Hilton Head Island, SC – March 13, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 24:1-14; Matthew 24:36-46
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But he who endures to the end will be saved.” – Matthew 24:13 (RSV)
Apocalypse NOW?
Last Sunday I preached a sermon in which I suggested that as time went on in Jesus’ public ministry, he knew that inevitably he was going to be crucified. He concluded there was no way he was going to be able to avoid the cross.
Today the primary thesis of my sermon is this: As time went on, Jesus apparently also came to believe with increasing certainty that shortly after his crucifixion, God would bring the earth to its fiery finale by means of what has long been called “The Apocalypse.” The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word apokalypsis. It means “to uncover.”
Throughout the Old Testament, there are scattered references, especially in the prophetic writings, to what is called “the day of the Lord.” When the day of the Lord would come, these verses proclaimed, God would enter directly into human history, and the good people, presumably worthy Israelites or Jews, would be saved, and most other people would be either be shunted aside or destroyed. It was never absolutely clear what the idea of “the day of the Lord” entailed, but it was sufficiently formulated in the minds of the prophets that they felt compelled to proclaim that God’s grand and glorious day was surely coming.
In the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels, certain parts of Paul’s letters, and the Book of Revelation, there are references to an uncovering or to the Apocalypse. The Book of Revelation itself is often referred to as “The Apocalypse,” because it declares what is going to happen when the end of the world comes; it claims to “uncover” the meaning of things which previously have been hidden from our eyes. The end was coming, Revelation implied, but probably not so soon. There would be a thousand years, a millennium, governed by one called the Antichrist and then a thousand years governed by Christ, and then The End would come. God would take His elect to heaven, and everyone else would perish in an earthly fiery finale. There was nothing anyone could do to alter or prevent it.
This notion of the apocalypse became a dominant idea among the Jewish people in the three or four centuries after the Old Testament was finished and before the New Testament was completed. No one can say with any certainty why this occurred, but here is an hypothesis which may explain it. Politically, those centuries were a very unsettled time for the Jewish people. In the 330s BCE, Before the Common Era, Alexander the Great and the Greeks came and conquered the land of the Jews. For a very short time the Jews were under the thumb of the Greeks themselves. Then, for almost two centuries, they were occupied by Hellenized Syrians, which is to say Arabs who had adopted the Greek language and culture. Then, for a hundred years they had their own independent monarchy. Finally, seventy years or so before the birth of Jesus, the Romans under a general named Pompey, came and conquered the land of the Jews, thereafter calling it Judea in the Latin language. In essence that word means “The Land of the Jews.”
These military and political upheavals in a relatively short span of history may have led some Jews to think that God would feel required to rescue His chosen people from all these foreign occupiers of their land. And the way God would do that, some but by no means all of the Jews decided, was to bring the entire world to its end. Thus “the day of the Lord” would become apocalyptic and eschatological. Eschaton, in Greek, means “the last things.” The end of the world apparently connoted the termination of human life on this planet.
It is important to realize that not all Jews assumed the world would end soon, but many did. And one of the Jews who did believe that, by any objective reading of the Gospels, was the prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus did not refer to the apocalypse in isolated verses; he referred it in many places throughout all four Gospels. Whatever else Christians believe Jesus was and is, unless we want to ignore his numerous eschatological sayings, Jesus was at a minimum an apocalyptic prophet, like Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah and Daniel before him. Jesus frequently insisted that the end of the world was quickly drawing near.
However, it would be a mistake to imagine that all of this is crystal clear, because it isn’t. It isn’t called apocalyptic for no reason. It is so mysterious, so covered over in enigma, that it is very difficult to uncover the various sayings of Jesus on this subject with absolute clarity. Nonetheless, it would seem to be a total abnegation of a major strand of the teachings of Jesus to deny that he truly believed the world would soon be terminated shortly after his impending crucifixion. In the mind of Jesus, the crucifixion and the apocalypse were closely intertwined.
