Redemption draws near

Christian Century, Nov 12, 1997 by James F. Kay

IS THERE ANYTHING promising on the horizon? Or will this world just keep grinding every eternal hope into powder and ashes?

It's not nature's resistance to human hope that's so unsettling, but nature's massive indifference. A volcano rumbles and an island nation disappears. The earth quakes and Assisi's monuments lie in min. El Nino awakens and Southeast Asia smarts with smoke; Mexico buries its dead. Nature proves perennially indifferent to our measured plans and treasured times.

Perhaps this is why Luke sees in the cataclysms of nature a more foreboding picture of the future shall our American eagle and bull market will allow. For Luke, the erratic heavens are signs that human affairs are off course; chaos, not cosmos, governs, in an inversion of Plato's Republic. War, insurrection, famine, plagues, betrayal and barbarism vengefully visit even Jerusalem and the people of God.

What's gotten into Luke anyway? Why do we have to hear Jesus telling us about a betraying community, a disintegrating social order and a cosmos collapsing into chaos? Although we Christians may have pensioned off apocalyptic rhetoric, social scientists, AIDs researchers and a swarm of journalists and commentators are employing it. They warn us that as the collapse of the earth's ecosystems accelerates, our overstressed social structures will begin to pop like rivets on the doomed Titanic. Consider the disintegration of nation-states, the irreparable degradation of the environment and the reversion to tribal savagery. We are sinking into an abyss.

In fact, there are many places where biblically shaped imagination can already discern the end of our world: precious rain forests, the size of entire countries, gone forever in a few days; 50,000 bodies, many headless and limbless, float into Lake Victoria as Christians kill Christians in Rwanda; suburban kids in Reeboks and t-shirts methodically heat a teenager to death on the steps of St. Cecilia's Church in Abingdon, Pennsylvania (dead at 16 on the steps of the church where he had been an altar boy).

You see why we can't just skip over Luke 21. The text is a reminder that our world, even "Christian" world with 20 centuries behind it, is far from redeemed.

But is this the message of Advent? That it's had out there? That's part of the message. But not the whole story. Luke 21 also shows Jesus teaching in the temple during his last clays on earth, boldly saying, "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Drawing near? Redemption? Luke's Gospel doesn't use such "preacher talk" very often. True, the priest Zechariah prophesies a redeemed people. And the prophet Anna, as she sees Simeon blessing the Holy Family, begins "to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem."

But neither Zechariah nor Anna will see Jerusalem's redemption. The birth of Jesus does not bring redemption to Jerusalem; the teaching of Jesus does not bring redemption to Israel; even the death of Jesus on the cross does not bring redemption to the world. "Salvation" strides through the pages of Luke, but not "redemption." As two friends confess on a Sunday after Passover, "But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." Redemption does not happen in Luke. It waits. It waits for the advent of the Son of Man.

Jerusalem and Israel await their redemption. The world awaits its freedom from hunger, from war, from violence and from persecution. And we all await our redemption from what Luke calls the "fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world."

The message of Advent is not that everything is falling to pieces. We probably don't need Luke to tell us that. And certainly the message is not that God is in heaven and all is therefore well with the world. No. The message of Advent is that when heaven itself is spinning into oblivion, when every fixed star on the moral compass is wavering, when all hell is breaking loose on earth, "your redemption is drawing near."

How can this be? It can be because God is faithful to this promise of Jesus Christ. If the future were not the promise of Jesus Christ but the predictable outcome of present trends, despair would overwhelm us. No trend points to the permanence of what we call heaven and earth. If trends predict anything, it is that death and dissolution bring an end to every human heart and hope.

But the message of Advent is that we can never take our own projections more seriously than God's promises. When we least expect it and when there is no evidence for it, God's power comes into this godless world in ways the world itself could never predict or foresee. Just ask Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, or Simeon and Anna. Ask Emperor Tiberius, Governor Pilate and King Herod, for they too await a promise enduring than their reigns.

We cannot deny that nations remain in agony. We cannot deny that ecological collapse appears imminent. We cannot deny that we are choking on our fears. But we also cannot deny that God is faithful to Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ has a future and that our redemption is entwined with his. Advent bids us to stand erect, confident and hopeful. Whatever beclouds our unsettled future, our redemption is drawing near, and our faith will lead us to see the promised face of Jesus Christ.