End of what?
Commentary
Object:
This week's scriptures call us to be awake and alert, fearless and ready for anything. We are like children waiting for Christmas -- or a trip to the dentist. We have little idea of what God has in mind for us, either as a church or as followers of the way of the Lord, but we are to be expectant, preparing ourselves and the world for the realization of the kingdom of God. If we are carrying out the work God has given us, we need not dread what is to come. After all, we are the beloved children of God, inheritors of God's creation!
Isaiah 65:17-25
The Glorious New Creation
Today's passage comes from what is known to scholars as Third Isaiah, the writings from one or more followers of the original Isaiah -- or, as the Interpreter's Study Bible says, "[A]n older and disillusioned Second Isaiah." While Second Isaiah announced the future freedom of the Jews who had been carried away into Babylon, Third Isaiah is living with the Jews who are struggling to rebuild the temple in a land that has not been theirs for nearly fifty years.
The Babylonians had defeated Judea and destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. But that was not the worst of it. They had also taken the upper echelons of society, the educated and the leaders of society, away into Babylon. Then they had installed Babylonians to lead the lower classes they had left in the land. In this same way, they had eradicated many cultures in the Middle East and established Babylonian culture. At the same time, they borrowed from their captives those elements that served Babylon well. Those who had been carried away into exile, meanwhile, were encouraged to take on the ways of Babylon.
This system was meant to destroy the Jewish way of life and belief. The Jewish teachers in Babylon worked very hard to maintain their faith and culture and to pass it on to their children, who did not remember Jerusalem at all. When Second Isaiah announced that God would use Cyrus the Great to set them free, they thought they would go home and rebuild the temple and reestablish their community.
What they found, however, was that the temple, and even Jerusalem, was in ruin, and the faith they had fought so hard to keep intact in Babylon had, in their absence, become corrupted by the very foreign influences they had been fighting. Rather than the glorious homecoming they had imagined, they were faced with backbreaking work and the indifference of the people who had remained in Judea. Their sole hope was that God would come and miraculously reestablish the nation.
This is why Third Isaiah equates the reestablishment of Judea with the coming of the Day of the Lord. We've been dealing with this theme for the past several weeks, listening to the various prophets as they threaten or promise that the great and glorious Day of the Lord is at hand. Most of them equated the end of the nation as being the end of the world. Third Isaiah has seen the end of the nation and its restoration, and suffers with the people as they try to figure out what it means that they suffered exile and have returned to a life that is unrelentingly hard. If their homeland is ever again to be a "land flowing with milk and honey," it will have to be by the sweat of their collective brow.
Third Isaiah promises that all this work they are having to put in -- tearing down the ruins so they can build again; tilling the soil so they can plant food; teaching their children about a God who is not simply the God of their fathers, but the ruler of the universe -- will culminate in a new Jerusalem that will be a joy and a new relationship with God delighting both God and worshiper. The returning Jews have known every kind of sorrow that Isaiah lists in this passage. But they will be so far removed from these things, says Isaiah, that even the memory of what has happened will be wiped out.
In our world today, those who remember World War II and the horrors of the Third Reich are dying off, and their memories are dying with them. We who did not live through those dark days cannot imagine the horror that those who were incarcerated, worked, starved, and even tortured for no reason suffered. And so there are those who want to say it never happened. But those who survived often survived with a tattoo on their arm, listing their prisoner number and a prefix that designated which camp they had suffered through. The memory was imprinted on them, literally, so that it could never be eradicated.
These words of Isaiah are for those who cannot forget the indecencies the world has put them through. For those who have been forced to live on the street or in their car or in a homeless shelter, fed and clothed by the charity of others, there is the promise that all of that will be wiped out by the joy that is going to be theirs. For those whose baby came too early, born incomplete or damaged, there is the promise that one day there will be no babies who live only a few days. For those who are orphans, there is consolation. For those whose homes were taken away from them by economic collapse or natural disaster, there is a promise that life shall not always be like this. And for those whose land has been confiscated so that a feedlot for 10,000 cattle or a banana plantation can take its place, there will be justice.
Our problem as human beings is that we cannot imagine that we ourselves might work together for such results. We believe we are without power and that only God can bring about such results. So, like those ancient Jerusalemites, we wait and hope that the Day of the Lord will come so that God can reestablish Eden on earth. Or, even worse, we cannot imagine that even God can accomplish this on earth. We decide that these promises apply only to those who have died. Too many of our parishioners have quit calling out to God, no longer believing the promise of verse 24: "Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear."
