Conflicting Signals

How many of you read the comic strip Peanuts? Anybody here NOT read Peanuts? Tell me, what do you think when you see Lucy with the football, holding it for Charlie Brown to kick? She always manages to talk him into it, doesn’t she? And he runs to kick the ball and she snatches it away and he falls flat on his back and feels like a fool and we think, “Why did you let her sucker you into it, Charlie Brown?” He should know better by now. How many years has it been that Lucy has been holding that football? and how many years has Charlie Brown let his incurable optimism, and a sort of naive wish to believe in Lucy’s goodwill and trustworthiness, persuade him into falling for the con, one more time.

Usually, of course, when you see someone holding a football like that, one finger holding it on its end, it’s an invitation to kick, isn’t it? So of course if you have any interest at all in playing football, you’ll accept the invitation. It’s a no-brainer. So Charlie Brown, who really wants to be a star athlete, is going to try to kick the ball, one more time, just in case this one is for real. It’s as if he comes to it new every time, with no history of disappointment and failure. It’s as if he didn’t have any other information to put alongside that invitation to kick, to change the meaning of the sign from an invitation to a warning.

But our memories are somewhat better, aren’t they? So when the old familiar story line starts up again, and we see Lucy holding the football and Charlie suspending disbelief and letting himself be taken for the umpteenth time we shake our heads and say, under our breaths, “Don’t do it, Charlie Brown.”

And that is, I am afraid, how many Christians nowadays see passages in the Bible like the one we’re looking at today: a kind of skepticism that says, “been there, seen that, not going to fall for it.” They're so determined not to be taken in by over-confident interpretations of end-times prophecy that they ignore the prophetic passages altogether. I don’t altogether blame the people who shy away from texts like these. They are some of the roughest passages in the Bible to deal with. How are we to understand them?

“They will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory... Truly, I say to you,” said Jesus, “this generation will not pass away till all has taken place.” These words of Jesus come right after a prediction of the fall of Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fell to Roman armies in 70 AD. So of course most, if not all, first century Christians took these words to mean that Jesus would return in their lifetimes. But he didn’t, and they died, and another generation grew up, and died. And by the time of St. Augustine in the fourth century, trying to figure out when Jesus would return had pretty much gone out of fashion.

We look with tolerant disdain at people who announce that they’ve figured out dates and times; they come and go, and they’re always wrong. Here in America, the eighteenth-century Shaker movement was one of those; they died out, rather than change their beliefs when their expectations weren’t fulfilled. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons were more flexible. In this century, Kaiser William in the first World War and Adolf Hitler in the second have both been identified as the Antichrist. The restoration of the nation of Israel in 1948 spawned a whole new generation of theories which are still going strong. Saddam Hussein was the top contender for Antichrist in the 80's but not too long before that ago people were tagging Gorbachev with the honor. One quasi-Christian group made the news with a confident assertion that the end of the world was coming in (I think) September 1984, for reasons I can’t remember exactly, but it had to do with the conjunction of the planets. People climbed to the top of the nearest convenient hill, waited and prayed all night, and trooped back down again in the morning.

We’ve got history with these prophetic passages. Too many people have been wrong too often. We can’t just take the simplest, most obvious reading, and go with it; the chances are too great that we’d end up, like Charlie Brown, flat on our backs feeling like fools. And yet these are the words of our Lord, and what he says is important, and he’s not Lucy, he’s not playing “Gotcha” just for fun. So how do we deal with it?

Back in Jesus’ day, the destruction of Jerusalem was about the worst thing that any Jew could imagine. It had already happened once, about five hundred years before, when Nebuchadnezzar had razed the place and taken the people off into exile. But then God had brought them back, hadn’t he? He restored the nation of Israel, they rebuilt the temple, they actually had been an independent nation again for a while. “Say it isn’t so, Jesus,” I can almost hear the disciples say. “Say it’s not going to happen again,” just the way they couldn’t handle their master’s predictions of his death. But Jesus doesn’t give them the easy answer, the comfortable answer. Jerusalem will fall. The temple will be destroyed. But it won’t end there. That’s not the end of the world, says Jesus. It may be the end of YOUR world, but it’s not the end of God’s world, it’s not the end of time.