Whenever I read one those apocalyptic passages in the Bible, the words to the R.E.M. song start running through my mind: “It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.” Watch Video

That song was released twenty years ago. Since then, songs about the end of the world are more common than ever, along with a shift in mood from one of ironic playfulness to pessimism and sometimes even despair, especially post 9/11. Radiohead (one of my favorite bands) made a fortune in the 90s writing lyrics which are downright depressing. So what’s up?

In Luke 21:5-19 Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple, but in the same breath he warns his listeners not to be led astray by those who claim that the end is here. A significant number of scholars agree that Jesus, towards the end of his ministry, did make a prediction to this effect (Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV, 1326). Like us, he lived at a time when people were thin on hope and desperate for change. The Temple and the ruling elite were dismally corrupt, not to mention that the nation of Israel was being crushed under the iron shod foot of the Roman Empire.

Like now, people in Jesus’ time responded to this sort of crisis in different ways. While some joined cults and ran off to the desert, others were plotting some violent means to cleanse the land of the Romans and its corrupt leaders. Most assumed that it would take no less than a cataclysmic event to shake things up. Just about everyone in Jerusalem, revolutionaries and religious freaks alike, were waiting for something to happen, something big enough to change the world.

Luke, however, is writing after the Temple had already been destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. His version is almost entirely dependent on Mark’s gospel, which was written while the Temple was still standing, except that Luke has eliminated Mark’s equation of the end of Jerusalem with the end of the world (Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV, 1328-29). Mark may have expected the destruction of the temple to coincide with Jesus’ return, but Luke knows for certain that it didn’t it happen that way: the Temple was destroyed, but the end they were waiting for never arrived.

In many ways our culture is experiencing a general loss of hope similar to the Jews of Jesus’ time. Not only on the part of the younger generations, but across the board. There are a large number of Christians who wait for the end times when Jesus will return and whisk them away to heaven. There are those who see the destruction of the World Trade Center as the proof that Jesus is going to return any day now [see example].

Whatever your interpretation of 9/11 might be, most of us are still reeling from the cataclysmic nature of that event, but let me ask you: did it really change anything? I think we all expected 9/11 to shake things up more than it did. Thats not to say that it was a good thing, far from it, but in some way it disappointed us and our sense of expectation.

After all, everyone born after WWII has lived in fear of a singular event: nuclear war. My mom tells me what it was like in the 50s expecting the “A-bomb” to drop at any moment. She describes air raid drills during school and doing the ‘duck and cover’ under her desk.

Like those who lived during Jesus’ time, we’ve all grown up living in anticipation of the end of the world.

Something changed in the 90s: the fear of nuclear war that characterized my mother’s generation is now mixed with a kind of fascination or even hopeful anticipation of the end.

This accounts for the phenomenal success not only of the Left Behind books (and now the Left Behind Games), but Gen-X writers like Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk, who depict the end of the world as the only thing powerful enough to interrupt the endless malaise of contemporary life or rescue them from the relentless cycle of work and consumption. Its like the Radiohead song the bends, “…waiting for something to happen and i wish it were the sixties i wish i could be happy i wish i wish i wish that something would happen..”

But as Baudrillard (my favorite postmodern thinker) says “in the New World Order there are no longer any revolutions…no longer any crises, but malfunctions, faults, breakdowns, aneurysmal ruptures”(Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 127). In our attempt to delay the onset of death, to stop growing old, to remove all the bad things which can happen, technology has deferred those events which give meaning to history; which give meaning to our lives. The costs is “a dissafection with life that is itself unbearable” (Baudrillard, 136). So that postmodern existence is infected with malaise and resentment: as expressed in Thom Yorke’s The Clock, ” Time is running out for us, but you just move the hands upon the clock..” The end that forever hangs over our heads, that which we both fear and long for, never actually arrives. Like the first line of the Bright Eyes song Road to Joy, ” The sun came up with no conclusions..”

Luke seems to suggest that in our longing for change we are too easily led astray. We end up inventing strategies which deprive of us of anything new breaking into our reality. If instead of plotting terrorist acts or looking for an escape, we just stand still, we actually create the space for new meaning to enter our lives. Does this mean the end of the world? It will probably feel that way - but which is worse: a continuation of the same without the possibility of anything new on the horizon, or allowing some degree of uncertainty. Living in a heightened state of fear and anticipation, waiting for the end to arrive any time, deprives us of the significant moments taking place in our lives every day. And honestly, speaking for myself, if Jesus does return someday, I think the only way I’ll even be open to that is if I can experience his presence in that day to day reality of my life.

Have you seen the late night TV ads,”Truth Restored” from the Church of Latter Day Saints, in which a young women asks, “I can be married forever?”  She’s totally wowed when she discovers that she will be with her husband in eternity. As comforting as this may be for some people, many of my gen-x friends don’t buy the whole resurrection thing. Not to mention that having been totally traumatized by the divorce of their parents, they feel ambiguous about commitment. Indeed, with the prevalence of second and third marriages many of us have such complicated family trees that the idea marriage is forever poses all sorts of problems: which family will I be with in heaven? My mom’s or my dad’s; my step-parent’s?

