The Ethics of the End of the World

Sunday upon Sunday can stack up after a while into something which amounts to not much of a muchness, and one must try to put all that out of one's mind for a moment, lay everything aside and re-read an entire Gospel at a sitting to regain one's sense of interpretive proportion. Usually when I do this I end up shaking my head over the stark contrast a Gospel represents just in its urgent tone of voice compared with the satisfied demeanor evident in the denizens of any given church. Whatever may be said of our religion of forty years ago, let alone twenty centuries, its moral tone was more distinct, its own sense of urgency more palpable. Was it because we were not as rich then? And did not live as long? Or was our connection to the sources of Jesus' inspiration somehow more substantial? Did we actually preach Law and Gospel in those days, instead of about Law and Gospel?

The conviction of the imminence of the end of the world has its basis in Jesus' moral vision of God's coming judgment. A studious peasant on the periphery of society, he brings to bear the powers of a gifted critic whose observations are steeped in the language of the Law and the Prophets but whose experience is that of the outsider looking in. His contemporaries are repeatedly said to be astonished at this mere carpenter's son who suddenly appears on the scene filled with an urgency to tell all who will listen to repent and follow him. Jesus is at pains to urge radical change in attitudes and behavior, to invest life with a moral sense it has come to lack, because he is convinced God is about to intervene decisively and justly in human history, in contrast to contemporaries who were content to acquiesce in the status quo, or who more widely thought we should enjoy it while it lasts because human life simply represented a fleeting point in time. For Jesus "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" must give place to "take up your cross and follow me" because God surely is coming. Apart from this constellation of presuppositions, the character and force of the teaching of Jesus itself becomes distorted and misunderstood.

The earthly Son of Man of this early tradition, who has no place to lay his head, looks besieged by hangers-on though supremely in command in comparison with the ascended Jesus of the later tradition, who sits at the right hand of God's power in heaven, from where he seems oddly unable to find the kind of competent help he is looking for, even among The Twelve. The latter he had commanded "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." Suddenly all that is changed, and he at length hits upon a young fanatic, one Saul of Tarsus, to whom he complains from heaven of being persecuted and whom he subsequently directs in his travels, first here and not there, to spread the message beyond the Jewish confines where it had produced what must be considered an anticlimactic result. But after a good beginning even this Paul disappears for upwards of a decade before he reappears and produces the history with which we are now familiar from the New Testament.

Since God's decisive judgment of men had failed to materialize in the conclusion of Jesus' earthly career, it is not surprising that the re-interpretation of it should find new expression in such formulations as "it is appointed unto men once to die, and then comes judgment," which amounts to an attenuation of the original eschatological expectation of Jesus. And unlike Jesus' missionaries of Matthew 10 (The Twelve) who went out provisionless with the promise and expectation that they "shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come," Paul takes no support from anyone but funds his own missionary activity by practicing his trade, going among the Gentiles, planting churches and visiting them, retracing some of his steps multiple times, being closer to the end of all things only by a day, each and every day that passes.

Under the pressures of such developments, it is still somewhat surprising that the memory of the early tradition survived. At this long remove it is easy to fail to imagine the impact that it must have made. Much of it must have seemed as unintelligible as it was offensive.

We are informed that the individuals Jesus called who became The Twelve left everything behind, including co-workers and jobs, wives and family, and, depending on the chronology you accept, wandered around following their teacher for about three years, turning most of them into what today we should call beggars and dead-beat dads, socially irresponsible men of the meanest sort. While it may be argued that some of these had nothing to lose by doing so except long hot days in the boat, at least one may have abandoned a more lucrative skimming operation collecting taxes.

But most were far more reluctant to come along. The command to cut off hands and feet or pluck out eyes if they cause one to sin can't have helped. The rich young ruler sorrowfully declined because he couldn't bear to part with his many possessions, which Jesus told him to liquidate for the benefit of the poor as the final one thing lacking. Others protested their need to bury their dead before they answered the call to follow, for which social obligation Jesus had no patience whatsoever. The man at the plow must keep looking to the future and not look back or he will plow a crooked line and miss the kingdom's sudden appearance ahead of him.

