Longing for the Day

The congregation of Swanvale Halt is mercifully free of the brand of Christian who gets excited about signs of the impending end of the world, but somehow I was copied in on an email referring to a blogging evangelist who was calling attention to the Paris conference about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it portended the terminal stage of human civilisation. Much was made about the number of nations present, seventy, and its fulfilment of Biblical prophecy: I don’t need to go into it in detail, I expect. You get the picture. ‘We hurtle towards our Lord’s bodily return!!’

I sat in front of the computer and wondered why I didn’t feel more enthused. After all, I tell myself that the final triumph of God is the hope that undergirds my life. The answer, I fear, is more than mere distaste for dubious analysis of current events in the light (or obscurity) of Scripture, but hesitancy at the whole thing.

The following day we sat at Morning Prayer in church and read, as directed by our holy mother the Church of England, from Chapter 5 of the Prophecy of Amos. And among what we read was:

Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord?

It is darkness, not light: as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.

Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

Well, quite. It’s inhuman to welcome mass suffering, no matter that it might be the birth pangs of something new and better, and God makes it clear that he knows this. The process of tearing apart good and evil, which at the moment are intermingled in us, is not going to be easy, never mind what it turns out to look like, and never mind when it comes. The Day of the Lord will be like surgery without an anaesthetic: adamantly necessary given the prevailing desperate conditions, but not a prospect to relish, if you are sane. Jesus says in Luke 21 that ‘when these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand’: and so we should, and there is some exultation, some leaping of the spirit, in knowing so. But it’s going to be hard, and if I see it, I doubt I will like it.

Sorry about all the religion. Fundamentalist Christians are always in an apocalyptic mood, but perhaps the whole world is presently.