Is that historically correct? It seems impossible either to deny it or to ignore it. But if it is correct, there is a very obvious and sobering factor with which we as Christians must comes to grips: It did not happen. The world did not end. The world has not ended. The world shall end, either billions of years from now in the extremely distant future when the sun shall inevitably burn out and our planet shall become too cold to sustain life, or perhaps in the not-too-distant future when human folly shall destroy the earth because of climate change or nuclear war or cybernetic catastrophes because of computer technology gone awry or some other factor.
Were the world to end by any of those catastrophic events, however, it would not mean that God had orchestrated the end. Even if, eons from now, the sun should burn out and the earth shall die, that is a natural astronomical outcome which is inevitable, but it would not necessarily mean God caused it to happen. Stars, planets, and moons come into being, and eventually they all disappear into space dust or black holes. It is an unwritten law of the universe.
There was another important strand associated with the apocalypse. It was not the same as the apocalypse, but it is invariably linked to the apocalypse, both by Jesus and by Paul and other New Testament writers. In several places in the Gospels, Jesus said that after he died, he would return again to earth, presumably in a physical as opposed to a spiritual form. This idea came to be called “The Second Coming of Christ.”
Some of the allusions to the Second Coming, according to Jesus, Paul, the writer of the Revelation, and others, seem to suggest that when Jesus will return to earth, that would be the prelude to the day of the Lord, the end of the world, the apocalypse, the eschaton, call it what you will. And whenever Jesus spoke of his Second Coming, he strongly hinted it would occur within months or a few years of his death on the cross. Obviously that did not happen either.
Thus we are left with the proclamations of an Apocalypse whose meaning requires a lot more uncovering than has yet been uncovered and a Second Coming which has not yet come. To put it in the most straightforward of terms, Jesus appears to have been wrong on both counts.
Or was he? Did Jesus actually say what he is purported to have said about the end of the world and his Second Coming, or did the Gospel writers and the other New Testament writers say that is what he said? Might it be that they, who lived through the destruction of Judea in the disastrous Jewish rebellion against the Romans from 68 to 72 CE, came to believe that Jesus had to come back to earth in their lifetimes and that God had to end the world then if justice and righteousness were to triumph? Otherwise, they may have assumed, if the end didn’t come soon and Jesus didn’t return soon, evil and injustice would win out, and that was unthinkable.
For the past two thousand years, and especially for the past century or so, who have been the people who were most convinced that the world was about to end and that Jesus was about to return? It has generally been those Christians who were the poorest and who felt the most downtrodden. In Medieval Europe, plagues, famines, and wars led millions of Christians to imagine that the end was near and that Jesus was about to come and gather the faithful into God’s celestial kingdom. The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries caused many people to suppose that the Apocalypse was just around the corner. In 19th century America several new religious millenarian groups came into being. Most of those people were lower-class, lower-income people who thought life was so bad it needed to end, and they believed God and Jesus were about to end it with the end of the world. You may remember that when January 1 of the year 2000 came, countless numbers of Americans and others thought the wheels were about to come off human history, because computers would not be able to handle the transition into a new millennium and century.
If things seem too bad or too complicated or too hopeless, the end of the world may seem like a good way to overcome the chaos. But for many of us, and perhaps most of us, our lives are sufficiently secure that we do not long for the end to come. Relatively few Christians of the first century lived secure lives, and many Christians of subsequent centuries also lived in constant deprivation and insecurity. Those are the kinds of folks who are more likely to be drawn to apocalyptic or eschatological messages. Folks like us either ignore or avoid such messages.
Will the world end? Unquestionably it shall. When? No one knows, although throughout Christian history many people have claimed to know when. In his hymn Our God, our help in ages past, Isaac Watts said of God, paraphrasing Psalm 90, “A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone.” Surely that is both chronologically and theologically correct. The God who lives in eternity can use many thousands or millions or billions of years to decide whatever major earth-shaking decisions He chooses to make. A God unlimited by time can take all the time He wants. Thus the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ may be either light years away or tomorrow. And because no one can truly know when it will happen, or even if the Second Coming will happen, it is probably a mistake to spend much time thinking about it.
