History and remembrance

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place, but the end will not follow immediately. Luke 21:9


If I’m not in church on a Sunday morning, I can be fairly sure that around eleven o’clock there will be a knock at the door and I will have a visit from a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their opening gambit is usually to present me with some Bible passage foretelling the last days and to ask whether I see any signs of the end in the world around. As they talk I feel two contradictory things: one, that they have got both history and the Bible by the wrong end, and two, that there is an awful lot of such prophecy in the Bible and that—unlike the Witnesses—I have chosen simply to ignore it.

Well, in our gospel this morning Jesus seems to be having a go at the same thing. The end is at hand; the Temple is about to be destroyed; get ready to flee from the wrath to come. His words are reminiscent of all those millenarian prophets of recent centuries, not just the Witnesses but the Adventists and the Mormons and the Jonesites and dozens of others whose faith is built around a catastrophic end to history as God marches in to sort us out.

Embarrassed scholars of a more liberal tendency have defended Jesus by pointing out that these passages carry the fingerprints of the Church almost two generations after the resurrection. Luke’s gospel is dated around 80AD, and by then the Temple had indeed been destroyed and the Church was indeed under heavy persecution. For those Christians, it must have been reassuring to be told that Jesus had foreseen all this. Luke was writing to the needs of his audience.

But Jesus can’t be excused as easily as that. There is plenty of evidence that Luke was building on a genuine element in Christ’s teaching. All the gospels show that he believed he was living in the last days, that God’s final intervention wws very close. Paul picked this up in his early writing: and the last words of the New Testament are in the same key: ‘“Surely I am coming soon.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus.’

What did Jesus mean by these sayings? He may simply have been reflecting the historical instability of his time. The political arrangements of first-century Judea were fragile, to say the least. Trouble was only too much to be expected, and he may have felt the need to point that out. But there is more.

These prophecies convey a recognition that history cannot save itself. The processes of history, of human choice and action, will never generate the Kingdom of God. We can work within history for the good; but history, left to itself, will never bring about our salvation.

Today is Remembrance Sunday. That should remind us both of the horrors of history and of the tendency, particularly strong in the last century, to believe that with a little more enlightenment and good will the Promised Land is in sight. The First World War was to have been the war to end wars. The League of Nations and the United Nations were to have established a peaceful, co-operative humanity. Fascism and Communism were supposed to deliver their different utopias. Even liberal democracy had its own utopian moment: in 1989, with the triumph of the free West, it seemed as though the broad sunlit uplands lay open before us. History had come to an end.

Twenty years on, it doesn’t quite feel that. History is closing in again. Utopias don’t have the following they once did. What do we, as Christians, do about that? Do we give up on history, join the JWs and start counting the days to the end?

We can’t do that because God didn’t give up on history. The incarnation is God’s presence in history, his acceptance of history, and so Christians have to take history seriously. Even as we remember the Somme and Hiroshima, we can’t back off in despair; we have to take ownership of history as Christ did, with all the pain and responsibility that entails. But we shouldn’t fall for the deception that history of itself will save us, however enlightened and moral we are, however glistening our ideals. In these strange passages, Jesus is telling us that. Jesus wasn’t going to fool his followers with an easy utopia. His gift to them was the true source of salvation, able to embrace and suffuse all history: the life of the Father, the life which the Father shares with the Son.