It is the job of the pastor to understand the pain of our parishioners and to address the hopelessness that has become the greatest hindrance to the establishment of the reign of God in our world today.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
The author of 2 Thessalonians is talking to a congregation that apparently has some members who think Isaiah's prophecy has already come to pass and they no longer have to pull their own weight. We have no way of knowing for certain what kind of people these were, for the early church really was a broadly inclusive society. Rich and poor, slaves and free, women and men were all part of the Christian community (though it was said by derisive outsiders that the church was largely slaves, women, and old men). So who were these who thought they did not have to work?
We can speculate, of course. This letter is not by the apostle Paul and is very similar stylistically to 1 Timothy. In that letter, the author makes many comments about problems with "young widows" who, according to the author, tend to gossip and flirt, and yet were maintained by the charity of the community. There might be a similar situation here. On the other hand, it might be that slaves who had become part of the community were relishing not having to wait upon a master and took their new freedom further than they should have. It might be that these folks were like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, who sold their worldly goods and supposedly gave the proceeds to the community but in fact held back part of the money and lied about it.
In truth, there is in all of us the desire to get benefits without having to pay for them, whether in cash or our labor or time. There are some people who will always take advantage of the good will of others. Even among members of our churches today there are those who are able-bodied who will never volunteer to help with any event, never give as they could and ought to, and at the same time sit back and criticize those who are trying to make things happen for the church and to reach out to those who need to know about the love of God.
The author is very direct in telling the congregation that they should follow the example they have been given by the apostles. Jesus, in Luke 10:6-8, states quite clearly that the apostles should stay in the homes and eat at the tables of those who were willing to support them and their ministry, because "the laborer deserves to be paid." Therefore the apostles should have been willingly paid by the congregations that they visited. Yet they had not depended on the new Christians but had plied whatever trade they had and supported themselves. Not that they boasted about this, or took pride in their labor, but the author says that they should serve as an example to those Christians who preferred sitting around and gossiping to getting up and helping out.
We can say this to any congregation and be telling the truth. However, we should focus equally on the concept in verse 9: the pastor of a congregation has the right to a salary that offers a reasonable way of life. If the pastor is in a "tent-making ministry" -- that is, a pastorate where s/he has to work at a secular job because the congregation lacks the ability to pay a decent salary -- then people in the congregation need to step up and help with the work. Door to door evangelism, fund-raising, and care of the property can easily be done by laypeople, and this frees the pastor to do the study and meditation that is necessary in order to preach, teach, and counsel.
While the idleness of some members of the community is the main thrust of the passage, there is another problem not unfamiliar to pastors today. In verse 11, the author says "we hear that some of you are... busybodies." We see this same accusation in 1 Timothy 5:13, where the author says, "Besides, they get into the habit of being idle... And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not to" (NIV). In this, the author is definitely following in the path of Paul, who lists gossipers among those "wicked" who are bound for hell (Romans 1:29).
The passage ends with a simple but profound exhortation: "[D]o not be weary in doing what is right." How difficult that was in the world of the early Christians! On every major street in every city, there were beggars. The blind, the lame, widows or women with small children -- all were reduced to sitting where they might be seen, holding a cup or bowl, begging for food or money. This was so common that over half of Jesus' stories are about how we use our money and treat the poor.
Today the poor are not allowed to beg on street corners. We have charitable organizations and foundations instead. And they struggle to make ends meet and get enough funding to serve the needs of the poor. There are so many people struggling with unemployment, lack of health care, failing schools, and the general collapse of whole segments of our economic system that charitable organizations are cutting back their programs and staff. Churches are also suffering from these problems, and many denominations are closing more churches than they are opening. So this plea from the writer to the Thessalonians is as modern as we can hope for.
Luke 21:5-19
The Destruction of the Temple Foretold
This Sunday's gospel reading is often referred to as "the Lucan Apocalypse," that is, Luke's telling of Jesus' words about the end of the world. Jesus seems to say that the end of the world would come in the lifetime of the disciples. Since this did not happen, we are left with as many questions as those original disciples.
Some clarity can come, though, if we compare Luke's text to the same incident and teaching of Jesus as found in Matthew 24. Rather than talking about the end of the world, in Matthew the disciples specifically ask about "the end of the age." If we look at the events that surrounded the end of the temple in 70 CE and the later destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in 135, we can see that the age in which Jerusalem was the center of Judaism certainly came to an end, even if the disciples were all dead by then. But the world went on.
Down through the ages, Christians have hoped for the second coming of the Christ, and Jews have hoped for Messiah to come. For both groups, the hope is that the prophecies of Isaiah might be realized. The earth should be remade in the form God had in mind from the first, and humans should live as we were intended, in the Garden of Eden, where no one has to earn their bread by the sweat of the brow and all may live in peace, not just with other people but also with the animals, both domestic and wild. And there is plenty of evidence in the New Testament writings that the early Christians expected that all of this would happen in their lifetimes.
