The Jehovah's Witnesses have changed their minds. After warning for decades that the world would end within this present generation, the leaders of the sect announced in December 1995 that they have softened their position. As a spokesman explained, "Jesus said that 'this generation will not pass away' until a number of signs have taken place (Mark 13:30). When we reflected on the scriptures, we decided that he was talking about his generation rather than ours." Ex-Witness James Fenton, professor emeritus at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, is pleased by the change in doctrine. The Witnesses probably won't be knocking on our doors, he notes. The reason for their urgency no longer exists. Since the Jehovah's Witnesses have officially declared that the world probably will not end tomorrow, they will have a harder time motivating their members to ring more doorbells and gather more followers.1
What that means, of course, is that the Jehovah's Witnesses are now like many of the rest of us. We have grown relaxed in our anticipation for the end of the world. Much of the New Testament was written by a church that lived on tiptoe, always watching for the imminent return of Jesus Christ. As time passed, the urgency cooled. As one generation after another passed away, the church found it difficult to maintain much enthusiasm for the end of the world.
This lack of fervor is not supported by a silence within the Bible. The Jewish and Christian scriptures frequently speak of a final consummation of human history. Life had a beginning. Life will have an end. The prophets spoke of the "day of the Lord," a final day when God will come in judgment and justice. The early church identified the end with the second coming of the risen Jesus, who will return to vindicate and complete what he started. Speaking of that day, Jesus said, "They will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory" (Mark 13:26). Yet we wait for this to happen. As we wait, we grow tired. As we grow tired, we let our culture tell its own story about the way the world will end.
As a grade school student in the '60s, I was well trained in duck and cover drills. Once a month an alarm would sound. Our teachers paraded us into the hallway. Then they told us to sit on the tile floor and cover our heads with our arms. Duck and cover drills seemed especially urgent in our school. The playground at Washington Gladden Elementary overlooked the IBM plant where most of our fathers worked. In the '60s, while other divisions of IBM were busy developing mainframe computers, the plant in my home town worked on undisclosed projects for the government. Years later, when the Cold War thawed, my father filled in a few gaps. It seems that during the '60s, while my friends and I were playing on swing sets and jungle gyms, people at IBM were developing computer guidance systems for bombers, tactical warning systems, and top secret surveillance equipment.
One day in third grade the alarm sounded. We moved to the hall and assumed the position. I sat at the feet of two teachers who had a conversation that scared me deeply. "I don't know why we do this," the first teacher said. The second said, "The kids need to be prepared in case the Russians drop the bomb." "Listen," said the first. "Rumor has it that we are half a mile from ground zero. The IBM plant down the hill is on the top ten list for Russia's targets. If they ever drop the bomb, none of us will ever get the chance to duck and cover."
By the time most children get to third grade, they have heard the story of Chicken Little. The fearful little bird gets bonked on the head and cries, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" When the truth is told, kids laugh at the story. Most third graders have also seen a cartoon of a sandwich board prophet who announces, "The end is near!" They have learned from adults that such people are probably crackpots and cranks, and not to be taken seriously. But sitting in a grade school hallway, it occurred to me for the first time that the world as I knew it might actually come to an end.
In today's text, Jesus affirms that this world will come to an end. That's a truth that I learned in third grade, not in church. If anything, church was a place where it seemed like the world was going to go on forever. Yet I will never forget that moment, not in church but in school, when it became clear that we lived under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Who knows if the teacher was feeling cynical about the safety drill or hopeless about our common future? Either way, he knew there was a chance this world might be blown to atomic smithereens. For the first time, I knew it, too.
We don't have a lot of American elementary schools that still do duck and cover drills. It is probably a different story in places like Bosnia, Belfast, or the Sudan, where lives are on the line and few children would laugh at the story of Chicken Little. In most of the world's trouble spots, no one doubts that one bomb or one stray bullet could blow apart somebody's world in a matter of seconds. Many people live with potential destruction every day of their lives.
Yet when all is said and done, the church believes that this is not how the world is going to end. One day Jesus and his disciples came out of the Temple in Jerusalem. One of the twelve turned around, looked up at the high towers and the massive blocks of stone, and, with the tone of a small town hick on his first trip to Manhattan, said, "Golly, Jesus! That's an amazing building." Jesus replied, "Do you see these great buildings? One day, they're going to be torn down and scattered like children's blocks." They looked at Jesus in terrified astonishment. The Temple was the central house of worship for an entire nation, the spiritual home for all scattered Jews. It symbolized the meeting place where God came to dwell with his people. How could Jesus talk about its demolition?
A little while later, four of them pulled him aside and said, "Jesus, what exactly are you talking about?" That began a grim recital of events in the thirteenth chapter of Mark, from which we heard a piece today. Looking ahead, Jesus spoke of earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, famines, persecution, betrayal, and suffering. "That's how it's going to be," said Jesus, because in some sense, that's the way it is. If we doubt it, we can pick up a newspaper and read it for ourselves.