The rich in particular have difficulty inheriting the kingdom of God because wealth's many cares distract them from the impending catastrophe and the narrow way of escape. The foolish rich man is more concerned with building new barns to store his gains than with the prospect of a final reckoning overtaking him as a thief in his nightly leisure. Riches represent a wide load on their backs which makes passage through the narrow doorway to the kingdom impossible. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be who find it."

Ostentatious dumping of wealth at the last second to get in won't do either, and would represent as conspicuous a sin as the lifelong propensity to accumulate wealth and ignore the needs of the poor. The improper divestiture of wealth at once exposes the insincerity of the would be follower of Jesus. It is noteworthy how often this is overlooked by our contemporaries both in the church and out of it who want to be recognized for their charitable giving. "Take heed," begins Matthew 6, "that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."

A person who has less to give away more easily escapes detection than one who has much, and faces a task therefore much less onerous. But still he must do it, and God will see it. This is the meaning of Jesus' statement that the widow he saw from the street, who almost escaped notice when she put into the treasury two small coins, "cast more in than all they . . . even her whole life," because it was all that she had, in contrast to the Pharisees who openly and grandly deposited great sums out of their abundance. In what Jesus had observed in the woman, God had observed as one of the truest of followers.

What is remarkable about the Gospels is how they preserve the memory of this world renouncing ethic in the face of the imminent eschaton despite the trend already at work within them, especially in the little apocalypses in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, to re-interpret the urgent expectation of the end in the light of the crucifixion. Consider, for example, Luke's account of the trial of Jesus. There Jesus no longer predicts his imminent coming as the Son of Man with the clouds as in Mark, but only that he will in future sit at the right hand of the power of God (23:69). Yet in 14:33 Luke uniquely preserves in the sternest possible terms the conditions of discipleship: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." The latter shows against the hyperbolists that Jesus expected all his followers, not just the rich, to turn their backs on everything they owned. To the hardness of which even members of the Twelve had protested their compliance, wondering to what end.

To what end, indeed. Despite the sacred halo painted over the early community in Jerusalem in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, it was Paul who intervened to rescue them from the economic difficulties they got themselves into, and who made of The Way the Weltreligion that it became. It was his expansive missionary ambition which brought Jesus' moral vision of reality in a new form to new soils which did not have the benefit of the Law and the Prophets. Without Paul the civilization of the West is almost unimaginable, the way forward, full of danger. If ours is a post-Christian age, if we no longer know what to make of this inheritance, if we no longer care, perhaps the swine are ready to turn, trample and rend.

The Absence of the Presence

If the experience of the divine presence can be as underwhelming in charismatic circles as it has been in sacramental Christianity, it is at least as equally elusive in what we may unhappily call "mystical" Christianity where a "personal relationship" with Christ is the emphasis.

Hard and fast borderlines between these forms do not exist universally, of course, and some mixture of these may be observed, depending on peculiar historical developments dominant in the experience of the individual congregation, especially since the 1970's when a great deal of interpenetration of ideas has occurred. For those sitting in the place of the unlearned, the sacramental churches may be represented as the far right of the spectrum, its mystical side is on the left but perhaps more to the center with the tongue talkers way out in left field. These last speak of being filled with the Holy Spirit in something called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so emphasize a direct and personal experience with the Godhead, and of a dramatic sort. Those to the center often claim to have a profound experience of conversion, but without the dramatic signs. Altar calls, emotional personal testimonies, and public dunkings are more their style. The most bizarre of the pentecostal types include those, I kid you not, who now even claim that God has actually restored missing teeth, in gold no less, and will do the same for you. Snake handling is oh so yesterday, while there is no question of the blind seeing and the deaf hearing. Hope springs eternal for the one who so believes: "the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father" (John 14:12).

