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December 13, 2016 | The Valley Catholic
Moral Theology: The End of the World
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and president of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
People are forever predicting the end of the world.
In Christian circles this is generally connected with
speculation around the promise Jesus made at his
ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and
soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish
God’s eternal kingdom. There have been speculations
about the end of the world ever since.
This was rampant among the first generation of
Christians. They lived inside a matrix of intense
expectation, fully expecting that Jesus would return
before many of them died. Indeed, in John’s Gospel,
Jesus assures his followers that some of them would
not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of
God. Initially this was interpreted to mean that some
of them would not die before Jesus returned and the
world ended.
And so they lived with this expectation, believing
that the world, at least as they knew it, would end before their deaths. Not surprisingly this led to all kinds
of apocalyptic musings: What signs would signal the
end? Would there be massive alterations in the sun
and the moon? Would there be great earthquakes and
wars across the world that would help precipitate
the end? Generally though the early Christians took
Jesus’ advice and believed that it was useless and
counterproductive to speculate about the end of the
world and about what signs would accompany the
end. The lesson rather, they believed, was to live in
vigilance, in high alert, ready, so that the end, whenever it would come, w ould not catch them asleep,
unprepared, carousing, and drunk.
However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not
return their understanding began to evolve so that
by the time John’s Gospel is written, probably about
seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had begun to
understand things differently: They now understood
Jesus’ promise that some of his contemporaries would
not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of
God as being fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus was, in fact, already back and the world had not
ended. And so they began to believe that the end of
the world was not necessarily imminent.
We need to be awake spiritually, not
slouching. But the end of the world
shouldn’t concern us, nor should we
worry excessively about when we will
die. What we should worry about is
in what state our dying will find us.
But that didn’t change their emphasis on vigilance,
on staying awake, and on being ready for the end. But
now that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance
was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s
own death. As well, more deeply, the invitation to
live in vigilance began to be understood as code for
God’s invitation to enter into the fullness of life right
now and not be lulled asleep by the pressures of ordinary life, wherein we are consumed with eating and
drinking, buying and selling, marrying and giving in
marriage. All of these ordinary things, while good in
themselves, can lull us to sleep by keeping us from being truly attentive and grateful within our own lives.
And that’s the challenge that comes down to us:
Our real worry should not be that the world might
suddenly end or that we might unexpectedly die,
but that we might live and then die, asleep, that is,
without really loving, without properly expressing
our love, and without tasting deeply the real joy of
living because we are so consumed by the business
and busy pressures of living that we never quite get
around to fully living.
Hence being alert, awake, and vigilant in the
biblical sense is not a matter of living in fear of the
world ending or of our lives ending. Rather it is a
question of having love and reconciliation as our
chief concerns, of thanking, appreciating, affirming,
forgiving, apologizing, and being more mindful of
the joys of living in human community and within
the sure embrace of God.
Buddha warned against something he called,
“slouching.” We slouch physically when we let our
posture break down and become slothful. Any combination of tiredness, laziness, depression, anxiety, tension, over-extension, or excessive pressure can bring
down our guard and make our bodies slouch. But
that can also happen to us psychologically and morally. We can let a combination of busyness, pressure,
anxiety, laziness, depression, tension, and weariness
break down our spiritual posture so that, in biblical
terms, we “fall asleep”, we cease being vigilant, we
are no longer alert.
We need to be awake spiritually, not slouching. But
the end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should
we worry excessively about when we will die. What
we should worry about is in what state our dying will
find us. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts in her book,
The Grace in Aging: “What a waste it would be to enter
the time of dying with the same old petty and weary
thoughts and reactions running through our mind.”
But, still, what about the question of when the
world will end?
Perhaps, given the infinity of God, it will never
end. Because when do infinite creativity and love
reach their limit? When do they say: “Enough! That’s
all! These are the limits of our creativity and love!”
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