear on how people live in the present moment. One way of describing this is to say that Jesus shifts our perspective from apocalyptic to eschatology. Eschatology is the study of the last things; the 'eschaton' is the end, the full stop at the end of time. Now when Jesus is talking about this, He uses images that are sudden. They will come like a thief in the night, or the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, or the story about looking after your house. Jesus emphasises suddenness and the purpose of these stories is to describe how we are called to live as if the end is about to happen. There is a phrase which Christian theology uses to talk about this perspective and its called a realised eschatology. What that means is that the end of the world is happening now, and so we are to live in the light of it now. It is not something that is happening in the future to which we need not pay any attention. Christians are called to live in the light of the end of the world, in the light of the last judgement.

Think of a bus driving along a mountain pass, and imagine that the driver has absolute certainty and conviction that he will get to his destination safely; that if, for example, he should go off the edge of the mountain, there are wonderful angels who will lift the bus back on to the road. That bus driver will view things differently from the bus driver who does not have that certainty. The latter expects something dangerous to be possible and therefore pays attention to that present moment and lives consciously and attentively to ensure that he drives properly and does not go off the edge of the cliff. Apocalyptic is the perspective of the first bus driver, who has got a certainty about where things are going, and therefore does not worry too much about what happens in the meantime. Realised eschatology, in contrast, is the second bus driver, and this is the perspective that Jesus is teaching, saying that we have to concentrate and live in the light of the end of the world now. We have to pay very close attention to each moment in time because the judgement could be just around the corner. The normal Christian way of describing this is to talk about 'living in the Kingdom'. A great deal of standard Christian language and doctrine has its roots in this perspective. It is the vision which structures Christian ways of thought, which was inaugurated on Easter morning, and which shapes and conditions the way that we live here and now.

So what is the nature of a properly Christian imagination about the end of the world? There can in our lives be a temptation to long for an apocalypse in the Gnostic and dualist sense, that is, to see all the bad people go to hell. It is rooted in a hatred of the present system and a desire for judgement. It is a very human response that those who are suffering, or those who care about those who are suffering, long for God to act, for there to be same cataclysm and to say “destroy it because it is causing so much pain”. That is the psychological root of the desire for apocalypse. It is closely tied in to a sense of judgement and discrimination. It doesn’t even have to be “I am innocent”, so much as “they are guilty, God destroy them, God damn them!”

This is not the Christian perspective. We are taught ever so clearly and directly that we are not to judge. What this means isn’t just “I’m not going to blame someone for something”, it is a call for Christians to let go of the whole game and business of judging, of blaming, completely. That language and grammar is what drives apocalypse and we are to abandon that language and grammar. We are not called to let go of discrimination, phronesis, of seeking to discern what the will of God is, rather the opposite. We are called to stop playing the game of “we are the righteous, we keep the rules, we keep the law, and you do not”. It is to accept that everyone is in the same boat, that we are all sinners, we are all liable to judgement, and therefore giving up on condemnation. So we do not just give up judgement of other people, but also of ourselves – and by doing this we are set free from “the curse of the law”.

Jesus says we must be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect and He gives a wonderful image of what that perfection is, saying that the Father sends the rain on the just and the unjust. There is no judgement in the rain, it is a blessing – it is not that the wicked have a dark cloud above them pouring down rain and thunder and lightning! There is something much more generous and open-hearted about the perfection which we are called to follow. This is the heart of the Christian way, that we let go of the process of judgement, of seeking to separate out the good and the evil. Think of what original sin is, when you bite the fruit you get the knowledge of good and evil, and what Jesus is doing is overcoming that original sin, He is taking away the consequences of that knowledge of good and evil and therefore “I’m good, you’re evil”, or even “I’m evil and you’re good”, are both of them a radical departure from the Christian point of view.

We must let go of this process, and the spiritual root of that letting go is a settled acceptance of the Father’s will. This is the Gethsemane moment: “Not my will but thine be done” and allowing God to be in charge of all judgement. Obedience, therefore, is more central to what it means to be a Christian than “being good”. To be obedient is to have our imaginations shaped by who Christ is and what He shows, to follow in the steps that He has laid out for us. It is about how we hope.

Consider John 3 verses 14 –21:

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life, for God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict. Light has come into the world but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

We are all working in the darkness, and before we know about Christ we do not really know whether our work is good or not. Once the light starts to dawn we can see the nature of the lives we are embedded in, and once we can see the crisis comes. That is when we have a choice to make. Do we stay trapped in the works of darkness or do we go towards the light? “They will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” What is that fear? It is the fear of judgement. It is the fear of being condemned. It is the removal of that fear of condemnation which enables the walking into the light. The whole point about the good news it is that the process of judgement no longer has to apply. However, if you believe that you are going to be judged and condemned for what you have been doing, then you will resist what is coming. If, instead, you trust in God being benign, you are enabled to walk into the light. That is the kernel of Christian hope: we can change from how we have been. We can turn towards the light.