The stodgy right wingers of the sacramental ilk or their rationalist brothers will sometimes glory in the fact of having no religious experience at all, and feel no regret about it either, which is why the authority and inspiration of Scripture is so important to them, for without that there would be nothing else. Among Lutherans of this type the old theological insight, simul justus et peccator, sums up human experience in Christ in formal, legal terms from God's perspective. The best analogy is the courtroom where the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge do not transform the essence of the person on trial. The person who goes free and the one who goes to jail differ in no wise from one another, except that the one knows this while the other does not. Technically freed from the consequences of sin, until the flesh is transformed in the resurrection the former is stuck with its baneful influences as much as is the latter. So he makes the best of it until then. It's schizophrenia only in the formal sense. Justification is forensic, but its temporal application requires other work outs first. Any kind of Christianity other than that, they will tell you, is madness in fact. That way lies manic depression at worst, fanaticism at best. No good can come of it. Mother Teresa, for all we know, now that her true feelings have seen the light of day, went to her grave in anguish over the absence of the divine presence in her experience. In public, she kept up appearances, as they say.

Mystical Christianity is all about human transformation, and it is no coincidence that its contemporary forms are heavily influenced by concerns, conceptions and terminology derived from the so-called science of psychology more than they are from the historic Christian faith. Ours is, after all, an age of enormous narcissism, a(n inevitable?) by-product of the success of the West. It is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century which has co-opted the first, and it comes as quite a surprise to its simpler devotees to learn that their hero, Saul of Tarsus, was an unwilling convert to Christianity who did not wring his hands in anguish over his sins when he "accepted" Christ on the road to Damascus. The Emperor Constantine was not brought to Christ in a fit of existential anguish about his failed life, substance abuse, and hurt feelings in his family but by a vision of the cross on the battlefield of war, if the sources are to be believed.

The stories of our converts are sniveling by comparison, and effeminate. We are constantly regaled with stories of slavery to drugs, alcohol, political power, sex and tobacco, none of which they were capable of overcoming without the help of Christ. When this was still a sane society, people told you to stop doing bad things because they thought God had so equipped human beings to stand on their own two feet. Not any more. The citizens of this country give the impression that they couldn't stop drinking for twenty-four hours let alone declare their independence from inside the confines of a paper bag, quite apart from the King of England.

It is not fair to single out the Christians for their bad behavior as if the same in non-believers is not also bad. It's just that their pretensions to transformation simply do not stand the tests of investigation. When no one else is awake early on Sunday mornings, they are out there on the highways in their freshly washed cars, as many of them speeding to church as the general population to work on a Monday morning. A Christian couldn't possibly pad a bill, especially if he's also your relative. We can't really treat you like one for whom Christ died unless you join our church. In fact, we don't really want to know you unless you do.

From where I sit, Christian or not, whether it's got tits or testicles, it's going to cause you trouble.

Piles of Rocks

The usual custom without which the worship service rarely begins is the Invocation of God's presence, as if in gathering God will come to be present in a way in which he is not normally. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Mt.18:20). Even in an evangelical church where Pauline sentiments such as Acts 17:28 might receive more attention (In him we live, and move, and have our being), one will hear the congregation admonished to prepare their hearts to enter into God's presence and "to let all mortal flesh keep silence before him." It is still amusing to me that in one such church where I recently heard the latter as a call to worship, the congregation proceeded to do no such thing. Instead they all got on their feet and started to make a joyful noise unto the Lord for about twenty-five minutes, non-stop.

To the nomadic patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the presence of God was commemorated in various places where it had been keenly experienced in dreams, usually with piles of stones made into altars. And he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down to sleep. And Jacob rose up early and took the stone and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. 'And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house' (Gen. 28:11,18,22). To Moses, God lived and revealed himself in fire on a holy mountain, a rather larger pile of such stones. To the children of the Exodus fleeing Egypt, he inhabited the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. After they were given the Law and the instructions to build an ark and a tabernacle where God said he would meet with thee and commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony (Exodus 25:22), the Israelites piled up stones to mark the spot in the middle of the river Jordan where the ark of the covenant had tarried (Joshua 4:9) to enable them to pass through on dry ground to the other side. The ark thereupon figured prominently in the collapse of an exceptionally impressive pile of rocks, formidably assembled as walls to protect the inhabitants of Jericho.