In fact, many of us are not interested in a continuation of the status quo in eternity: it sounds more like hell than heaven! I wonder how many people who have been married 50 plus years really want to be together forever? Certainly there are couples that have discovered the power of love and forgiveness to renew their relationship. The rest of us are thinking how unfair it is that we should have to make such a once and for all choice to begin with. As long as resurrection is treated this way, it doesn’t have much to offer.

In Luke 20:27-38 Jesus says there is no such thing as marriage in eternity: this was good news for some, especially since the status quo in his society was so abusive to women. He says this in response to a trick question. The Sadducees, who supposedly don’t believe in the resurrection want to know what man a women will be married to in the resurrection. Her husband has died and left her without children. According to the Levitical law she must marry her husband’s brother. When the brother dies, she then must marry the next brother and so on down the line, she ends up married and widowed seven times.

Why is it so important that this women should immediately remarry? Sexual desire provokes rivalries, which can tear human communities apart. Therefore, one of the primary foundations to any society is the structuring of sexual relationships. In many traditional societies a woman is passed directly from the father’s household to the husband’s ensuring that she’s always under the authority of one man. She is allowed no control over her own sexuality or desire. For instance, Deuteronomy 22:13-21 demands that any woman who has sexual relations outside of marriage be dragged from her father’s house and stoned by the men of the community! Such acts of punishment are carried out to this day under oppressive regimes in Iran and Afghanistan.

So when the Sadducees recite the transference of a women from one man to the next, they are completely blind to the insensitive treatment of women in their society. Not to mention that the idea a woman would continue to be constrained by such oppressive rules completely contradicts the resurrection as Jesus understands it.

Ironically, the emphasis today on marriage and family values has contributed to the loss of community. Isolated and without adequate social support, families are forced to rely on their own resources. The day to day stress on families has increased significantly as both parents are pressured to work more hours than their parents. Children hardly get to be children these days, passed as they are from one activity to the next, one parent to the next. The pressures and tensions are just too much for individual households to bear and literally pits family members against each other.

So beware of political candidates who claim to support family values, it actually demonstrates a lack of vision, an inability to imagine a better basis for our society.

Marriage cannot serve as the foundation of our society. Like Atlas trying to shoulder the weight of the world, marriage is crumbling under a burden it cannot possibly bear. Attempts to artificially reinforce it as the basis of society only make it a rigid and oppressive structure. And worse, insisting on this false foundation deprives us of the firmer ground we so desperately need.

Does this mean we shouldn’t get married? No, but marriage needs to be grounded in the larger context of a human community founded on compassion rather than oppression. If we remember to view marriage as a fragile relationship rather than an institution, we are much more likely to honor the humanity of the people involved. In this light the idea of resurrection becomes more attractive. For unlike the Sadducees whose understanding of social order originates as a response to death, Jesus’ response demonstrates a vision of life in which death plays no role, with the result that heaven starts to look more like heaven and less like hell.

Imagine being trapped in a world where everyone believes that sex is evil. How would this affect your body image, your understanding of nature and your relationships with others? Not to mention what would happen to those caught in the act.

Imagine someone coming along and saying sex is good, really good, a gift from god. If you could believe it, wouldn’t that change your entire understanding of yourself and your world?

Now imagine a world in which everyone believes that homosexuality is evil. If you were gay, how would that affect your self-image, your relationships? You may even be trapped in self-denial and self-loathing.

In Luke 6:20-31 Jesus proclaims that the poor are blessed. In a world where wealth was considered the reward for virtue and poverty was definitive proof that you were a loser, this is very counter-cultural. Not only does Jesus revolutionize people’s self-concept, he is clearly turning the tables. In fact for every blessing he announces a parallel woe: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. ²Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”

But this is precisely where Christians get into trouble. They tend to treat the Beatitudes as Jesus’ blueprint for the Christian society; a kind of “Jesus PC” - his version of political correctness. So that before you know it, the rich, or the conservatives and fundamentalists are being thrown in the stocks.

Jesus comes off as the ultimate PC sheriff, except for one point: he also says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” It is all too easy to hate the ones who oppress us and to scapegoat them when the tables are turned. Indeed in Jesus’ world, where poverty was used as a form of scapegoating, it was all too easy to demand an eye for an eye.

But what if Jesus is really saying, “Woe to anyone who constructs their definition of order by scapegoating those who are different. Woe to you if your wealth is founded on the exclusion of the poor, because he is going to turn that order upside down.Woe to anyone who derives comfort from the suffering of their enemies”? Likewise, we can say, “Woe to you if your definition of family is founded upon the exclusion of gays, lesbians and trans-gendered,” because Jesus subverts all order founded on any form of scapegoating.

Jesus understands that mutual care and respect for all members of society is the only lasting foundation. External structures no matter how rigid cannot replace the internal bonds of love and affection between family members or Christian community. There is no need to condemn anyone to the stocks. In fact the more rigidly you reinforce your definition of order the more likely you are to fail because more and more people are giving themselves permission to reject it.

Its hard for us to imagine what a radical message this was. It had the power to liberate people not just from the condemnation of society, it also allowed them to reject all those negative messages which poisoned their self image.

The real miracle happens when all those people who were once oppressed by rigid attitudes begin to treat each other with mutual respect and tolerance. Free not only from self-hatred, but also the need for revenge they become the foundation for a new human community.