Is. 64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7
1 Cor.1:1-9 Mark 13:24-37
Lectionary Link
To be human is to be a futurist. We live toward the future. We live toward the events which will be after now.
How we regard the future is highly conditioned by how we understand our current conditions and how we have integrated our past experiences. We project what the future might be in not-yet scenarios. We extrapolate from the past and present what a future might look like.
Our futurisms take many forms which are consistent with the discursive varieties in our lives. Scientific futurism is different from aesthetic and artistic futurism which share more discursive habits with religious futurism.
In science the concerns is not really about ethics or spirituality or entertainment; in science the rule of statistical approximation prevails. From observing and charting the behavior of "things," laws of consistency are derived and the guiding assumption is that the conditions will be so similar in the future that accuracy of prediction is guaranteed. We should all be thankful for this kind of reliable futurism since it provides us with the most practical method of planning in our lives.
But there is also a futurism which inspires differently than science. Not all human events are as reliable and predictable as the rising of the sun or the boiling of water; the events of how human beings treat each other manifest a wide range of fickleness. We can treat each other with kindness or love or we can be extremely cruel on the personal level or on the level of social units of family, tribes, and nations.
Much of the biblical literature was generated in times of distress for biblical writers and their communities. The leaders of these distressed people could not rely upon a predication of a better tomorrow because no relief from oppression seemed imminent.
They had to live on the fumes of hope, the kind of hope which could inspire a program of visualization in words of what love and justice could mean for them. These prophets of the visualization of hope used utopian language, magic realism, super-heroes, and what we call the apocalyptic genre.
Jesus arrived within a community of people whose identity was significantly formed by the apocalyptic mode of thinking. Why? Jesus and his friends knew that life could be significantly better than what they experienced. Their literature revealed to them about a time during the reign of King David, when they had much better conditions, and they longed for future conditions to be like or better than they were during the reign of King David. There were other writings besides the Hebrew Scriptures which expounded this apocalyptic futurism for an oppressed and suffering people.
If the future were to be better for the oppress people of the community of Jesus, there needed to be super heroes who were greater than the Caesars and the military surrogates of the Caesar. The earthly power of the Caesars seemed to be so formidable that interventions of super non-earthly powers were needed to put things right, or more selfishly, to deliver the oppressed people. The names of the super heroes in the time of Jesus were Messiah and the Son of Man. These super God blessed heroes were visions of how thing could be put right.
The writer of Mark's Gospel understood that Jesus identified with this figure referred to as the Son of Man. This super hero was a visualization of a God appointed and God powered person to establish judgment and justice for the oppressed people of the world.
Our nay saying sides could say, "it didn't happen, it hasn't happened, and it probably won't happen in such a way." The skeptics might say that such people are to be pitied for believing such stuff, especially if they are taking it literally.
But as one who argues for the functional purpose of every discursive practice, I would say that such discourse is not meant to be taken literally, but literarily. It is a discourse of visualization of the end of pain and distress even as a pain counselor at a cancer clinic might devise visualizations techniques for people of different ages to deal with the pain and reality of their terminal disease. The discourse is true to human hope even while the images do not comport to the empirical verification standards of science.
While we moderns might feel superior to these poor purveyors of the apocalyptic, we should confront ourselves with the reality that we in our situation are far more futuristic and apocalyptic than the biblical writers ever were. Super heroes of Marvel Comics dominate our lives, science fiction, and action adventure in the cinema draw big audiences. The "art" of the future in its many genres are part of our lives. We regard it to be artistic entertainment, even while as skeptics we don't allow the biblical apocalyptic to be a part of the analgesic and entertaining aspect of their lives in their experience of oppression. Many people wrongly think that "entertainment and the aesethetic" were not valid modes of being for biblical peoples. Shame on us for allowing ourselves such pervasive genres of futurism, while denying it to biblical people because of the biblical literalists who misappropriate the functional purpose of the apocalyptic genre of futurism.
The Gospel for us during Advent is to let hope visualize a better world, with better realized justice, and with persons of surpassing virtue to call us to our future surpassing selves.
Let us appreciate the genres of futurism which are in the Bible, in the Gospel, in the words of Jesus, and in that appreciation let us be honest about the genres of futurism which work in our lives to give us hope that love and justice have actual futures. Amen.
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