Years later King David wanted God to have a more permanent house like his own house of cedar, but it was his son Solomon who would build for God and his ark a more lasting pile of rocks in Jerusalem, despite his conviction that not even the universe which God had made was capable of containing him (1 Kings 8:27). Solomon's skepticism seems to have stopped there, and he leaves no record of doubt that God used the ark as his footstool.

The innermost part of this temple contained this ark, and as with the innermost part of the tabernacle, it was therefore thought to be a very dangerous place. As God had appeared in the cloud upon the mercy seat above the ark in the tabernacle (Leviticus 16:2), the cloud of God's presence also filled Solomon's temple, driving out the priests (1 Kings 8:10-11). The place where it did so was also called the holy of holies, God's resting place, and it was forbidden for anyone to enter into it on pain of death, except the high priest, and this but once a year, on the day of atonement. A later conqueror found this innermost place of the sanctuary rebuilt after the Babylonian Exile oddly vacant. Pompey the Great was famously nonplussed by the experience, and was not immediately struck down dead for his transgression, as previous transgressors of the ark's holiness had been (2 Samuel 6:6f.). It would seem that God had by then made an exodus of his own. Probably lost when Solomon's temple had been destroyed, the fate of the ark of the covenant still fires imaginations.

The Fourth Gospel records (John 2:19) that Jesus had said he could rebuild the then extraordinarily impressive Herodian temple in three days' time, if someone were but to destroy it (a saying hurled back at Jesus on the cross in mockery by bystanders, according to Matthew, but without justification, in his opinion). Jesus had more than once insisted that faith, even faith as tiny as the diminutive mustard seed, is capable of doing almost unimaginable things, even picking up a mountain (yet one more big pile of rocks) and casting it into the sea (Mt.17:20; 21:21). Despite the context of the cleansing of the Jewish Temple, John's opinion in 2:21 was that Jesus spake of the temple of his body, not of the real one. And so in fulfillment of this, the giant boulder blocking Jesus' tomb had to make way for the abolition even of death (John 20:1). John's Son of Man rises from the dead to ascend up where he was before (6:62) in order to prepare a place for you (14:2) and from where he will send the Spirit who shall be in you (14:17) and abide with you for ever (14:16). Gone is the apocalyptic Son of Man from Mark's Gospel. Gone is the imminent end of the world.

Instead, Peter, The Rock (Matthew 16:18), shall lead the new Israel, the church. He will obey the threefold command of Jesus in the closing chapter of John's Gospel and feed Jesus' sheep with the Bread of Life of John 6. In time, this would be equated with the Lord's Supper, despite the absence of a record of its institution in John. Once Christianity became a permitted religion under Constantine, the way was open for the rock-piling to begin anew, where sacraments could freely be dispensed.

Every parish soon had its church. Bishops eventually got magnificent cathedrals to mark the seats of their office. The Protestant Reformation later gave impetus to a new proliferation of buildings everywhere, and the force and vigor of sectarianism still plays out today in many places as even more churches go under construction, despite the new period of economic difficulties which confront the world, in which real estate of all kinds has played a defining role, and sits increasingly vacant.

Rocks, it seems, are inescapable elements in our lives, but we rarely think of them as such. We use them to make our roads. We then drive on these on vacation to see other more impressive piles of them. The Egyptian ones, carved into enormous blocks and arranged pyramidally as it were, still compel us. Writers resemble them, seeing that, as Johnson quipped, "no one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Hence the ubiquity of the novel, and now of the blog, by beefwits all. Especially beautiful and rare small stones we'll pay handsomely for to adorn our true loves, who later divorce us and take us to the cleaners. Others we'll hunt and polish to expose their colorfulness, and display them on shelves, requiring dusting at intervals. Adventurers climb the tallest piles of them. When the snow melts, their remains are sometimes found. Others practice climbing walls of them as "sport." We have spent billions of dollars to send men to the moon to collect boxes full of them to bring back to this our Earth, which our humorists call the third rock from the sun. From its bowels do molten ones continuously spew forth, augmenting the land. We regularly elect boxes of them to represent us in Washington, which they do admirably, giving us the government we deserve. To others whose heads were so full of them that they killed themselves by accident we posthumously give Darwin awards. We still mark the places where we lay our dead with them, that we may find them and visit with them. Although "dumb as a rock" is a common slur, to warn people who live in glass houses not to throw them won't really do much to deprive us of the spectacle. We dig them out of the ground where they interfere with our vegetable gardens, and assemble them in pleasing arrangements elsewhere on our property. Hadrian used them to build his wall in Britain. China's version dwarfs it by comparison. The Ten Commandments were inscribed on them by the finger of God. Moses broke these. Backward societies still use them to kill their malefactors. Muslims make pilgrimage to and circumambulate one that fell from the sky. Their houses of worship everywhere in the world face in its direction, as do they five times a day when they pray. The five main tenants of their religion are called pillars. Scientists have believed a very large one similar to theirs hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Some fear another one might do the same to us. Still others pray for this.