This expectation has taken a variety of forms in the 2,000 years since. Whole communities seemingly have gone mad, selling everything they had and waiting at the top of a local hill for the literal coming of Christ through the clouds. Congregations have moved to some foreign country to wait for that coming and when nothing happened taken poison so as to leave this world en masse. There have also, however, been new communities formed, trying to live in a manner they thought most pleasing to God, usually a communal form of living in which material goods were shared equally by all, and often requiring men and women to dress plainly, perhaps giving up sexual relations (though some other "end-time" communities urged their followers to produce as many children as possible, so as to repopulate the earth after the old world would be destroyed).
So what should a pastor preach about when this scripture comes around, as it does at the end of every Christian year? It would be too easy to project the coming of Christ into the distant future, hoping to avoid the hard-to-address issues of why Jesus would tell them that the destruction of the temple would mark the end of the world. It would take some research to talk about how wars and rumors of wars, famine, disease, earthquakes, and signs in the heavens (like the comet appearing in our skies by the time you preach this) have perhaps accompanied great social changes and even the end of various ages in civilization.
However, there is a reasonable way to discuss the end of the age or the end of the world, however one may think of those events. While it is unlikely that the world is about to end, despite the numerous wars and rumors of wars that we are living through, it is absolutely certain that for each of us, the world will indeed end in our lifetimes -- at least for us! After all, every person comes to the end of our own personal world eventually. Who cares, really, when the world will come to an end? What we do care is, "When am I going to die? When is my world (my spouse, my lover, my way of life) going to come to an end?" "Does God have a plan for me? For my life? For my family?" We may have a deep concern for the damage being done to our planet. We may grieve the loss of wilderness and the animals that need that wilderness. We may have concerns about the kind of world our children will inherit. But our chief concern, as it was for the disciples who asked the question, is what our own future looks like. So for those who are concerned about the end of the world as we know it, it is best to address that concern, along with the assurance that Christ is with us no matter what the future may hold. This is, after all, what Jesus did for his disciples in the answer he gave.
In his honesty, Jesus does not really offer the consolation that the disciples were probably hoping for. He warns them that they will face arrest and persecution, even from family members, the very people they hope they can count on. They will be put on trial. But they should look at all this as an opportunity to testify to the love of God. They will be tested, but "by [their] endurance [they] will gain [their] souls" a place in the reign of God, which cannot be beaten.
Isaiah 65:17-25
The Glorious New Creation
Today's passage comes from what is known to scholars as Third Isaiah, the writings from one or more followers of the original Isaiah -- or, as the Interpreter's Study Bible says, "[A]n older and disillusioned Second Isaiah." While Second Isaiah announced the future freedom of the Jews who had been carried away into Babylon, Third Isaiah is living with the Jews who are struggling to rebuild the temple in a land that has not been theirs for nearly fifty years.
The Babylonians had defeated Judea and destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. But that was not the worst of it. They had also taken the upper echelons of society, the educated and the leaders of society, away into Babylon. Then they had installed Babylonians to lead the lower classes they had left in the land. In this same way, they had eradicated many cultures in the Middle East and established Babylonian culture. At the same time, they borrowed from their captives those elements that served Babylon well. Those who had been carried away into exile, meanwhile, were encouraged to take on the ways of Babylon.
This system was meant to destroy the Jewish way of life and belief. The Jewish teachers in Babylon worked very hard to maintain their faith and culture and to pass it on to their children, who did not remember Jerusalem at all. When Second Isaiah announced that God would use Cyrus the Great to set them free, they thought they would go home and rebuild the temple and reestablish their community.
What they found, however, was that the temple, and even Jerusalem, was in ruin, and the faith they had fought so hard to keep intact in Babylon had, in their absence, become corrupted by the very foreign influences they had been fighting. Rather than the glorious homecoming they had imagined, they were faced with backbreaking work and the indifference of the people who had remained in Judea. Their sole hope was that God would come and miraculously reestablish the nation.
This is why Third Isaiah equates the reestablishment of Judea with the coming of the Day of the Lord. We've been dealing with this theme for the past several weeks, listening to the various prophets as they threaten or promise that the great and glorious Day of the Lord is at hand. Most of them equated the end of the nation as being the end of the world. Third Isaiah has seen the end of the nation and its restoration, and suffers with the people as they try to figure out what it means that they suffered exile and have returned to a life that is unrelentingly hard. If their homeland is ever again to be a "land flowing with milk and honey," it will have to be by the sweat of their collective brow.
