Apocalypse and Promise

Only when the Lord of history makes himself known, vindicates history in judgment, are the nations humbled ("Let the nations know they are but human," cries the psalmist, Psalm 9:20). Then doorways are opened to the elevation of the poor, the oppressed, the widowed, and the orphaned. But in apocalyptic imagination this comes about through divine intervention, even if hidden; certainly not through the saints.

Moreover, anyone who, identifying with the poor and oppressed, indulges a grim satisfaction in the apocalyptic vision has not comprehended the dimensions of apocalypse. The apocalyptic catastrophe lifts up the poor, but only by destroying the oppressive social order that is also their chief security. In the process, the poor, the saints, the oppressed perish with all the rest. Apocalypse is catastrophe. If it restores the center to the world order ("let the nations know they are but human"), it does so by a wrenching that appalls us. If it is God's justice, this justice is hidden so deeply in the mystery of suffering as to be scandalous: it is the poor, the innocent, who would be carried away in famine or nuclear holocaust while the sleek bodies of the affluent pace out their desperate hopes in well-stocked bomb shelters and hidden command centers.

In this light the terrible ambiguity of Jesus' prayer comes clear and demands a reflection in Christian action: "thy kingdom come," but "lead us not into the tribulation, and deliver us from evil." In this light we must turn to prayers of repentance and intercession. In this light, Christian activism must be stripped of its pretensions: no question here of inaugurating apocalypse, sealing thus the doom of those we pretend to help.

Watch, Wait--and Confront
Thus, a central admonition of both gospels and epistles is "watch and wait." The expectation of the apocalyptic outcome, the threat of judgment and the promise of resurrection glory, are the wellsprings of an ethics of the kingdom--an interim ethics, to be sure, but one repeatedly relevant if we accept the good news of judgment and promise. And those ethics seem eminently geared to one who watches and waits: from turning the other cheek, to submission to the ruler, they are the stances of the patient.

This patience, this watching and waiting, is at the heart of the problem of Christian action in the modern world. For Marx its counsels are a scandal. Neo-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch put it this way: "Resigning oneself to fear and servitude, being consoled with promises for the beyond--these are the social principles of Christianity which Marx despised and Joachim [diFiore] consigned to the pit."

With judgment again on the horizon, with the hope of the triumph over Babylon again our hope, must we equate the "watch and wait" of Jesus with either literalist delusions or "resignation to fear and servitude?" Is there an ethics of the kingdom that comprehends and dissolves the problem of action?

To start with, it is clear that the "watch and wait" of Jesus is not cowardice or resignation to fear and servitude. On the contrary, it expects, it courts, persecution and martyrdom. However ordinary, however respectable the lifestyle Paul is constantly urging upon the churches, it has this effect: it sets the brother and sisterhood apart--by the disciples' fidelity, their love, on the one hand; by their proclamation that Jesus is Lord and that his judgment and his glory is about to come, on the other. However respectful of the constituted authorities, the community of the saints is set apart, set over against those authorities, those principalities and powers, in the refusal to acknowledge any of them as absolute. Their confession is Jesus as Lord.

For Jesus, for Paul, and for the early church this is not a matter of an ill-defined inner attitude, but of a constant challenge to the authorities of the day, who usurp the place of God and subject the little people to their own manipulations. For Jesus, for Paul, and for the early church this is a call to confrontation, to persecution, to martyrdom.

Clearly Jesus' "watch and wait" is not passive but thoroughly active. Moreover, there is more than a hint that Jesus confronts the powers on behalf of the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed. He keynotes his public ministry with the famous passage taken from Isaiah:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me;
he has sent me to announce good news to the poor,
to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,
to let the broken victims go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. --Luke 4:18-19

We have spiritualized this passage long enough. It becomes clearer and clearer, as John Howard Yoder argues, that "the year of the Lord's favor" that Jesus is sent to proclaim is the Jewish jubilee year: the year, long-neglected, when prisoners quite literally were freed, debts canceled, land restored to its original owners, and society equalized. Jesus thus confronts a social system with his good news; it is in that system's refusal of the terms that judgment is unleashed.

But beside this rigorous stance, this confrontation, this active service of the poor, the hungry, and the homeless, stands the cross. Not simply the deafening roar of the powers, the crushing defeat of a rebel, the cross is the culmination of Jesus' ethics. The relativization of the powers, the elevation of the downtrodden at the expense of the well-satisfied, the restoration of sinners and outcasts--all these lead not to a new system of powers but to powerlessness as a way of life. And such a way of life is not confined to some hereafter, some Utopian classless society. It can be realized here and now, in the community of the church.

