Ottheinrich, The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse
The Traumatic Stress Bible
Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28 Year C RCL)
13 November 2022—8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Malachi 4:1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D., homilist
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
You’ve seen them, I think: sober-looking men in button down shirts and ties, accompanied by a few “modestly” dressed women with big hair, marching in our Rogue Valley parades on such days as the 4th of July. These “Christians” carry banners with the slogans: “Repent, for the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord is coming to burn the wicked!” There banners quote today’s reading from Malachi about the Great Day of the Lord, hot as an oven but give no mention of its hope that the day of setting things right will dawn like the sun upon those who revere God and give alms to others (that’s what “righteousness” in that passage means.) These people call themselves Evangelicals, or people of the Good News. But with their grim focus, they would be better called Dysangelicals, people of the bad news.
Whenever anything horrible happens, no matter what, count on it that someone somewhere will mark it up as an act of God, as some punishment for some bad thing, the fault of some bad group of other people. You know what I’m talking about.
Pat Robertson said the 2010 Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment on Haitians’ ‘historic pact with the Devil’, dredging up a bit of Haitian revolutionary war propaganda from two centuries ago. In 2001, Jerry Falwell blamed the 9-11 attacks also on the victims, saying that God was punishing America for lax sexual morality and casual acceptance of abortion. The severity of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was also in some quarters attributed to a Deity angry with America’s supposed moral laxness, rather than on climate change. My friend Louis Crew-Clay, founder of the GBLT-supporting Episcopal ministry group Integrity, used to say that he personally over the years had been blamed for earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires, all supposedly God’s punishments for Louie’s depravities. “Oh, honey, if only I had such power!” he would wistfully muse in his best Queen Lutibelle voice. But it seems that explaining such disasters as punishment sent from an angry God rather than random horrors is easier for many people.
Such Bad-News Bears usually quote parts of the Bible like Daniel or the Revelation of John to explain bad stuff as God’s punishment for the wicked. But they misread these books entirely.
Daniel, Revelation, and today’s Gospel lesson are examples of what scholars call apocalyptic writings. The Greek word apokalypsis means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden. The question is: what do they uncover? Is it coming events, or is it God’s ultimate purpose?
This literature is rich is images: symbolic figures, numbers, angels, and animals. It includes disturbing and shocking scenes: a third of the sea or the moon turning to blood here, the stars falling from heaven and killing most living things there, a scarlet-clad crowned prostitute corrupting all nations here, a multi-headed beast covered with eyes and horns devouring the righteous there. Though Christians for the first 1000 years understood this all symbolically and allegorically, more recently we often see people who say they believe it all literally: they see these stories as if they are predictions of coming events. In the year 1,000, penitentes were running all over Europe whipping themselves and declaring the end of the world quoting such images. Early Protestants saw the Bishop of Rome as having the “Mark of the Beast.” In the American Civil War, the battles where so many millions died were seen as the Lord “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” In the 1970s, we had “the Late Great Planet Earth”; today we have the Left Behind novels and claims that this or that public figure is the Anti-Christ.
But Jesus, in today’s Gospel, won’t have anything to do with such thinking.
Just before his arrest, Jesus is with his disciples at the Temple in Jerusalem. It is pretty impressive: 10 stories high, with masonry stones embellished with smaller carved jewels glittering in the sun, gold leaf covering large parts of it, truly a marvel. A disciple says, “Wow! Look at that, Jesus! Isn’t that impressive?” Jesus replies by dismissing it all and saying, “Don’t get too excited. The Temple is not really where God’s action is. Soon not one stone there will be left standing on another. It’s all going down.” Later, they ask him about this. Such destruction must be something on the scale of those troubling apocalyptic books. So they ask him how his prediction fits into the images and timetables of the Book of Daniel and Ezekiel: when will this destruction happen, when is the end of the world? What will be the signs preceding it?
Jesus explains that such a scorecard approach to end-time signs is pointless—too many people abuse such imagery for their own advantage (“many will come and say…”). He says they shouldn’t be too alarmed or overly excited by the appearance of apocalyptic stage props of “wars and rumors of wars” or natural catastrophes. Such things, he says in Mark, are “but the beginning of the birthpangs,” that is, Braxton-Hicks’ contractions or false labor. Jesus is saying, “Don’t worry too much about any of these things. They’re just a false alarm. Keep calm and carry on!” Jesus denies that apocalyptic should be read as a coded playbook of good guys versus bad guys, but rather as an invitation to hope despite whatever horrors we may run into.
The fact is, Apocalyptic is primarily about events and people in the world of its authors, not the distant future. The Revelation of John, the classic Christian Apocalypse, itself says that it is about things that will “come to pass soon” (Rev 1:1). That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer.
Apocalyptic is literature written during persecution. It seeks to
understand the sufferings of the righteous and encourage them to not lose
faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors.
In John’s Revelation, these are Romans under the Emperors Nero and
Domitian, who put Christians in the arena to be torn apart by wild animals
because they decline to offer incense to a statue of the Emperor. In the Book of Daniel, they are Greek Syrians
under Antiochus who tortured to death whole families simply because they kept
the Law of Moses.
Apocalyptic puts its message in rich images and code so that the readers can read it without the censors and secret police of the persecutors catching on and then using the possession of this literature as evidence against them.
These books read sometimes as if some mental patient wrote them. That is because the authors were traumatized people. Whatever the specifics of the hardships they describe, we must remember that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of the Good. People like our Dysangelical friends who take these books as coming events and cause for threat and alarm just don’t get it. Instead of “Keep calm and carry on,” they, like Chicken Little, run about and shriek “the sky is falling! The sky is falling.”
Jesus’ “false alarm!” approach here suggests what is the real message of Apocalyptic: as Winston Churchill famously said in WWII, “If you are going through hell, then keep on going!”
Jesus here is saying that we should take the traumatic events we experience, whether persecution, war, or natural disasters, as occasions for drawing closer to others, for helping them, for being helped by them, not as whips wielded by a nasty hateful deity.
In the coming week, I invite us to ask how we react to bad things in life. Do we blame God for them, or say God is punishing someone, maybe us? In prayer, let us seek ways to help use the traumas we experience or witness as ways to draw closer to others. Let us encourage each other in hope unwavering and thus bring closer the great day when God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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