It should be evident to anyone who has ever thought about it that The Chapel Without Walls is not a liturgical church, but that we have become a thematic church. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that John Miller is not a liturgical minister, but he is a thematic minister.
What does it mean that this church is “thematic,” or that I am thematic? Specifically it means that every Sunday I preach a particular sermon about a particular theme, and that everything in the order of worship, from the call to worship to the benediction, is intended to revolve around that theme to the greatest degree possible. For better or worse, whenever I am in charge, the call to worship is a signal of what is to come, the hymns – even if they are not well known -- correlate to the sermon theme if possible, as do the three scripture passages and obviously the sermon itself. I have not always operated like that, but I have increasingly done so as the years have gone on. And when you are as old as I am, you get sort of “sot” in your old ways.
Well, I wanted to choose hymns for today which go along with the theme of Apocalypse NOW? There is no section in any hymnbook I know of about the Apocalypse per se. But there is a section in one of my hymnbooks called “Jesus Christ: His Coming in Glory,” in which there are five hymns. Rejoice, rejoice believers, our last hymn, is the best known. It is based on a parable of Jesus, found in Matthew 25, immediately following our third scripture reading this morning. In 50+ years I don’t think I ever chose The King shall come when morning dawns, because I don’t think I have ever preached about the Apocalypse or the Second Coming in the same way I am referring to these ideas today. Nevertheless the tune for our middle hymn, St. Stephen, may be familiar to many of you in the hymn Behold the amazing gift of love. I tell you all this because as long as I am able to stand in a pulpit we are not likely to have a sermon like this again nor am I likely to choose these two hymns together again. But they sort of fit the theme, so here they are.
I believe Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, and therefore I believe he did talk about the Apocalypse to some degree. Historically how much is anyone’s guess. But, as Jesus said when referring to the Apocalypse in a verse read just before the sermon began, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Mt. 24:36). Even Jesus could not uncover the exact day or time the end would come. Therefore we shouldn’t get too worked up thinking or worrying about it either.
History is filled with many mini-apocalypses: the fall of Rome to the barbarians, the black plague, the eruption of volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods. Trench warfare in World War I, in which millions of men were killed, was an apocalypse. The firebombing of Berlin, Dresden, and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were apocalypses.
Years ago Francis Ford Coppola directed one of the strangest movies ever produced. It was called Apocalypse Now. The stars in it were Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Robert Duvall. It was about a highly decorated Green Beret colonel (Brando) who, without authorization, had gone into Cambodia during the War in Viet Nam, fighting Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. An army captain (Sheen) is sent to find him and kill him, because it is believed the colonel has gone insane. A lieutenant colonel (Duvall), with more bravado than brains, is also sent on this top-secret mission. Without divulging any more of the plot, at the end the US Air force sweeps in and bombs everything around where the crazy colonel is holed up, at the end of which (which is the end of the movie) Brando whispers the immortal lines, “The horror . . . the horror.”
Each of us will have our own Apocalypse Now at the moment we die. We believe that then many of the questions we have always asked and were never answered for us shall be both completely uncovered and totally answered.
In the last few days of his life, Jesus may have been consumed with his knowledge that the end was very near. Little wonder then that he spoke at some length about what he perceived to be The Apocalypse, and cryptically he also spoke of his Second Coming. For these two ideas to have any relevance to us, we must admit they shall always be largely enigmatic, and their meaning shall likely remain covered up to us for as long as we live.
Then what word of hope may we bring away from this peculiar sermon? They are the words of Jesus, spoken in the midst of the difficult, dark, and befuddling things he said a day or two after Palm Sunday and before Good Friday: “But those who endure to the end will be saved.” Endure, Christian people; endure. Easter, and the resurrection, and God’s kingdom are coming. Endure to your end and to The End. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!