But here is the scandal: this new way of life puts Christians at the mercy of the powers, those very powers Christians confront with the proclamation of powerlessness. True, there is the promise of resurrection. But it is not just that without the resurrection the cross is nothing but loss, not just that without the grace of Christ-with-us powerlessness is simply subjection and servitude and fear. It is also the case that without the cross, the lifeblood of Jesus' hope is drained away: the cross is the consistency of powerlessness as a power at cross-purposes with all power. The cross is power without power. It does not manipulate, it does not propagandize, it does not lord it over men and women. It is service pure and simple and terrible.

If the ethics of the kingdom is founded on the judgment to come seen as the Lord's alone, it is sustained by hope and by grace--by a spirituality founded on the promise. For the counsel of biblical apocalypse is neither one of unrelieved hostility toward one's real or fancied enemies, nor one of despair. On the one hand, as we have seen, judgment is reserved to the Lord. Moreover, the judgment is not vengeance, not personal vendetta. And it is remarkable, as Vernard Eller has pointed out, that one finds the kings of the nations on the scene in the New Jerusalem, bearing all the good of the peoples to the City.

The kings of the nations--who have prostituted themselves with the whore, who have persecuted the saints, and who have oppressed the lowly from the foundation of the world--they too walk in the life of the promise. This promise, on the other hand, dissolves the despair of end times: not consolation so much as assurance, confidence, and promise, it propels forward against all despairing inertia. The promise is not, to be sure, so much a principle of action as an antidote to inaction. As such its chief occupation in the midst of apocalypse is to root out fear.

An ethics, of the apocalypse issues in constant confrontation, however quiet, with the principalities that lord it over us day by day. This confrontation takes place on many levels, but it occurs first of all in a confrontation with fear. Fear is in the air, it is in our bones, it is the very substance of the power the principalities wield over their subjects. Traditionally, Christian eschatology has been compressed into the individual's confrontation with death. And its power has lain in exorcising the fear of death. Death itself is the limit, the personal end time. It is also threat. And it is first of all as threat that the principalities assail us: We are threatened with loss of job, loss of security, loss of health, loss of happiness unless we hew to this or that line, conform to this or that institutional or cultural or commercial imperative.

We are cajoled with promises of health or security or popularity or wealth or good times, and at base it is our fears that drive us. Apocalypse puts an end to all this because it puts a stop to the promises; it is a societal end time, and as such it gags the blithering hopes and veiled threats that assault us all the while they mold us.

But apocalypse itself is therefore fearful. We fear not just the judgment--the cataloging and weighing of our "sins." We fear far more the stripping away of all the ministrations of the principalities so dear (yet so oppressive) to us. Passage from old to new; the breaking down of the securities, the gods, of the past; whole segments of our lives, so intertwined with our culture, swept away with that culture; the sacrifice of what we are in the face of a raging world: this is the real fear of judgment, the deepest fear of apocalypse. This fear strikes us where we hurt the most: it touches the whole lifelong question of self-worth.

Such fear, called forth by apocalypse, is also answered by apocalypse. It is answered in the conviction of being loved--the heart of the gospel, the promise of apocalypse. Love drives out fear, according to St. John, and the love he speaks of is not our love for God so much as God's love for us manifest once and for all in Jesus Christ. Once and for all, but not over and done with; for this Christ who was and who is will also come again. The love that sustains hope in the Christian apocalypse is the love of the Father and the Lamb, who will shine on the faces of a renewed people, wiping away every tear and binding up every wound. Such an answer is appropriated by most of us only with difficulty, only under loving teachers, only by learning it by heart.

There is a second fear made manifest in apocalypse: the fear of persecution. For the judgment is inaugurated by the great tribulation, and those who look for another king than Caesar face the lions. Thus, the power that was so interior, so personal, so crucial to one's self-esteem--the love that drives out fear--becomes social, political, almost military: the power to sacrifice one's self. Christian altruism, Christian courage begins in personal salvation; it ends before the firing squad. In most times, and for the mass of us, these are mere metaphors. We have not yet learned by heart our own salvation. Nor do we yet face an ultimate sacrifice, whose heroism in any case distorts the picture.

