Jesus said to his disciples, “When these things begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand. Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life . . . Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21.28,34,36)
If today’s selection from scripture sounds oddly familiar, it is with good cause. It is the same as two weeks ago, although written this week by Luke’s hands, not by Mark’s hands. Scholars acknowledge that Matthew and Luke borrowed freely from Mark’s writing and this is one of those many instances. It may simply be coincidence that we concluded the liturgical year with Mark’s apocalypticism and today we begin a new liturgical year with Luke’s apocalypticism, as borrowed freely from Mark. Truth be told, there is not a dime’s difference between the two.
As we learned the other week, apocalypticism is a type of writing that focuses on the future, specifically a future time when the Most High God will come to earth to rectify the wrongs done and to redirect the course of the world towards goodness, justice, and right living. Rooted in the Jewish prophets and in the Jewish people’s experience of persecution and domination by foreign powers, apocalyptic writing imagines a world where things are made right again by God.
It may not be now, but it will come. This is the central belief and the critical hope of the apocalyptic writer, as he sees the smudge-marks of evil on everything around him, a world besmirched by injustice, intolerance, and indulgence. It is not as the world was created and not as God intended. There is darkness everywhere, not light. The evil done by evildoers cries to the high heavens for remedy and for redress.
The answer, says the apocalypticist, is not now, as wrongdoing rains down upon us, but in the future, at a time decided by God alone, when his patience is done and the cries for justice have piled up as high as the heavens. Jeremiah the prophet, keenly aware of pain and deprivation, promises the people of Israel that their suffering is not without end, their distress is not unto death. “The days are coming,” he tells them, not once, but seventeen times in his oracles, each occurrence a reminder that help is on the way.
Well schooled in that tradition, Rabbi Jesus, a faithful Jew living in a situation of similar distress, although under Roman rule, not under Babylonian rule, as was Jeremiah, evokes the same apocalyptic call for renewal and restoration by the Most High God, his conviction resting on the ancient promises that the days are coming when the ways of the world will be condemned forcefully and radically by the Maker of the world.
As we know–and as Rabbi Jesus knew–the days have not come yet and so we live between the utterance of the promise and the fulfillment of the promise, betwixt and between, our lives spent in expectation of a new world, even as we exist in a world grown old with wrongdoing, wrongheadedness, and wrongs too many to count.
This time in between is described beautifully and powerfully by the Irish poet and writer, John O’Donohue whose poem, “For the Interim Time,” describes our situation perfectly with these words, “You are in this time of the interim/ Where everything seems withheld./ the path you took to get here has washed out;/ The way forward is concealed from you./ The old is not old enough to have died away;/ The new is still too young to be born./”
O’Donohue concludes his poem with this verse, “The more faithfully you can endure here, the more refined your heart will become,” a challenge to us to remain strong and standing tall even as chaos and conflict surround us, seeking to upset us and wanting to steal our hopes for a better tomorrow from us. Ours is a call to grow stronger in the ways of goodness , although evil slams against our door with ferociousness and voraciousness.
In 1960, Ruby Bridges was only six-years-old when she was chosen as the first black child to integrate the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Photos from that time show the stout courage of that little girl as she was escorted to school each morning by federal marshals who protected her from the angry white parents who screamed, cursed, insulted, and threatened her each day.
Interviewed by a Harvard psychiatrist who was interested in knowing how a young child such as her could cope with such frightening circumstances every day, Ruby told him that her mother and her minister had told her that God was watching over her each day and it was her duty to pray for and forgive the people who opposed her.
Asked if she thought this was good advice, Ruby said, “I’m sure God knows what is happening. . . He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it. That’s what they say in church.” She was right. That was what Rabbi Jesus said, as we have heard for ourselves today.
A careful look into the words that Rabbi Jesus uses in his clarion call to withstand corruption and soul-corrosion can be seen in his emphatic commands to his followers “to stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand” and “to pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.”
That is our posture as his followers, to stand erect, even as Rabbi Jesus stood erect before Pilate, refusing to shiver and shake before the strong arm of Rome, his security and his strength coming from the sure knowledge that there was One more powerful than the Roman governor, the One who ruled the heavens and the earth, the One who promised that evil men would not have the last say-so.
And though he stumbled three times on his way to crucifixion, he stood up again each time, using the strength of his spirit, if not of his body, showing that evil may throw us to the ground, but it cannot keep us flat on our faces. Knocked down and, at times, knocked out, we imitate Rabbi Jesus best when we stand erect, confronting evil by our refusal to conform to its ways.
In 1949, following the end of World War II, which had let loose on the world more evils than ever imagined, a Benedictine monk at Downside Abbey in England wrote a book of meditations that he called, We Die Standing Up. His name was Dom Hubert van Zeller and his only possessions during his monastic life were his toothbrush and a typewriter. At the start of the book, van Zeller writes, “True is the instinct in man which salutes the tiny percentage who die in their boots.” That quote establishes his theme.
Near the end, he offers this counsel, “We have then to be tough in our determination to put the first things first, and to meet the world’s philosophies with a toughness at least as obstinate as theirs.” He continues, “We have to be no less tough in dealing with ourselves. Not physically merely, but much more morally. No excuses, no compromises, no trailing away into the land of easy options and deadening slogans.”
He ends with these words, “We must keep our eyes open all the time, and look. Christ means the Cross, and there are no mists on Calvary. If you watch and pray, you won’t have the face to say you’ve never really seen the issues in their true terms. You won’t have the face to plead the easy way out. Erecti moriamur. We have got to die, so let us die standing up.”
His words speak even more powerfully to our own day, when wars have proliferated for decades and when the suffering of the innocents is ordinary news. It seems fewer are willing to stand erect, as Rabbi Jesus called us to do, choosing the other option, to escape from the cross, to be spineless in the face of sinister forces, to be speechless when injustices abound around us, our silence complicity in the wrongs done to others, our cowardice a turning our backs to Christ on the cross.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity,” wrote the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, in his poem, “The Second Coming,” a poem predicated on the scriptures spoken to us today, a reminder that many who say they follow the Crucified One do not stay with him on the climb to Calvary, but fall down and refuse to stand up.
We all do it when we could have helped the helpless, but did not; when could have shown generosity, but did not; when we could have consoled, but did not. How many before us have we disappointed, dismissed, or despised? Each one has been a step away from the cross, a choice to stand back rather than to stand up. “Stand erect and raise your heads,” the Galilean Rabbi tells us, his words reminding us that burying our head in the sand is not an option, not if we want to walk with him to Calvary.
It is with clear purpose that we begin the season of Advent today with these words from the Rabbi. Advent, as we know well, is a time of watching and waiting for the Promised One to come, the One called Wonder Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. While it is a time of waiting, it is not a time for wasting.
Instead, we continue the work that was begun, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger, all our efforts spent in service to the One who walked the roads of Galilee teaching and telling us that the day is coming when God will reclaim his creation, and when that day comes, he wants us to be standing erect, with heads raised and hands bleeding.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 