FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

11/26/12 

As has been mentioned in an earlier FINDINGS, the graphic symbols of Advent, having originated in the Northern Hemisphere, work better in it because of the approach of the winter solstice congruent with the build-up to Christmas, a feast of lights, and the waning of daylight hours. In antiquity and well into modern times there was no general illumination of the night beyond individual efforts with candles and oil lamps so that the coming of darkness became a symbol of the approach of death with its attendant miseries. No wonder apocalyptic became important to Christians, especially in light of the belief in the resurrection of Christ and his prophesied return.
 
Thus shall the hymns and songs and psalms and readings for the coming four weeks be redolent of all that, at first with the last judgment at the forefront ("Every eye shall now behold him, robed in dreadful majesty; those who set at naught and sold him, pierced and nailed him to the tree, deeply wailing, deeply wailing shall the true Messiah see."),*  then with a general reversion to immature, juvenile hopes that all will be well once Christ arrives (again) and the sun comes out. -- It is against this thematic scrim that our exegetical explorations will be made.

The consensus among scholars not driven by ideological or theological agenda is that all four canonical gospels were written and compiled after 70 CE. That date is of enormous significance, because in that year the Second Temple was desecrated and destroyed by the Roman military in an epoch-making, life-changing event for any Jew. To virtually all first century persons who might have described as proto-Christian and would first have been Jews, or Gentiles enamored of the Jewish tradition, that event had enormous implications.
 
Luke, writing 25 years or more after the debacle, used the images of astronomical omens, political conflict and natural disaster that Mark first proposed a couple of decades or so earlier as real or imagined events to explain the destruction of the Temple. It would not be unreasonable to think that Jesus Jews of Luke's era might have interpreted the Temple's destruction in an odd kind of positive light because the disappearance of the cultic site and the resultant discrediting of its elitist administrators strengthened the synagogue, i.e., the local assembly of people. The synagogue may have been the nest in which Christianity was hatched, although it soon took flight on its own.
 
Mark, Matthew and Luke, each and all, connect the dread apocalyptic imagery that appears in Luke 21: 25-26 with the parable of the fig tree (21:29ff). The "sign" exhibited by the fig tree (sprouting leaves) suggests that purposeful passage of time and function that anticipate a consequence -- in the case of the fig tree, figs. In the case of the astronomical signs "in the sun, the moon, and the stars" (whatever those signs might actually have been in the Lucan imagination) baleful things are suggested.
 
A reasonable interpretation is that Luke (and maybe Mark and Matthew, too) were saying to late first century Jewish and Gentile Christians (or Jesus Jews) that, with the passage of time, fewer days and hours remained for people to make up their minds about personal loyalties. The fig tree's blooms would flower and ripen into edible fruit. Whatever Jewish Christians of the time were or were not doing would likewise have commensurate results. Luke was allergic to summary condemnation of the recalcitrant -- see 15: 11-32, the parable of the prodigal son. But even Luke, whoever he/she was, was part of that late first century ferment when and in which anything must have seemed possible both for good and ill.
 
A term in these verses needs further explanation, i.e. "redemption" (άπολύτρωσις), but here referring not to Jesus' sacrificial death but to an eventual realization of his rule (or kingdom). One could even say that the redemption was a release from the complicated cultic requirements of the former Temple life. Paul might certainly have seen it just that way (see Romans 4: 13-16; I Corinthians 4: 11-17; II Corinthians 4:7, 5: 1-15 and Galatians 5: 1-2). To achieve freedom, Jesus Jews had to give up the security of tradition, perhaps as symbolized by the Temple and what it had meant culturally.
 
The Jeremiah and I Thessalonians readings have an air of anticipation about them: Jeremiah: "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . ." Thessalonians uses such language as "at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints." -- A caution to homilists: take care that you do not confuse Jeremiah's vision of the future with Paul's or specifically with the destruction of the Temple. The similarity shared by the three passages is that each points to different future event. The readings taken together merely help reinforce the Advent theme of anticipation.

The classic homiletic temptation of Advent is to use the appointed readings to forecast the end of life as we know it, to dilate too graphically on the apocalyptic themes found here and there in the Bible and to skate too close to hysteria. A better approach is to acknowledge that such themes exist and, when scholarship permits, to explain them in their historical contexts.
 
A helpful thing to do would be to assemble the amply available evidence of sure and almost certain disaster concerning climate change, the signs of which are clearly visible in nature. Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and 9/11 were huge and terrible surprises, the first and third being huge shocks to the national psyche of the United States, the second catastrophically ruinous of life to those over whose city the atomic bomb was first detonated.
 
Yet most disasters of lasting effect occur slowly over time, and therefore the evidence of their inexorable approach comes in bits and pieces over time. It is easier to assume the position of denial when a cooler-than-usual summer in one region of the planet seems to the untutored to contradict the facts that Earth's atmosphere and oceans are growing warmer, sometimes by the year. Yes, there may be other evidence to the contrary, but the overwhelming scientific conclusion is that Earth's residents are courting trouble but nevertheless are thought to be able, in fact, to stave off the worst effects of degradation by altering lifestyles.
 
That was, in a way, what the character(s) named Jesus in the gospels was saying. Not all those who work with New Testament texts agree that Jesus was a wisdom-teacher type as opposed to an apocalyptic prophet, but I am persuaded that the textual evidence supports the former rather than the latter.
 
The corpus of Jesus' wisdom teaching has to do with how human beings live together in peace. The unspoken part of that wisdom is that if they do not turn the other cheek and forgive as often as it takes and do not find ways to love the enemy as well as the neighbor it is possible that human conflict could grow to unsustainable proportions.
 
Once the human race crossed the line into the nuclear era the possibility of catastrophe became clearer. We see the signs of it all the time. The Advent preacher need only call attention to those signs.

*"Lo, he comes with clouds descending," by Charles Wesley, The Hymnal 1982, #s 57 & 58, The Church Hymnal Corp.