Third Isaiah promises that all this work they are having to put in -- tearing down the ruins so they can build again; tilling the soil so they can plant food; teaching their children about a God who is not simply the God of their fathers, but the ruler of the universe -- will culminate in a new Jerusalem that will be a joy and a new relationship with God delighting both God and worshiper. The returning Jews have known every kind of sorrow that Isaiah lists in this passage. But they will be so far removed from these things, says Isaiah, that even the memory of what has happened will be wiped out.
In our world today, those who remember World War II and the horrors of the Third Reich are dying off, and their memories are dying with them. We who did not live through those dark days cannot imagine the horror that those who were incarcerated, worked, starved, and even tortured for no reason suffered. And so there are those who want to say it never happened. But those who survived often survived with a tattoo on their arm, listing their prisoner number and a prefix that designated which camp they had suffered through. The memory was imprinted on them, literally, so that it could never be eradicated.
These words of Isaiah are for those who cannot forget the indecencies the world has put them through. For those who have been forced to live on the street or in their car or in a homeless shelter, fed and clothed by the charity of others, there is the promise that all of that will be wiped out by the joy that is going to be theirs. For those whose baby came too early, born incomplete or damaged, there is the promise that one day there will be no babies who live only a few days. For those who are orphans, there is consolation. For those whose homes were taken away from them by economic collapse or natural disaster, there is a promise that life shall not always be like this. And for those whose land has been confiscated so that a feedlot for 10,000 cattle or a banana plantation can take its place, there will be justice.
Our problem as human beings is that we cannot imagine that we ourselves might work together for such results. We believe we are without power and that only God can bring about such results. So, like those ancient Jerusalemites, we wait and hope that the Day of the Lord will come so that God can reestablish Eden on earth. Or, even worse, we cannot imagine that even God can accomplish this on earth. We decide that these promises apply only to those who have died. Too many of our parishioners have quit calling out to God, no longer believing the promise of verse 24: "Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear."
It is the job of the pastor to understand the pain of our parishioners and to address the hopelessness that has become the greatest hindrance to the establishment of the reign of God in our world today.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
The author of 2 Thessalonians is talking to a congregation that apparently has some members who think Isaiah's prophecy has already come to pass and they no longer have to pull their own weight. We have no way of knowing for certain what kind of people these were, for the early church really was a broadly inclusive society. Rich and poor, slaves and free, women and men were all part of the Christian community (though it was said by derisive outsiders that the church was largely slaves, women, and old men). So who were these who thought they did not have to work?
We can speculate, of course. This letter is not by the apostle Paul and is very similar stylistically to 1 Timothy. In that letter, the author makes many comments about problems with "young widows" who, according to the author, tend to gossip and flirt, and yet were maintained by the charity of the community. There might be a similar situation here. On the other hand, it might be that slaves who had become part of the community were relishing not having to wait upon a master and took their new freedom further than they should have. It might be that these folks were like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, who sold their worldly goods and supposedly gave the proceeds to the community but in fact held back part of the money and lied about it.
In truth, there is in all of us the desire to get benefits without having to pay for them, whether in cash or our labor or time. There are some people who will always take advantage of the good will of others. Even among members of our churches today there are those who are able-bodied who will never volunteer to help with any event, never give as they could and ought to, and at the same time sit back and criticize those who are trying to make things happen for the church and to reach out to those who need to know about the love of God.
The author is very direct in telling the congregation that they should follow the example they have been given by the apostles. Jesus, in Luke 10:6-8, states quite clearly that the apostles should stay in the homes and eat at the tables of those who were willing to support them and their ministry, because "the laborer deserves to be paid." Therefore the apostles should have been willingly paid by the congregations that they visited. Yet they had not depended on the new Christians but had plied whatever trade they had and supported themselves. Not that they boasted about this, or took pride in their labor, but the author says that they should serve as an example to those Christians who preferred sitting around and gossiping to getting up and helping out.
We can say this to any congregation and be telling the truth. However, we should focus equally on the concept in verse 9: the pastor of a congregation has the right to a salary that offers a reasonable way of life. If the pastor is in a "tent-making ministry" -- that is, a pastorate where s/he has to work at a secular job because the congregation lacks the ability to pay a decent salary -- then people in the congregation need to step up and help with the work. Door to door evangelism, fund-raising, and care of the property can easily be done by laypeople, and this frees the pastor to do the study and meditation that is necessary in order to preach, teach, and counsel.
