Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You

In response to working on this apocalypse in Luke 21 I decided to reread Cormac McCarthy's “The Road.” His bleak novel is a walk through an unnamed and undefined but dreadful apocalypse.

As with “The Road”, being on the road with the Christ will take us into bleak and terrifying landscapes and events not well-defined, and not given a date on the calendar. And then, the kicker: after rumors of wars and insurrections—which I take to mean the socio/politico/religious systems stressed and collapsing—what comes next is the persecution of Christians. And then what follows that is cosmic apocalypse, which I do not take to be literal, but rather archetypal and much deeper than typical “end of the world” speculation.

Ready for all this? Luke's Jesus expects us to be. On this road, the Christ asks us to open our hearts to the agonies and sorrows of the world. This is not easy. It will give us broken hearts, wounds, and sorrows not originally our own. In fact, the more I work my way in Luke, the more I sense how severe is the call in the fourth path of maturing service. In Luke, the only creative response to a future yet unknown, but loaded with the stealthy shadows of war, evil, and persecutions, is to live faithfully in the present, serving those in need along the way. To serve like that we need see, hear, and feel the pain right in front us, and then seek to do something about it, one way or another.

But every step brings risk. We may trip over a “roadside bomb”, or encounter the shadowy lurking “they” whom Jesus references several times (“they will arrest you and persecute you, they will hand you over, they will put some of you to death...”). Even betrayal by family and friends is a feature of the this fourth path, this “Way”.

Luke's community lived all that stuff. Opposition to the Way is real because the Way is real and runs counter to the systems that ruin life and the world.

Therefore we are asked to continue down this road, this Way of maturing, difficult service, knowing that what may be around the next bend in the road is trouble greater than we've imagined: apocalypse now.

But knit together in a community of faith and service, we are given the wisdom and comfort of the Holy Spirit. Our answer is God, not timetables or doctrines about eschatology. In Christ we endure, and doing so, we gain more than mere physical survival. We gain our souls, a transcendent gift of the grace of God.