In times gone by, our own criminals we put to work breaking big ones into littler ones. And if you break them little enough, you will get the dust from which we were made, and to which we shall return, as sure as the day follows the night.

And Abraham answered and said, 'Behold now, I which am but dust and ashes have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord. . . .' And the Lord went his way, as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place (Genesis 18:27, 33).

Baptism and the Long Ending of Mark

"He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved" (Mark 16:16a).

Among the Lutherans, this text is still appealed to, front and center, in support of baptism, as happened to an infant at the opening of a recent church service. This habit of citation is infelicitous, because the text comes from the long ending of Mark, which is not penned by the same person who wrote up through Mark 16:8. To go on quoting from this long ending simply will not do. It diverts the attention away from the topic at hand.

Whole academic careers have been made out of this problem of the ending of Mark. Suffice it to say that the internal and external evidence of the verses after vs. 8 have convinced all but the most stubborn defenders of the Textus Receptus that they were supplied, albeit from an early date. Why were they supplied? Because the want of an ending was felt. To end the Gospel in fear and in silence without a resurrection appearance in Galilee, as promised, just wouldn't do.

So what happened? There have been many proposals, of course, and we will probably never really know. Perhaps "Mark" never finished his work. But to suggest, as some have, that he intended to end there at vs. 8 for literary reasons just sounds crazy. Most of the New Testament was rightly dismissed as "Kleinliteratur" a long time ago. And that's being generous to Mark. I prefer to think his original got damaged, obviously at a very early date. The mucked up ending is just one of its many inadequacies which went on to be answered by Matthew, Luke and John.

As for texts to be read in support of baptism, especially infants, I nominate the stories in Acts 16, where Lydia, a seller of purple, believed and was baptized, "and her household" (vs. 15), and where the jailor was baptized, "he and all his, straightway" (vs. 33). Whether or not it is conceivable that infants can be inferred from the language, the concept of inclusiveness certainly shines forth, as in "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Mt. 19:14).

The Son of Man

Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you.

-- John 6:27

This line from today's Gospel lesson about Jesus the Bread of Life is noteworthy for its use of the title "Son of man."

In the Synoptic tradition the use of this title bristles with notions of the imminent end of the world, but that conception is wholly lacking in John's gospel. In the former it is thought to refer to a figure spoken of in the Book of Daniel:

And, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

-- Daniel 7:13-14

Consider Mark's gospel in particular.

In it Jesus introduces his ministry, saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (1:15). In chapter 2, Jesus identifies himself as this Son of man, who has the power to forgive sins (vs. 10), and is Lord even of the Sabbath (vs. 28). Later in Mark 8:38 and 9:1 Jesus explicitly uses the Son of man imagery from Daniel of himself:

Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. . . Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

The consummation of all things is so close in the imagination of Jesus in Mark that even at his trial he can say to the high priest, an unbeliever, that the high priest himself "shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (14:62).

In John, by contrast, what is imminent is the Son of man's return to heaven.

In future believers such as Nathanael "shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man" (1:51). This same Son of man says, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (6:51). The prospect of it is a point of contention even among Jesus' closest followers: "Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?" (6:61 f.). It is from this heavenly vantage point, he says, that "I will draw all men unto me" (12:32).

Some believe the latter conception is a rationalization in the wake of the failure of the former, and the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar a rationalization of that.

At least I do.