The key to this passage, however, is that Jesus does not speak about the end of the world, as much as he speaks of a world that is coming to an end. One hopes we can hear the difference. For, in a world like this, human institutions like the Temple crumble apart stone by stone. It seems an inevitable part of this age. But Jesus claims this worn-out world is passing away. In a world like this, there are people who stand up to tell the truth, who speak good news, and who point to what God is doing. As a result, they are abused, beaten down, and betrayed by those close at hand. That's how it is in this age; but this old world is passing away.
In a world like this, there are drive-by shootings, acts of verbal abuse, and children who have nightmares about atomic clouds. But the good news is that this weary, old world is passing away. "Don't be alarmed," Jesus says, "for in a world like this, you can always expect nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom. The good news is that the end of all this fighting is in sight."
The evidence is found in his own words, as Jesus speaks of signs that we have already seen fulfilled. Even as we wait for the end of the world, Christians are those people who have, in a sense, already seen the end of the world. We have seen it in the cross. Jesus promised, "The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven." A short time after he said it, darkness came over the whole land on a Friday afternoon from noon until three (Mark 15:33), and the lights of the heavens were extinguished, exactly as he said. Then Jesus said, "The powers in the heavens will be shaken." Shortly thereafter, Jesus breathed his last on the cross, and "the curtain of the temple was ripped in two, from top to bottom" (Mark 15:38). According to Mark, it happened with the same force as the day of his baptism, when God ripped apart the sky (Mark 1:10). The powers were shaken, just as he promised.
The clearest sign, according to Jesus, was that people would "see the Son of Man." All who looked upon the cross saw him plain as day, in power and glory. As scholar Ched Myers points out, "In Mark's story the cross is neither a heroic nor a tragic moment. It is an apocalyptic one, the epiphany of a new power that 'shakes the Powers in the heavens.' "2 The death of Jesus killed off the world as we've known it. In the suffering of Jesus, the old world of brutality passed away. A whole new creation was born.
The challenge for us in these difficult times is to live toward that new world as if it's already here. Christians are people who live as if the times have changed. We wait for the Son of Man to come again because we have seen the Son of Man in the power of the cross. We watch for his future kingdom because, in the death of Jesus, God's kingdom is already here. We continue to wait, because the kingdom is not yet here. Not completely. We live in the tension between "already" and "not yet."
It isn't easy standing on one foot and then another. We trust God's will ultimately, yet we cope with unfinished suffering. The stakes are high and it's easy to give in. Neill Hamilton, who taught at Drew University for many years, once observed how people in our time lose hope for the future. It happens whenever we let our culture call the shots on how the world is going to end. At this stage of technological advancement, the only way the culture can make sense of the future is through the picture of everything blowing up in a nuclear holocaust. The world cannot know what we know, that everything has changed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that the same Christ is coming to judge the world and give birth to a new creation. And so, people lose hope. As Hamilton puts it: This substitution of an image of nuclear holocaust for the coming of Christ is a parable of what happens to Christians when they cease to believe in their own eschatological heritage. The culture supplies its own images for the end when we default by ceasing to believe in biblical images of God's triumph at the end.3
The good news of the gospel is this: when all is said and done, God is going to win. We are invited to live as if God's final victory is a done deal. But can we believe it? Iwan Russell-Jones recently asked why so many wild-eyed prophets of the future end up as television preachers. In the world of religious broadcasting, you have to look long and hard to find a reasonable and faithful voice. To take one example, he observed an evangelist named Jack Van Impe and his wife Rexella, two figures who were made for television. Their hairstyles defy the laws of gravity, their teeth are unreasonably numerous and white, and they know and love us all individually. Their weekly show, Jack Van Impe Presents, purports to look at world events through the eyes of faith. Contrary to Jesus' warnings in Mark 13, Jack and Rexella point to news items as if they are cogs in God's mechanical plan for the future. This is highly speculative theology, says Russell-Jones, as these evangelists list one earthquake after another famine, and declare "It's God's unfolding will!" Whether Jack and Rexella realize it, their scenarios are also unabashedly pro-American. In all of their end-of-the-world schemes, the devastation and carnage takes place in other countries, apparently so Americans can watch it on television.
It's easy for us mainline folks to take shots at Jack and his wife Rexella, particularly when it comes to their silly and simplistic views of the future. But what do we have? Could it be that, just maybe, we have given in to the despair and hopelessness of our culture? Have we given up on God's future, left with a hand-wringing pessimism about the state of the world? Have we felt abandoned by God? Jack and Rexella would answer, "Of course not! We are preparing for the coming of Christ our Lord."
So why don't people like us have a place on the religious airwaves? Iwan Russell-Jones admits, "It's difficult to make a mark in the communications business when you don't have anything much to say." Then he concludes: The time for us sensible, "mainline" folk to make a serious move into the world of television will be when we can pray with Jack and Rexella "Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus." And mean it.4
1. John Dart, "Jehovah's Witnesses Abandon End-of-the-world Prediction," Religious News Service 1 December 1995, PresbyNet, p. 3318.
2. Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 249.
3. Neill Q. Hamilton, Maturing in the Christian Life: A Pastor's Guide (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1984), p. 68.
4. Iwan Russell-Jones, "Jack Van Impe Presents," Journal for Preachers (Lent 1994), pp. 25-29. "