JUNE 21 2015
LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Every night, before I go to bed, I make sure our outside door is locked, even though it has a lock that will only keep an honest person out. Not that there is a lot to steal in our place: most of the stuff we have is of sentimental value. Nevertheless I make sure that access to our dwelling is somewhat more difficult during our sleeping hours. I once locked myself out and had no trouble finding a way in via a window.
If you are at all familiar with the Bible, you might recognize my title: it is used seven times there, all in the New Testament. My Dutch brother alerted me to this. It always refers to the return of Christ. Jesus himself mentions it twice in the Gospels (See Matthew 24 and Luke 12) and also twice in Revelation, all in the context of his second coming. The apostle Paul refers to it in 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 2 and in verse 4 emphasizes again that the Lord’s coming should not be a surprise. Peter, when speaking about the last days writes: (2 Peter 3: 10) “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by a fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” Perhaps he foresaw the nuclear bomb threat, the MAD thing, the Mutually Assured Destruction. The image of ‘thief in the night’ is also used in the Bible’s last book, Revelation. There, in Revelation 3: 3, Jesus warns that “If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief.” The same sort of language is used a few chapters later, Revelation 16: 15: “Behold, I come like a thief. Blessed are they who stay awake.”
We are totally unprepared for the return of Christ
It seems to me that one thing is clear: the world at large – and I dare say including the church – is totally unprepared for this event. There is a curious prophetic example in Revelation 18, where, in verse 11, it says: “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more…… “. In other words the return of the Lord comes at a time of economic depression. Could the Greek default be a factor there? Also today lots of retail outlets are shutting down: there’s too little buying going on!
Jesus often points to ‘nature’ when describing scenes. In Matthew 24 Jesus tells us what to expect during the final days that precede his Second Coming. In verse 32 of that ominous chapter he says: “Now learn the lesson of the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near,” suggesting that we can more or less predict his coming, because there will be definite indications preparing us for this cataclysmic event. But for most it will come as a total surprise: “like a thief in the night”.
For those who are caught unawares – and here I become really unpopular – there is judgement. Actually the Parable of the 5 wise and 5 foolish bridesmaids – the chapter in Matthew following Jesus’ warning about the Last Days – illustrates this quite strikingly. Those bridesmaids who were ready for a delayed arrival of the groom – something like today – had extra oil. Those who had not prepared were shut out of the kingdom. Some call that cruel. God is love but also just. He’s not a patsy.
That Christ returns ‘like a thief in the night’, does not mean that he is a thief. This shows good biblical humour, because exactly the opposite is true: he comes to chase out the thieves and to put the rightful owners in, which will be a painful process: it involves the ultimate war between the forces of darkness and the angels of light. Malachi, in the last Old Testament book, says: “Who can endure the Day of his coming? For Jesus’ coming will be like a refiner’s fire and purify the earth”. This cleaning process is utterly necessary because the present day humanity has left such a cotton-picking mess that only an all-consuming fire can force the filth out.
The last Bible book, Revelation, is full of that judgement stuff. Jesus himself said that he would intervene to cut short the suffering for the sake of his followers. For a discerning eye all these final elements are already in place, but somehow we ignore all these signs. WHY?
Somehow this collapse and ultimate judgement business goes against the human grain. You see we humans were created for eternity, to live forever. For the first human pair there was no threat, either immediate or long term. Even the Lord himself told us not to worry what to eat or drink because the Father will look after us. Well, he did not take in consideration the multinational agricultural business that has locked us up into an economic system that totally depends on money, has forced us off the land and into urban ghettos where self-sufficiency has simply become impossible.
Basically our worry is not for tomorrow but for today.
Our brains are powerful organs that allow us to walk, to think, to smell, to see, to reason, to become Olympic champions, to do whatever. Humans by nature see
everything from a human perspective, and reason that the future will be an extension of the past. We simply cannot process such concepts as long-term, civilization-threatening phenomena. We are proven miracle workers for our short-term survival of individuals, but our human brain sort of malfunctions when it comes to navigating wide-lens, slowly-unfurling crises like climate change. Also somehow brains have not given us the ability to have faith. That is a God-given factor that has nothing to do with intellect or any brain-induced act.
And that brings me to the Pope.
So the Pope spoke of these matters this past week. He speaks from a biblical perspective. His basis is that “we must love our neighbours as ourselves.” The welfare of creation is basic to all human beings, from Bill Gates to the destitute African people who risk life and limb to come to Europe. The Pope is powerful, but he cannot give us faith. Nobody can, and only faith can give us the right perspective of the future. Without faith in the glorious ‘Hereafter’ we are incapable of grasping the large, looming, yes apocalyptic threats facing our societies.
“Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, “That’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds.” That is, our brain seems to be programmed to react best to hard, certain information, but threats that unfold over generations fail to trigger our reactionary instincts. “Many environmentalists say climate change is happening too fast,” Gilbert says. “No, it’s happening too slowly. It’s not happening nearly quickly enough to get our attention.” If Climate Change was visibly happening we would take notice. Just imagine: politicians last week decided to eliminate fossil fuel by the year 2100, 85 years from now!!
Still, I think we will from now on see an immense acceleration in natural, climate change, disasters, all related to mass extinction, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification, which already now are becoming full-blown, civilization-threatening calamities.
So far we have been behaving like children, when it comes to these planetary threats. We have opted for instant gratification—guzzling oil, burning coal, razing forests, manufacturing plastic, all as if there is no tomorrow. Fundamentally we are fossil fuel fanatics fiercely fouling our future.
Even though NINETY SEVEN PERCENT (97%) of scientists agree that Climate Change is caused by us, about half the North American population is in denial. Even if you live on the vanishing shores of Bangladesh, in the tinder brush woods of the Australian outback, or the parched dustbin of the American Southwest, your brain is not making the case that climate change is going to kill you. Storms might kill, wildfires might burn us, drought might make us go hungry, the symptoms of a warming globe might do us in, but climate change itself remains impersonal, an abstraction, and registers little need for urgent action.
As I said, it is a lack of faith. Let me correct that. It is the wrong kind of faith. Hal Lindsey in his The Late Great Planet Earth laid it all out. Millions endorsed him by buying his book which was on the best-sellers list for decades. Lindsey taught the mostly Southern Baptist and Pentecostal people that our future does not lie in a New Earth, but in Heaven. There’s where the crux of the matter lies. And the Pope in his so important encyclical basically says the same.
Almost all church-going people see the earth as evil, and exploiting it as a God-given duty. Harold Bloom in his The American Religion has exposed this fallacy without offering an alternative. He calls the American society ‘doom-eager’. In his book he argues that the American Religion – of which the Tea Party is an outcome, I might add – masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian. The interesting part is that confirmed Roman Catholics, such as Rick Santorum, a Republican aspiring to become the next president, and John Boehner, the speaker of the House, are now also among the adherents of The American Religion, which, indeed, has ceased to be Christian.
Of course that begs the question: “What does it mean to be a Christian?”
So this week the POPE came out swinging. I greatly admire the present Pope, because he is upsetting a lot of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, both clergy and lay-people, especially politicians, who say that he should stick to Religion and not meddle in matters of Economics and Climate Change, because, so say these politicians, these matters have nothing to do with religion. Pope Francis’ basic idea is that in order to love God, you have to love your fellow human beings, and you have to love and care for the rest of creation.
Of course. In my opinion John 3: 16 is the most important text in the Bible. God so loved the world. Finally the church connects the earth to God, finds back The Gospel of the Earth. We cannot love God if we don’t love the earth. A sin against the planet is a sin against God. That’s why my motto is “all of life is religion”.
I skimmed the entire 186 pages of the Pope’s sermon, paying special attention to the biblical references, of which there are many. I speed-read it because all this stuff was old-hat to me, even his apocalyptic tone so familiar to my readers. I agree with almost the entire document, except in the end where he, not surprisingly, falls into the ’heaven heresy’ portraying the old gnostic basis, the American Religion so well exposed by Harold Bloom.
Christ’s directive to us to “Seek first the Kingdom” had no place in the encyclical, even though it is the main theme of Jesus’ teaching. This illustrates the cardinal error of the Roman Catholic Church as it equates the Kingdom with the Roman Church. Although he calls the earth holy, and cites several bible passages to back that up, even mentions that God gave the earth to the human race, calls us one with the soil of the earth, there’s no New Earth theology. With heaven as our ultimate goal, mentioned on the very last page, the Pope’s entire argument is weakened because there is no mention of our ultimate glorious future: a renewed earth under a renewed heaven. Now with the earth beyond repair, and the heavens contaminated with satellites and other space junk, not to mention the C02 and CH4, methane, the most lethal of Green House gases, both need renewing which only Christ can do.
Still, of course, I am delighted with the outspoken analysis of the Bishop of Rome, also known as the Holy Father.
I wonder how the Politicians will see this encyclical. Here in Canada, Prime Minister Harper is an evangelical Christian but also the country’s greatest environmental polluter. In the States where Religion always is part of the political scene, the document may prove to be a turning point in politics.
Suffice it to say that we live in interesting times where the time is ripe for Jesus to return “Like a thief in the night.” Perhaps the Pope’s sermon was the last universal appeal the world will hear until reality catches up with the rhetoric.