Is. 2:1-5 Psalms 122
Rom. 13:8-14 Matt. 24:37-44
Rom. 13:8-14 Matt. 24:37-44
Language is co-extensive in accompanying our lives, even when we don't think or know it is. Language is always the prior assumption for knowing or having consciousness of anything in particular.
Language and what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and language about the might have beens and the future possibilities and probabilities seem to be separate and different from the experience of life itself, but the use of language is always a version, an interpretation of human experience. We in our cultural upbringing and training take on the stories which have precoded our experience and how to interpret what we experience.
A great text like the Bible is compendium of words about human experience; as such it provides exemplars of language which accompanies and defines significant human experience. Since the Bible includes a significant number of human experiences, we cannot say that it is always one to one specifically applicable to each and every person now in their lives. Every word has the potential to be an insightful exemplar for our lives but all of the biblical words cannot be applicable in a one to one correspondence with the particular current experience of any given biblical reader.
However, when the Bible is the text book designated "Word of God," for various communities, some can regard Word of God to be an omni-competent, omnipresent, conversational oracle to be sought to give advice which can specifically intervene in a objective way with our lives, rather than be a source for devotional comfort which in fortuitous ways one can find insights for ones life because thing written many years ago can elicit a sense of common experiences which bespeak to what empathy among people means in significant ways.
The biblical writers provided significant wishful thinking for people in distress. And distressed people need survival discourse, the discourse of encouragement, something like the tender whispers a mother might give to a suffering child, "There there, everything is going to be alright."
The Bible provides a mothering nurturing literature, which is the equivalent of a Mother saying to a crying infant, "there, there, everything is going to be alright." And mom might even sing a lullaby with visions of comfort. The discourse of mother is emotionally meaningfully true, even though it may not be empirically true.
Imagine a prophet saying to people devastated by war, "take comfort, a word from the Lord will come forth from our devastated capital city and war will end and there will be a transformation of all the instruments of war into useful agricultural tools." There is hope and wishful thinking in all people who know the devastations of war. War and fighting is such an absolute waste; what if the resources of life could only be used for healthful activity for human welfare? Dreams for utopia, whether they ever come to empirical reality or not, still co-exist with our warring world to comfort us but also confront us about the wrong use of human power.
The utopian dream worlds of Isaiah were superseded with more adult words of visualization of significant intervention by the divine in human situations to deliver oppressed from their dire conditions. The adult words that came to be promulgated in the centuries before Jesus are known by scholars as apocalyptic literature, after the name of the last book of the Bible, The Apocalypse, or the Revelations, the unveiling of secret and mysterious things about the end.
With ordinary statistical knowledge we can know that endings of all kinds are always, already possible and probable, both personally and socially. Utopian and apocalyptic literature are a functional analgesic literature for distress people. The utopian words and apocalyptic words allow a people to continue to affirm their highest values even when the actual circumstances do not seem to support such affirmations.
Can people continue in the belief that God is good, and made this world and human beings good and when they are not, can people still believe that law and order can train us to be lawful and orderly with each other for the common good in the experience of what we call love and justice?
For modern skeptics about the value of biblical writings, especially the utopian and apocalyptic writings which have no empirical likelihood, one should remind skeptics that the omni-genre writings of the Bible served broader purpose in the lives of people without the degree of widespread literacy in our post-modern world of such expansive textuality. The genre of the apocalyptic and utopian has now moved into the realm of art and is known in both writing, cinema, and the many forms of computer generated imagery that pervades our media today. People who criticize the utopian and apocalyptic writings of the Bible, mainly are criticizing the people who appropriate these writings as somehow being precisely predictive of when, when, and how the specific events of the end are going to occur.
How can we as followers of Christ and readers of the Bible appropriate the apocalyptic and the utopian writings of the Bible?
We can be those who affirm the visualization function of language for comforting people in distress and keeping them hopeful about the values of love and justice. We can admit that Jesus and his followers, and many people of his time found comfort in words of visualization which gave them hope to continue to live in the belief of the superlative values of love and justice, and the possibility of repentance or transformation as being always available to humanity.
We can also remind the people of our world about how utopian and apocalyptic our popular culture is. It is much more apocalyptic and utopian than the biblical writings because there is a proliferation of artistic presentations of what the future, the end, and the imminent intervention of "superheroes" might be. There seems to be great social catharsis to watch a movie where the hero can intervene and interdict all the bad guys, and resolving the oppressive issue raised in the scenario. Because the apocalyptic and utopian is seen in different ways in popular culture, we should not regard ourselves as temporally superior because the biblical writings had utopian and apocalyptic writings too, and in fact, served as models for our own modern versions.
Let us acknowledge that just as visualization is valid for pain management for terminally patients, so too the biblical utopian and apocalyptic words are visualization for pain management in suffering people.
The season of Advent which begins today, refers to the future coming of the Just One to establish justice on earth. There is no need for us to be embarrassed about the function of visualization for our current lives, but our visualization does require a choice of visions. Some would like to assert the visions of the dystopic where chaos prevails and where injustice and the powerful evil oppressing ones win.
Following Jesus, we choose the visualization of justice and love winning because they have a telling goodness which bespeaks the goodness that we choose to valorize as definitive of our superlative values.
Let us not be ashamed of our apocalyptic and utopian discourse, because they stand before us as the direction that we want to aim for in our lives. Amen.
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