On a recent news airing on NBC Brian Williams held up a copy of Newsweek Magazine. On the cover was this massive breaking wave with the title in an ominous font that read Apocalypse Now, and a sub-caption that read something like this: earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear radiation, outbreaks of wars, financial woes…what the blank is next? I didn’t read the article, but certainly the implication is the question as to whether we are living in the end times…Journalism now based on hyperbole and sensationalism…The writer of the piece surely doesn’t remember the so-called Cuban missile crisis in the sixties during which relatively sane people built bomb shelters, stored up food to weather the possible nuclear winter…My aunt bought stores of sardines and spam (before Sam’s Club) and kept them in her basement. That was frightening unto itself. School children were taught to crouch under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Our own citizens were suspect for being in league with the dark powers of communism. Thousands of African Americans were killed or beaten during this time in our history, because of their quest for civil rights. And then just decades earlier fifty to seventy million dead during World War Two…and Newsweek calls these days apocalyptic!?
In the second and first centuries B.C.E. there arose a genre of literature in Jewish culture called apocalyptic. (The Book of Daniel is an example; Revelation is a later manifestation.) The word apocalyptic literally means final revelation…the end of times. In those two centuries the scribes (journalists of the era) saw great calamity befalling the people of Israel particularly centered on Jerusalem. Antiochus Epiphanies the despot ruler of Selucia (southern Syria) ran herd over the Jewish people, slaughtering thousands and desecrating the Temple of Jerusalem…and then the brutal Roman occupation….Jesus himself predicts the fall of the Jewish Temple which is in effect the symbolic destruction of a culture.
We may look at any period of history in any part of the world and say, “apocalypse now:” Wars, rumors of wars, plagues, famine, drought, natural disaster…such is the way of things. The point is: We always live on the edge of destruction and of new life. On the edge of despair and unknowing, and of hope and revelation of the truth, on the edge of undoing and remaking. We believe as Christian people that there is life after death…that in a certain end is surely a beginning…Ours is to embody such a predisposition and stand against the fear that the prophets of doom would foist upon us….We know in our maturity as people of faith that in spite of the ills of our world there is also beauty, and the potential of beauty made new… and God calls the whole of it good….because in it life is
If one cries, “Apocalypse Now,” then let our answer be: never fear, for all things are being made new…as they always have been, and as they ever will….”The Temple will be forever built back in three days”
