Lk.21:5-19, Is. 65:17-25 November 14, 2010

Here as the church year closes, we usually move to readings of the close of this age and the opening of a new one. Luke gives a prediction of the destruction of the temple. It happened about forty years after the death of Jesus in 70, but some time before Luke's gospel may have been committed to writing. Already in the time of Luke, people were growing concerned about a seeming delay in the return of Christ. Notice how Luke arranges the material. He has the typical apocalyptic natural disorder, but after that, he moves to foreshadowing about the struggles of the disciples that we will soon see in his second volume, the book of Acts in normal history and time. Luke seems to understand that the new age is inaugurated in Jesus Christ, but we will live with feet in both ages.

Luke warns to have his readers alert. One warning  made contemporary for them and us is being led astray could be false messiahs? We may not see false messiahs but we certainly live in a period of false claims about the end times. Another striking thing about Luke is his push for virtues, resources,  needed for times of religious pressure. Personal trials and tribulations will come before the cosmic trials of the end. Maybe that is another way of reading the end times, of linking our personal trials with the great drama of death and rebirth that is off in a distant future. Before the end, they will meet their end. Before the end, we will most likely reach our own, yes even the young here now who may well live to the age that Isaiah saw as a dream, not an expectation that may well be actual.This does not envision a rapture where we are lifted away from troubles. Instead, the troubles we face could well be a part of the end times experience. We require God-given resources to even cope with the troubles everyone faces, including Christians. In a way think of apocalyptic material as graduation exercises that signal the end of one phase of life and the commencement of another. 

Compared to Luke, we get a much brighter image in Isaiah. It is one of transformation, an almost heavenly account before people believed in an afterlife.It is a vision of all sorts of abundance and fertility,long life, of security and peace, a new Eden, but better. Not only will the troubles of human life be lessened but even the threat of the serpent would be removed. In God's hands, the end is not the conclusion. Indeed the end is a new beginning. what looks to be finality from our point of view is a chapter in the divine time frame.  In terms of medical science we are nearing what must have seemed to be a far off dream to the prophet. Sadly we are still far away from a sense of fairness and security.So often, the end times are pictured only with the disturbances and destruction, but it is more in God's nature to embrace than to cast off (see this week's blog notes on TOT) In a way it may be the difference between a nightmare and waking. Indeed apocalyptic material has a companion less in social life than in our own natural course of life. All of us have apocalyptic moments of the death of the old and the birth of the new, in love, in career, in family. All of us are moving toward the fateful day when we are now more in this zone of being, when we die. That won;t be the conclusion either, as then we move into god's time and place.