Progressive reflections on the lectionary #45

Monday 25th November 2024

Luke 21:25-36 Beginning with the end of the world

It’s the first Sunday of the church calendar, for anyone who cares about such things, so we enter ‘Year C’ in the revised common lectionary, the third of three years worth of set readings with this reading from Luke’s gospel. This time next year we’ll be back at the start of ‘Year A’ again - if, that is, the world doesn’t end first.

As I write we’re beset, yet again, with fears of the end of ‘the world’ - by which we basically mean human civilisation. Beset to a certain extent, at least. Not so beset that we neglect to make plans for retirement or look forward to a holiday. Beset in a middle class way, perhaps.

“Cockroaches will survive a nuclear bomb,” I remember learning when I was a child. This lesson briefly conjured up an imagined future where cockroaches roamed the earth, slowly growing more powerful until they, too, found a way to exterminate themselves.

In contemporary Western Europe and North America current ‘end of the world’ fears centre upon concerns that Putin’s Russia will do something dastardly - in parts of Russia the fear is, presumably, quite the opposite. In Palestine, meanwhile, many of the worst fears are not just coming true, but already have come true, the same is true for dozens of other places around the world.

By the time he reached the end of his life the firebrand Reformer Martin Luther could put his hope only in the end of the world. Rome, he felt, had hopes that a political solution would be found to their problems - that the burgeoning reformation would be put down by a show of force. Luther, of course, had no such hopes.

The world, he said in sermons and reflections on this text from the 1520s onward, is “the devil's child” and a “murderers' pit.”

Not one to mince his words, old Martin. He was convinced that the end of the world was nigh - ‘thank goodness’ he might have added. Around five hundred years later, his hopes seem to have been a little misplaced.

It seems strange, perhaps, to begin Advent with this prediction of the end of all things. But this text, written sometime around the turn of the first century during the conflict between embattled Jews and early Christians, and well after the catastrophic fall of the second temple, echoes the reality that for many everything seems dire and hopeless. The only way that this can get better, some feel, is if it all ends now.

Perhaps this only feels strange from the comfort of contemporary Western Europe. Here, even the threat of looming nuclear crisis doesn’t quite stop us looking forward to the Christmas special of our favourite TV show. Nuclear Armageddon doesn’t prevent tax planning. But Christianity isn’t really at home in this comfortable existence of ours - true Christianity, if I dare use that phrase, is the religion of the marginals.

Christianity belongs, if we’re honest, to those for whom life is precarious and dangerous. It’s no wonder that warnings of the end of the world seem out of place to us - because they’re not good news for those of us who still find space to look forward to good things. For those, though, who know a different kind of life, one which is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbes would have said, those caught up in war and desolation - hopes for an end of it all make perfect sense.

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