But everyday life in the heart of an apocalyptic reality calls up both living faith and real heroism: At each moment, in response to the judgment all around us, we are called upon to renounce some god, to take the risk of resistance to Moloch. At each moment only memory, only the security of having once experienced the touch of God's love, can render us pliant before the gale winds of tribulation and of judgment. Aside from this pliancy, aside from the God who lives, whose sufferings with us have yet to be fulfilled, we can hardly help but drift into fanaticism or despair.

Christians, it is well known, are not exempt from either. Hearing only the apocalyptic injunction "Get out of Babylon, flee from her!" is not new to Christian history, nor is it dead in these apocalyptic times. Both fanaticism and despair drive some of those who flee to the desert, stocking up for the tribulation to come, preaching the bad news to any who will listen. Closer to home, perhaps, is despair over the churches, the facile (and thoroughly unbiblical) identification of the foundering weakness of the churches as a "Babylonian captivity," eventually justifying a withdrawal from communion. Nothing could be further from the biblical vision of "Babylon," nor further from the biblical vision of the church. The Lord abandons his church, it is true, but to tribulation and captivity, not to an unconscious apostasy that he does not chastise from within, in the persons of his prophets, in renewal of the Spirit.

If a remnant is all that can be saved, it is the Lord who shapes the remnant, never calling them out of Israel as if Israel, the New Israel, were herself Babylon. The bitterness with which radical Christians have often reproached the churches suits much better the style of Jonah, that stubborn prophet, than that of Jeremiah, who for all his stridency remained with his people to the end--not to speak of the Spirit of reconciliation who has been poured out through Jesus on all those who acknowledge his name. Bitterness, especially bitterness with one's own, is the mark of despair, and abandonment of hope and of confidence in God's mercy and loving kindness toward all his creatures.

Despair and fear, bitterness and fanaticism--all the fruits of infidelity to the eschatological vision of Jesus--have no place in an ethics and spirituality born of apocalypse. For the importance of the apocalyptic wrath and the apocalyptic promise lies in their ability jointly to create a hope that gives substance to our present. This hope is strikingly mirrored in the common evangelical concern, so much misunderstood, to live simply and humbly, "faithful to the gift we have been given." This is not to say that the failure of evangelical witness on the level of structural questions and questions of social justice can be condoned. But at least we can see in a common evangelical lifestyle (one which reaches far beyond evangelicalism) a germ of what we are called to do in the face of apocalypse. For hope gives substance to the present not by ignoring the apocalypse to come, but by living in it without fear.

Such fearlessness is empowered by faith. If we turn to the apocalypse in despair, we must come away with hope. Not because our worst fears are assuaged, not because the city will be allowed to go its way, to evolve from the depths of its degradation into the City of God, not because the success of a reformist politics and an activist Christianity is assured, nor yet because "the elect" are to be carried away in a "rapture" before the advent of the Great Tribulation.

Hope appears precisely despite the failure of our hopes, the persecution of the saints, the suffering of the innocent. And precisely by grasping such hope are we able to admit that now is apocalypse, the revelation of both wrath and glory. This is salvation, or as John puts it, eternal life--an eternal life that is lived now because faith and hope make each moment radiant with the eternal "now" that has no concern for the morrow, for trials or tribulations, or for death itself.

Apocalyptic vision, apocalyptic hope, thus reveals the salvation that is present here and now. Hope, again, gives substance to the present. This means first of all that the present is lived--quite simply lived. The calm with which Peter confronts apocalypse is incredible:

Everything will soon come to an end, so to pray better, keep a calm and sober mind. Above all, never let your love for each other grow insincere, since love covers over many a sin. Welcome each other into your houses without grumbling. Each one of you has received a special grace, so, like good stewards responsible for all these different graces of God, put yourselves at the service of others. --1 Peter 4:7-10

It is this calm in going about the ordinary but extraordinary business of building a loving community that characterizes Christian and apocalyptic fearlessness. This building, this going about the Father's business, is the heart of the ethics of the apocalypse--and yet it is so calm, so everyday. Salvation is the fruit of an ever renewed faith, and at each moment of renewal it makes itself known in our presence of mind before the revelation at hand.

