It Is The End of the World
Hurry up! The time has come! This is the moment to wake from sleep! According to Paul in Romans 13, the Christians in Rome knew what time it was. The moment of salvation was upon them. The end of history had come. Hurry!
Nearly two thousand years have passed at this point, and the end hasn’t come. Paul preaches urgency, but it is hard to maintain such haste when nothing seems to be happening. The church keeps walking forward, sometimes limping, but we aren’t falling and we don’t need to sprint. Was Paul wrong?
In a historical sense, we might quickly dismiss Paul’s message. He said a lot of good and correct things, but this obviously wasn’t one of them. He thought the end of the world, the return of Christ was around the corner, so he naturally preached urgency. But he was simply wrong. The world hasn’t ended yet.
At the same time, we could say that while Paul may have been historically misleading, he was doing exactly what he wanted tactically. To understand this, we need to make this idea a little more personal. How would you behave if you knew it was your last week on Earth? I want to clarify, this isn’t about what specific action you would do. This isn’t about your bucket list. I’m more interested in how we would behave toward one another if we knew we would be gone by the end of the week.
In many cases, the finality of death has a way of putting things into perspective for us. Little disagreements fade away as we come to realize they simply aren’t important anymore. Petty squabbles and past grudges burn off as long remembered love warms our hearts. Even big disagreements on political issues or matters of personal values and beliefs may disappear. I suspect that for most of us, if we knew that we would soon die, we may be overwhelmed by fear, but we would also feel overpowering love. Anger, hatred, intolerance, envy, and greed would crumble, leaving only the most important things remaining behind. And if we were assured of our salvation, then even the fear would be quieted, only love would remain.
Paul’s statement about urgency comes just after he has told his audience to “owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Again, making sure all debts are paid could be a way of preparing for the end, closing accounts before the end. However, the one debt that remains is love. Love isn’t something that people are supposed to earn from us. We owe them love. We are indebted in love to others. That is a profound way of thinking about it, and I’m not entirely sure how Paul imagined that transaction working, but I suspect that he saw God in the center of it. We owe love to others because we owe love to God, and God trades that debt with our neighbor, spurring us into service to others. To be clear, this isn’t to say that we can love our neighbor well enough to save ourselves, again, we aren’t getting credit for it. God saves us first as a free gift, but we have been given so much love, that we will be eternally indebted to the world and people God loves.
In imagining the church as coming to the end, imagining the whole world is on the verge of death and rebirth, Paul strips away everything that might drive us except for love. We owe nothing but love, and we need not argue over specifics of the law. The only thing that now remains for us is love. While the urgency could be read as an encouragement to greater temporary purity—be perfect, you only have a little longer to hold out until the end—we could also see it as a filter. Imagine the world as if the end were upon us, and if your quarrel no longer seems important, then replace it with love.
When we walk forward normally, we don’t necessarily think about what is happening, but generally speaking, with a normal gait, there is a moment in which we are falling. Walking is a process of thrusting one foot forward and falling just slightly, trusting that the ground will be there beneath you. Of course, we’re used to this. This is normal for us. We know how to balance and continue moving without panicking every time we start moving toward the ground. What might begin as a frightening, dramatic moment when we first learn to walk becomes mundane as walking becomes an autonomic process. Every fall is just like the last step. We aren’t always in crisis, nor is the end always upon us.
The church has existed in crisis since its very beginning. Paul thought the end was at hand. The Roman empire was collapsing in the time of Augustine, and some people thought the church would fall apart as well. Martin Luther had some notion that the end was upon him in his lifetime. And just look at all the end times predictions that we've seen over the past hundred years. People throughout history have looked at the world and seen evil days upon them. And perhaps that is right in a sense. Certainly, the church hasn't collapsed in the near two millennia of its existence, but that's only because every time it was falling as it walked along, God rose up to catch it.
Sometimes, belief that the end is upon us drives us into self-destructive behavior. People will sell everything they have and be left with nothing because a cult leader convinced them the end had come. Some people become paranoid and turn inward, making sure they have the supplies they need as if MREs and guns could save them from the divine wrath of God. But there is a better way to live into the end of time. Just as in Paul’s generation, if we assume that the world is ending and use that finality to drive us to a love that conquers every form of hate and binds us together as Christians with a deep care for the world, then we will fulfill the law. Let the world end. Let the world end every day. And every day, let the end of time teach us anew what it means to love in the face of death.
