Monday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 497

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to show his servants what must happen soon. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who gives witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ by reporting what he saw.

As a high school senior in 1965, I read George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which had appeared in 1949. At the time, 1984 was still a long way off. It seemed possible, despite the prosperity and freedom Americans enjoyed in those days -- we have less of either today -- that an authoritarian party with a mythical "Big Brother" might gain total control of our lives by 1984. There were precedents in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China.

I attended the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, in 1968. Again, it seemed possible that we might have a permanent, manned base on the Moon, and that voyagers might have been sent to explore Jupiter. The computer age had arrived on campus as I knew students who were studying programming. One could conceive of an artificial intelligence named Hal. 

Remembering those and other futuristic novels it's easy to understand how the public might be fascinated by those scenarios. And it's easier to see how the predictions never came to pass. In 2022 we might imagine the Big Liar as Big Brother, but we don't seem any closer to a moon base, exploration of Saturn, or artificial intelligence than we were in 1968. Given what's happened to Twitter, Elon Musk's other companies may implode in the near future. 

Prophetic and apocalyptic literature often use future scenarios to warn the unfaithful about the penalties of sin, even as they promise peace and prosperity to the faithful. 

In the Book of Daniel, the young prophet not only interprets the king's troublesome dream, he describes the dream for him: 

...you saw a statue, very large and exceedingly bright, terrifying in appearance as it stood before you. Its head was pure gold, its chest and arms were silver, its belly and thighs bronze,its legs iron, its feet partly iron and partly clay.

The statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay represents the kingdoms which will supplant Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom. The prophecy was remarkably accurate. But that should not surprise us since Daniel is a fictional character written into a historical past. This work was composed during the bitter persecution carried on by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–164 B.C.) and he was the brittle feet which, like all autocratic governments, is too fragile to survive. Daniel was written to strengthen and comfort the Jewish people in their ordeal. 

For a very different purpose, Mark Twain created a similar hero in his novel, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." Wikipedia says of it, "It is a satire of feudalism and monarchy that also celebrates homespun ingenuity and democratic values while questioning the ideals of capitalism and outcomes of the Industrial Revolution. It is among several works by Twain and his contemporaries that mark the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era of socioeconomic discourse."

My point being: although prophetic and apocalyptic writings use futuristic scenarios, they should not be critiqued by what actually happened after their appearance. Beyond sunrise and sunset, no one knows what will happen. How many times have we seen climatologists and economists flummoxed by what actually happened? We should take their warnings seriously but not be obsessed with fear about them.  

Today and through the rest of the liturgical year we read the Book of Revelation. It was written to reassure Christians. It describes a peaceful, faithful community sorely oppressed by a violent world all around it. More importantly, it assures Christian congregations as they hear it publicly read that God is still in charge, and that His Son Jesus Christ, who has been raised from the dead, will establish his Kingdom of Peace forever. We have only to wait and watch and trust in what we have already seen and believed. 

We can bring to Revelation the lesson of the Prophet Habakkuk (chapter 2):

I will stand at my guard post,
and station myself upon the rampart;
I will keep watch to see what he will say to me,
and what answer he will give to my complaint.
Then the LORD answered me and said:
Write down the vision;
Make it plain upon tablets,
so that the one who reads it may run.
For the vision is a witness for the appointed time,
a testimony to the end; it will not disappoint.
If it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.
See, the rash have no integrity;
but the just one who is righteous because of faith shall live.