While the idleness of some members of the community is the main thrust of the passage, there is another problem not unfamiliar to pastors today. In verse 11, the author says "we hear that some of you are... busybodies." We see this same accusation in 1 Timothy 5:13, where the author says, "Besides, they get into the habit of being idle... And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not to" (NIV). In this, the author is definitely following in the path of Paul, who lists gossipers among those "wicked" who are bound for hell (Romans 1:29).
The passage ends with a simple but profound exhortation: "[D]o not be weary in doing what is right." How difficult that was in the world of the early Christians! On every major street in every city, there were beggars. The blind, the lame, widows or women with small children -- all were reduced to sitting where they might be seen, holding a cup or bowl, begging for food or money. This was so common that over half of Jesus' stories are about how we use our money and treat the poor.
Today the poor are not allowed to beg on street corners. We have charitable organizations and foundations instead. And they struggle to make ends meet and get enough funding to serve the needs of the poor. There are so many people struggling with unemployment, lack of health care, failing schools, and the general collapse of whole segments of our economic system that charitable organizations are cutting back their programs and staff. Churches are also suffering from these problems, and many denominations are closing more churches than they are opening. So this plea from the writer to the Thessalonians is as modern as we can hope for.
Luke 21:5-19
The Destruction of the Temple Foretold
This Sunday's gospel reading is often referred to as "the Lucan Apocalypse," that is, Luke's telling of Jesus' words about the end of the world. Jesus seems to say that the end of the world would come in the lifetime of the disciples. Since this did not happen, we are left with as many questions as those original disciples.
Some clarity can come, though, if we compare Luke's text to the same incident and teaching of Jesus as found in Matthew 24. Rather than talking about the end of the world, in Matthew the disciples specifically ask about "the end of the age." If we look at the events that surrounded the end of the temple in 70 CE and the later destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in 135, we can see that the age in which Jerusalem was the center of Judaism certainly came to an end, even if the disciples were all dead by then. But the world went on.
Down through the ages, Christians have hoped for the second coming of the Christ, and Jews have hoped for Messiah to come. For both groups, the hope is that the prophecies of Isaiah might be realized. The earth should be remade in the form God had in mind from the first, and humans should live as we were intended, in the Garden of Eden, where no one has to earn their bread by the sweat of the brow and all may live in peace, not just with other people but also with the animals, both domestic and wild. And there is plenty of evidence in the New Testament writings that the early Christians expected that all of this would happen in their lifetimes.
This expectation has taken a variety of forms in the 2,000 years since. Whole communities seemingly have gone mad, selling everything they had and waiting at the top of a local hill for the literal coming of Christ through the clouds. Congregations have moved to some foreign country to wait for that coming and when nothing happened taken poison so as to leave this world en masse. There have also, however, been new communities formed, trying to live in a manner they thought most pleasing to God, usually a communal form of living in which material goods were shared equally by all, and often requiring men and women to dress plainly, perhaps giving up sexual relations (though some other "end-time" communities urged their followers to produce as many children as possible, so as to repopulate the earth after the old world would be destroyed).
So what should a pastor preach about when this scripture comes around, as it does at the end of every Christian year? It would be too easy to project the coming of Christ into the distant future, hoping to avoid the hard-to-address issues of why Jesus would tell them that the destruction of the temple would mark the end of the world. It would take some research to talk about how wars and rumors of wars, famine, disease, earthquakes, and signs in the heavens (like the comet appearing in our skies by the time you preach this) have perhaps accompanied great social changes and even the end of various ages in civilization.
However, there is a reasonable way to discuss the end of the age or the end of the world, however one may think of those events. While it is unlikely that the world is about to end, despite the numerous wars and rumors of wars that we are living through, it is absolutely certain that for each of us, the world will indeed end in our lifetimes -- at least for us! After all, every person comes to the end of our own personal world eventually. Who cares, really, when the world will come to an end? What we do care is, "When am I going to die? When is my world (my spouse, my lover, my way of life) going to come to an end?" "Does God have a plan for me? For my life? For my family?" We may have a deep concern for the damage being done to our planet. We may grieve the loss of wilderness and the animals that need that wilderness. We may have concerns about the kind of world our children will inherit. But our chief concern, as it was for the disciples who asked the question, is what our own future looks like. So for those who are concerned about the end of the world as we know it, it is best to address that concern, along with the assurance that Christ is with us no matter what the future may hold. This is, after all, what Jesus did for his disciples in the answer he gave.
In his honesty, Jesus does not really offer the consolation that the disciples were probably hoping for. He warns them that they will face arrest and persecution, even from family members, the very people they hope they can count on. They will be put on trial. But they should look at all this as an opportunity to testify to the love of God. They will be tested, but "by [their] endurance [they] will gain [their] souls" a place in the reign of God, which cannot be beaten.
