Why be afraid of the end of the world?

Sunday 33 C 13^th November 2022

[ Luke 21:5-19]

Why have so many movies been made about some disaster that threatens to bring about the end of the world, or destroy all human life on the planet? Why do people eagerly pay to watch this? The end of the world, or of humanity, fascinates us. Will it come by collision with an asteroid? By nuclear war; a plague-virus experiment out of control; or maybe by nasty extra-terrestrial visitors? We are intrigued, but scared to face the real end, for most of these movies end with some heroic persons saving us from disaster at the last minute.

Our fascination and fear is not new. The last book in the Bible, Revelation or Apocalypse, depicts it with spectacular scenes of droughts, floods, plagues, fires and wars. These apocalyptic visions seem almost to be predictions of the current devastating flooding in Pakistan and Eastern Australia, or the world-wide bush-fires and the terrible famines in Africa.

Jesus warned us not to be needlessly alarmed by imagined “prophecies” about our world’s end. He was not concerned with spectacular visions about it, for only God knows the time. In today’s gospel, he implies that wars and revolutions are almost the normal result of the way we treat each other. Since his time, we have learned that earthquakes and plagues are natural, inevitable processes in the evolving world.

Jesus did predict that the grand Jerusalem temple would be destroyed. When Luke wrote his gospel, the Roman armies his had already destroyed it and Jerusalem some decades before. The temple had been a foundation of Jesus’ Jewish education and faith. He was carried there as an infant and went there with his parents for the annual Passover and probably other feasts. When almost an adult, he absconded there to hear and talk about God with the learned scholars. But Jesus knew that the temple’s enormous cost had come from king Herod’s ruthless taxing of the populace – most of them poor – and criticised its officials for “swallowing up the houses of widows” by their taxes and laws. (Mark 12:40) Immediately before Jesus predicted the temple’s destruction, Luke shows him praising one such widow for her generous gift to the temple.

The temple’s terrible fate did not perturb Jesus, for it was no longer needed as symbol of God among us. “Something greater than the temple is here”. (Matthew 12:6) Jesus was condemned to death on a false accusation that he promised to destroy the temple, and replace it with one “not made with hands”; (Mark 14:58) and three of the gospel writers note that when Jesus died, the curtain that closed off the temple’s Holy of Holies was mysteriously torn from top to bottom.

That symbol was replaced by something much deeper. Jesus was showing us that we are equipped to deal with difficulties and conflicts; the misunderstandings and persecutions that will sometimes hit us hard. He told us that under such opposition we are to “bear witness”. Witness to what? To the Good News that the Reign of God has already begun, and consists in the reality that God is within us; that we ourselves are God’s temple.

This amazing truth had been hinted at in the book of Genesis: “God made humans in the image of God’s self… ” (Genesis 1:27) Centuries before Jesus It had been discovered to varying degrees by the Hindu sages and the Buddha, but was clarified and deepened by Jesus’ promise that he would send God’s Spirit, would come as God’s self to dwell in us: “We [The Father and I ] shall come and make a home in you”. (John 14:23). This central Christian truth has transformed countless lives. When everyone understands it, it will bring about Revelation’s promise of a “new heaven and a new earth”. (Revelation21:1)

* * * * *

To cast fire on the earth?

Sunday 20C 14^th September 2022

[Jeremiah 38:4-10, Luke 12:49-53]

The statement by Jesus that he has come “to cast fire on the earth” is both puzzling and shocking. Especially so, when we recall the August anniversaries of the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagaski by nuclear bombs that our allies used at the end of the Second World War. These bombs caused such terrible “crimes against humanity” that the US military tried to prevent people from seeing the destruction they had caused.

Military authorities forbade all war correspondents from entering Japan, and more than 200 obeyed the ban: except one, the Australian Wilfred Burchett. Carrying his own rations and his typewriter, he travelled secretly for thirty hours by train to Hiroshima, and saw what was left of the once-beautiful city. Only ashes and rubble remained, and thousands of traumatised people doomed to die in agony from radiation poisoning. This is what happens when, for selfish purposes, we try to “cast fire upon the earth”. And it might easily happen again, for thousands of much bigger nuclear weapons are today in the hands of untrustworthy people.

Jesus’ alarming words meant something quite different, of course. More like Wilfred Burchett’s truth-telling, when he sat on a slab of broken concrete and typed his headline story: “I write this as a warning to the world…” The prophet-journalist Burchett disobeyed the army’s attempt to conceal the truth, and this, and for other acts of truth-telling, he was punished by being exiled from his homeland for seventeen years.

It was the same with the prophet Jeremiah, in today’s first reading. Inspired by God, he warned the king that following his counsellors’ advice would lead to national tragedy. Those counsellors tried to kill the prophet, plunging him into a muddy well where he would starve to death. Prophets and whistle-blowers who challenge the corrupt status quo in any institution usually meet with murderous opposition like this. Institutions in government, religion and commerce often try to suppress the truth. Jesus was murdered for challenging the exploiting religious system of his day.

He, the ultimate truth-teller and prophet, made another shocking statement when he said he came to bring division, not peace. Since we know that his ultimate purpose is to “bring a peace which he world cannot give” (John 14:27), and to unite all things in himself (Ephesians 1:10), this division must be only a stage on the way to this goal.

Jesus was trying to show us that we have access to the limitless love that is the Source of all. We can base our lives on it. But he warns us that when some persons try to share the truth they can see, but others cannot see yet, families and communities can be divided. As when a person declares the truth that they are gay, lesbian or different in some other way; or understands scientists’ clear warnings that a huge ecological crisis is coming; that the planet is warming and many species are becoming extinct.

Whenever people are not facing the truth in human affairs, for them the flow of life has become stagnant. It is only by speaking the truth, with as much love as possible that we can help each other to move towards wholeness, which is another word for salvation. The recent Australian Plenary Council – and the Second Vatican Council – were such opportunities for our church.

Our body and mind must be free to move and flow, because since the first basic life-forms began several billion years ago, each individual and species is in a ceaseless process of evolution and development. The question challenges each of us: “Am I open to accepting and living the changes the truth demands of me?” Life-giving change is what forms us, as individuals, families and as a church. When we hear of this fire that Jesus brings, do we “wish that it were blazing already”?

* * * * *