This presence of mind is at once deeply spiritual, "abandoned to the will of God"--to use a formula of an older spirituality--and the foundation of the critical spirit. Fear, despair, pride--all give way before the apocalyptic spectacle .of our time in the hope that sustains us. And that hope says quite simply: "Be still and know that I am God." This consciousness reverberates in the faith that knows with Paul that nothing

can come between us and the love of Christ, even if we are troubled or worried, or being persecuted, or lacking food or clothes, or being threatened or even attacked...for neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord. --Romans 8:35-39

This faith knows, moreover, that "by turning everything to their good, God cooperates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose" (verse 28).

Criticism in Love
Each moment discloses the will of God. And yet the will of God disclosed at each moment only renders clearer the enormous gap between the present moment and the age that is to come, between reality and ideality, between human kingdoms and the kingdom of God. Far from saying, "Whatever is, is right," it alerts us to the unreality and immorality of the moment. Because in that moment God is judge, Lord, and burning fire. Criticism begins the moment one can say, "Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit." On any other foundation, criticism is simply despair: the rebellion of a subject race against the Fates.

The distinguishing mark of a Christian criticism is humor. The peculiar fatality of prophecy and of radical Christianity is its humorlessness. Refugees from the rigors of the Law that we are, our most serious temptations are moralism and legalism. But hope--the hope that knows that God's grace is being poured out on the world even in judgment--such hope goes hand in hand with humor. Only in the light of hope and the assurance of grace can one laugh at human folly, including one's own, even in the midst of misery.

Such laughter begs to be misunderstood. It is most easily grasped as irony. Irony is born of the sense of disproportion between what is and what should be; hence it is at the root of criticism. Yet hope--hope that what should be shall be, in the knowledge that the future is not wholly in human hands but in those of a far more competent lover of humankind--this hope mitigates the severity of irony without denying its insight. One is permitted to laugh even when rage threatens to overcome all.

Thus there is a humor born of hope that is ever apt to scandalize our moralistic and critical minds. And there is another, deeper humor born of hope that is yet more deeply scandalous. Chesterton pictures Jesus withdrawing into the desert because he can no longer control his mirth. He knows that his mirth would only be misunderstood.

Pure joy, reveling in the world and in oneself in the grace of God--this is hidden lest we seem out of touch with the misery of the world, or malicious in our laughter at the expense of such misery, or simply uncaring. Such mirth is the expression of Christian joy, that least expected of all the eschatological virtues. Georges Bernanos, tortured by the extinction of the values for which he lived, whose rage seemed implacable, was capable to the end of his life, we are told, of a laughter that was simple and pure and childlike. Such a laugh belongs to hope.

Hope in the apocalypse of our lives bears in itself the germ of agapic love: a love that "is always patient and kind...never jealous...never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes." (1 Corinthians 13:4-7) This love, it has been said over and over again, has no strings attached; it refuses to single out the worthy from the unworthy, the brother from the enemy, or the righteous remnant from the mass of the damned.

If apocalyptic criticism foresees judgment, apocalyptic hope forbids us to be the instruments of that judgment. Nothing that is unclean shall enter the city of light, yet the kings of the nations bring their treasures to the very throne of God. The ethics of apocalypse requires that we look for the resurrection of the dead, even if it be a question of the second death, the lake of fire. Again the paradox emerges; on the one hand, judgment and clear-sighted critique, because the world has already judged itself (John 3:18); on the other hand, mercy and the refusal to condemn lest one be condemned. The two poles are a precarious balance. Yet together they found a Christian criticism and a Christian activism.

Lot's wife looked back with regret and longing to the land of Sodom; we have averted our gaze from the apocalyptic present for much the same reasons. We cling to the skirts of whore Babylon like frightened children--more afraid, at times, of the horsemen from the east than of the coming tribulation. It is time we looked the present squarely in the face with the eyes of biblical apocalypse. The vision terrifies us, yet it also consoles. And more than that it gives access to hope and humor, agape and criticism; it exposes the despair at the core of our activism and restores activism to us, purged of fanaticism and compulsiveness.

Apocalypse is the heart of the gospel made historical and political. If the churches have lulled themselves into thinking it a bit of mythology pasted onto an eternal (or eternally evolving) gospel, today we can no longer afford the ministrations of an obscene optimism. If exodus is the heart metaphor of the Third World's struggle for liberation, apocalypse discloses the drama of our common future. There is no turning back; the Beast is ready to rise and wage war on the saints, as already his whore devours the poor and the helpless. They have only to refuse his mark.

Michael W. Foley was a Catholic layperson and sometime high school teacher living with his wife and four small children in Ojai, California, when this article appeared.