Is the end near?

People used to speak about “going to the movies.” Perhaps that phrase went out of currency when television brought the movies to us. For years now, I have neither gone to the movies nor spent much time watching television; but the movies come to me these days on airplanes. Looking at the list of movies shown on some of the flights I’ve been on in recent months, it seems to me there is great interest in apocalyptic events. Movies like “The Book of Eli” and “The Road” portray a world turned upside down by global disaster. Fascination with the Mayan calendar’s running out in 2012 rivals some of the popular musings about the end of the millennium 10 years ago. Tales of vampires and werewolves are testimony to bizarre imaginings of worlds far removed from normal events or history and far removed, as well, from any sense of God’s providence.

Imagining the end of time or a radical change from what we know and how we live now isn’t new and can even be inspired. The last book of the Bible is called the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation. It portrays a state of affairs very different from the normal world, but it does so to bring to the fore the providential action of God in the world.

It took some time for the church to accept the Apocalypse as inspired Scripture. Its violent visions can obscure its message. Its judgments on the state of the church and of society can nurture despair. Its puzzling predictions can be used to justify political or religious fanaticism. Because it is part of sacred Scripture, however, the Book of Revelation speaks to us as it spoke to the Christians in the Roman Empire’s Province of Asia, to whom it was addressed over 1,900 years ago. Difficult though it is to interpret, what the Apocalypse has to say is of importance now. Perhaps it deserves more study now, at a time when doomsday stories seem to be so popular.

How should the Apocalypse be read and understood? As is the case with any text of Scripture, some sense of the circumstances in which the book was written is necessary, along with a knowledge of what kind of text it is: history, poetry, homily or some other literary form. It is also necessary to consider why the church included the particular book in the canonical texts of Sacred Scripture and how it was designed to fit into public worship and the liturgy. Since all Scripture speaks to us from God and about God, a serene confidence in our union with God is especially necessary in reading the Book of Revelation. It is intended to be enlightening, not confusing. Its use of symbolism familiar to its first readers should not make us imagine it to be a book of esoteric clues leading to a secret knowledge of the future, although it does speak to the future of the church and of the world.

The symbolic language of the Apocalypse, with its layers of meaning, strengthened its readers in the midst of the beginnings of persecution and also protected them from being co-opted or seduced by the values of the wealthy world in which they were living. It plays the same role for us. Like a dream, a vision such as John relates both moves the emotions and informs the intellect. The vision describes the world in which the Apocalypse was written and speaks as well of the end of the entire world. Jesus’ warnings about the end time collapsed events in the same way. The church spans all the ages until Christ returns in glory; and the church, relying on the inspired texts of Scripture, is to keep her children together in Christ, no matter the historical circumstances in which they live.

The Apocalypse calls Christians to repentance so that we may be ready to meet the Lord when he returns. It condemns the vices of Christians and of pagans and contrasts them with virtues and beatitudes that guide moral living. It teaches us to live in hope because our present world will pass away, but the kingdom of God is eternal.

Last January I went on a personal pilgrimage to visit the seven churches mentioned by John in the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation. The sites are all in present-day Turkey. Some are still cities today, but inhabited by Muslims rather than by pagans and Christians. A few are ruins, devastated centuries ago by earthquakes or destroyed in warfare between peoples and states still unknown 2,000 years ago. Visiting the sites, I realized that the Christians who inhabited them when the Apocalypse was written and first read could not possibly have imagined what they would be like 1,900 years later. But their faith in Christ’s return is the same as ours, and that is enough.

Is the end near? We do not know when Christ will return (Mark 13: 32-37), nor can we know the future of the country and cities that we live in; we can only live now with the faith that tells us what will last forever. In the end, the church will gather to meet her Lord and cry out: “Come, Lord Jesus! (Rv 22:20).” We will know the cry, because each day we’ve practiced it in reciting the Lord’s Prayer, asking that God’s kingdom come.