Acting on Predictions

One of the comic strips in this morning's paper featured a scraggly character holding a sign that said, "Repent! The world ends tomorrow."  The fellow is a stock character we've all seen many times, the crazy who has figured out the end is coming and wants everyone to be ready.

But if this is a fringe, stock figure, tamer versions of him are quite popular. On the one hand are those who presume they can do reasonably accurate predicting by deciphering a code for the book of Revelation.  And on the other hand are the larger number of folks who laugh at such attempts but do a different sort of predicting themselves, insisting that nothing will happen in any foreseeable future.  Things will go on pretty much as they are well beyond all of our lifetimes.  And both sorts of predicting are used to support behaviors, or the lack of them.

"Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour," says Jesus in today's parable.  Jesus says this sort of thing a number of times, but his followers seem not to have heard him. Some insist they will not be surprised by the kingdom's arrival because they will have seen it coming, but others insist they will not be surprised because it won't come.

 I have really been intrigued in recent years by the Emergent Church movement and its attempt to reclaim an emphasis on the Kingdom, on the promise of God's coming rule. This is certainly central to what Jesus teaches. He calls people to reorient their lives in preparation for a very different world whose arrival will take us by surprise. But somehow Christianity's focus shifted over the centuries to an off-world heaven rather than the transformed world Jesus proclaimed.

My own faith is probably more about personal solace, about hope and guidance for the day than it is about being transformed so that I conform to an as-yet-unseen, new world.  "It's gonna happen.  It's gonna happen," says Jesus.  Sure it is, but right now I need a nap.

Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.