Examining a pair of scary and misunderstood readings

Tom Acemoglu, Pastoral Associate for Evangelization and Catechesis at St. Ambrose Church in Latham, writes that "much of the witness of our tradition is the cry of the oppressed both to God and to their neighbors who ignore their plight, unaffected." (Unsplash photo)

Next Sunday is the last day of the liturgical year (Advent kicks off a new year). For the last few years, I’ve tried to shine a spotlight on the kind of readings we get as the liturgical year winds down. They comprise some of the scariest and most misunderstood readings you’ll find in the entire Bible. I suspect that if you’re particularly attuned to their being read out loud, you might not know what to make of them:

“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch, says the LORD of hosts. But for you who fear my name, there will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays.”  (Mal 3:19-20a)

“Nations will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues from place to place; and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky.” (Luke 21:10-11)

The genre of our First Reading and our Gospel reading this Sunday is “apocalyptic.” Undoubtedly, the word “apocalypse” conjures up images of the end of the world and in that you wouldn’t be wrong. I’d like to parse this out a bit because imbued within our language as Catholics is language like this: “He will come again to judge the living and the dead,” “World without end,” “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead,” and the like. We probably don’t think much of it when we say or hear words like this but they’re a very important part of our worldview and we should spend some time understanding what these words mean and, maybe more importantly, what moved people to express themselves in this way.

In early Jewish and Christian writings, apocalypses emerge in the midst of great calamity, conflict, suffering and feelings of profound helplessness. When the people couldn’t make sense of God’s goodness amidst the catastrophic unfairness they were experiencing, they expressed their day-to-day struggles in bigger and bigger ways. For example, in the second century BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV imposed a severe and violent repression of Jewish practice. The Sabbath observance was outlawed. Torah scrolls were burned. Circumcision was outlawed and, if any mother had a child circumcised, their children were cruelly murdered. The temple worship was abolished, replacing it with worship to Zeus Olympios, where pigs were sacrificed … a supreme desecration to both Yahweh worship and observing the kosher laws.

For the Jews, this felt like the end of their world and in the literature of the time, they expressed their angst as the end of THE world, where the grave injustices they were experiencing would be settled ultimately by God. The battle wasn’t just local anymore but cosmic. The players weren’t just people but fantastic beasts filled with symbolism. The Old Testament book of Daniel expresses the angst of this time. Scripture also conceived of an impending Day of the Lord, where God would visit the persistently unrepentant and make all things right.

A century after Antiochus, General Pompey took Jerusalem from Rome, which sparked other writers to express their despair similarly. A little less than a century after that, the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple for a final time. It was never rebuilt and the shockwaves it created are still felt today. It is this catastrophe that is remembered in our Gospel reading. Drawing from Mark’s version of the story, the apocalyptic imagery expresses the trauma of a people that had lost everything and felt God’s wrath so severely.

For us Christians, remembering all of this historical trauma should have at least two effects. The first is to recognize that suffering is part of the life of faith and that we struggle to reconcile God’s goodness when so much is wrong. Trauma and grief can really feel like the entire universe is collapsing on you.

But the other is that our tradition is not content with merely expressing our sorrow. We really do have a hope that God will have the final say in the midst of whatever suffering or injustice we experience. It is the glorious resurrection after the dreadful crucifixion. Remember, the end of one liturgical year is immediately followed by a period of penance and hope in the season of Advent as we eagerly await a Savior. That’s a big deal! Likewise, in whatever earth-shattering thing that might be upsetting our lives right now, there is a light at the end. This is really what we believe.

So how should we conduct ourselves in the meantime? I would say you should beware of two extremes. The first is to obsess over apocalyptic doom and gloom as though we “grieve as those who have no hope”  (1 Thes 4:13). But the other extreme would be to pretend that hardship does not exist in a sort of forced optimism. After all, much of the witness of our tradition is the cry of the oppressed both to God and to their neighbors who ignore their plight, unaffected.

In his letter to the Ephesians (11:1-2), St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110 CE) put it this way: “Let us either fear the wrath to come or love the grace which is present, one of the two; either way, let us be found in Christ Jesus, which leads to true life. Let nothing appeal to you apart from Him.”

Tom Acemoglu is the Pastoral Associate for Evangelization and Catechesis at St. Ambrose Church in Latham.