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.
The end of human history, in standard Old Testament language, is not just ordinary siege warfare, not just ordinary famine, ordinary everyday tragedy. The end of human history will be marked by a whole different degree of disaster. The "signs" in sun and moon and stars, the distress of nations, the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear, the shaking of the heavens are going to be of a whole different order of magnitude.
Of course they wanted him to come soon, and of course they didn’t want to witness any disaster greater than the destruction of the temple, the obliteration of the nation, the slaughter and scattering of the people. Jesus knew that. He knew that they would get it wrong.
I believe that one of Jesus’ purposes in putting these two prophecies together was to give the disciples courage, as well as hope. He knew what a blow it would be to them. They would need more than an ordinary degree of fortitude to hang in there after the fall of Jerusalem. But he had to let them know that it wasn’t the end. They couldn’t take the fall of Jerusalem as their cue to blow the whistle, lay down their tools, and wait for the pick-up. They weren’t to close down the program; instead, they would have to put on a second shift.
“Learn to read the signs correctly,” Jesus says, and tells them a parable to emphasize his point. “Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.” Or, we might say, “look at all the trees. As soon as the maples begin to turn red, we know that the winter is already near.” Learn to read the signs. Learn that the signs of the end of Jerusalem are not the same as the signs for the end of time. Learn that disaster is not a sign that God has forgotten you, but a sign that God is still in the process of working out his plan for the world. Learn that when the leaves turn, and die, and fall, winter will come, but it is only winter. It is not yet the end of the world.
But if this is what Jesus meant, I hear you ask, why does Jesus say that “this generation will not pass away till all has taken place”? Scholars have argued about this. It’s the hardest sentence to deal with in the entire book of Luke. Obviously, he didn’t mean the generation of people who were listening to his words. Some scholars say that he meant to use the word in its alternate meaning, as a member of a class, for instance the entire class of Jews, or the entire class of his followers, or even the entire class of fallen humanity itself. Of all the interpretations, however, the one that makes the most sense to me is the one that does retain the usual meaning of the word generation, that is, a span of time 30-40 years long. But the generation he is referring to is the one that sees the signs in the sun and moon and stars, who sees the shaking of the heavens and the earth. In other words, Jesus is giving a span of time FOR, rather than UNTIL, the final cosmic meltdown.
Well, I’m sure this is all very fascinating for Biblical scholars, but what has it got to do with us?
Simple. How many Christians do you know who think of America as a sort of new Jerusalem? Or who relate contemporary events directly to Biblical prophecy and see America’s enemies as God’s enemies?
With the approach of the third millennium, it’s even more tempting to over-interpret the signs, pointing to the recent floods and earthquakes, the new plagues, from AIDS to the Ebola virus, Middle Eastern political shenanigans, you name it, as evidence of the imminence of Christ’s return. But I don’t think that these things are any different, either in kind or degree, to what has gone before. This is ordinary tragedy, the stuff of everyday life. Not even the fall of our Jerusalem would necessarily mean that the final judgment is at hand.
I do believe in Christ’s return, and I long for it. When I read in the news things that make me think “distress of nations” and “men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world” I confess that it crosses my mind to wonder if, indeed, Christ is coming soon.
But what is more important than knowing when Jesus is coming, is to remember that whether or not he IS coming within our lifetimes, or whether he will continue to tarry, he WILL come. And the next time he comes, he will come in judgment. He warns his disciples, and through them us, as well. Listen to verse 34:
“Take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare.”
Jesus tells us not to get distracted by anything of this world, either work or pleasure. This is a theme he has stressed many times over the course of his ministry; remember the parables of the wise and foolish virgins, the watchful servants, and the man guarding his house against thieves? It’s too easy to let other things crowd out the kingdom of God, especially when things are going smoothly. Crises help us remember.
“But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of man.”
Instead of getting caught up in our own little worlds, we should be constantly on the watch for signs. And every banner headline in the news, whether flood or earthquake, famine or epidemic, tragedy or scandal, global warming or bank collapse, is a sign. When we see these things we are to remember that Christ is coming - not necessarily that he is coming at any particular time, but that HE IS COMING. It is a sign that we are to put our hope in Jesus Christ, not in things. They are signs that even though “Heaven and earth [may] pass away, [his] words will not pass away.” They are signs that neither human beings nor our societies have progressed beyond the need for repentance and salvation.
Too often we look at the terrible things that happen in the world, the natural disasters as well as the cruelties men routinely inflict upon one another, and we despair of God’s justice. Like the psalmists, we complain that God does not hear the cries of his people, and that evil appears victorious. Jesus reminds us that God controls history in spite of our limited vision. Jesus reminds us that God is still with us. “So also,” Jesus said, “when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”
The time of advent is a sign to us, as well.
Advent reminds us that in times past people waited for their Savior, looking for signs. They waited through exile, through wars, through four hundred years of what seemed to them like the silence of their God, and many despaired. Some turned away, investing in other hopes and plans. Some were fooled by false Messiahs and lost their dreams if not their lives in following them. Some decided to help God out, by creating a system of rigid, unbending rules. Others simply waited, in hope and obedience and trust. And still others watched for signs, and saw the star, and came to worship.
And the Savior came. Jesus did come. And he has not left us. Jesus has never left us. This season, as we sing to Immanuel, “God with us” we are reminded that God is still with us in Jesus Christ, he is here with us as we gather in his name to worship. He is with us as we go out into the world in his name, loving and helping and bringing the good news to people.
Our Savior has come, our Lord will come again. But Jesus is here now as well. Let us see the signs, recognize his presence, and continue to worship and serve him as we wait in confidence and hope for him to come again.
