Advent and Apocalypse
Derrick Weston
Day 1: Apocalypse Now
Back in my preaching days, I was always taken aback by the lectionary passages that came up for Advent. I wasn’t raised in a liturgical tradition, so following the lectionary was relatively new for me. I was surprised that as we moved into the season of preparing our hearts for the coming of Christ, the readings we were presented were largely of an apocalyptic nature. On the more hopeful side, you have Isaiah say things about swords being beaten into plowshares and God judging the people with justice. On the scary side, you have the Gospels filled with scenes of the sky turning black and people vanishing. Very Left Behind!
To understand why these passages are here this time of year, you have to understand the function that apocalyptic texts serve in the larger narrative of scripture.
When we think of the word “apocalypse” in the 21st century, we think of devastation, widespread death and disease, and war-torn landscapes. We’ve actually become pretty obsessed with the dystopian futures in our popular culture where law and order has ceased to exist (or lives in the hands of an elite few) and everyone must fend for themselves. From The Matrix to Mad Max: Fury Road to The Hunger Games to The Walking Dead, we have been obsessed with what happens when the world falls apart.
The apocalyptic texts we use in Advent from Isaiah and the other prophets were written with the people of Israel either in exile or immediately after. The Gospel texts were written to an early church being scattered and persecuted under the thumb of the Roman Empire. For those groups, the idea of the world as they knew it falling apart wasn’t such a terrible prospect. In fact, they were looking to God to turn the world upside down. Those texts that we consider catastrophic were hope-filled for those tired of being trampled by the world—that’s why they appear during the “hope” week of Advent. That God would enter the world and change the order of things would be best the possible news one could hear.
Reading Scripture often requires us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Those shoes usually belong to someone being victimized by the rulers of the day. That those people would long for an end to a world that oppresses them should not surprise us, but what do those thoughts have to do with us today?
Derrick Weston