Faith and apocalypse

Editorial

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A moving scene toward the end of the film Cold Mountain depicts a dinner gathering around an outdoor table where people who had experienced profound loss during the Civil War thank God for the food and for their lives. This simple, profound image of gratitude following loss has been in my mind often during the past year—a time during which my community at Bluffton (Ohio) University suffered a tragic bus accident that took the lives of five students and during which I experienced the breakup of my marriage of 16 years.



For me, these losses will forever mark the 2006-2007 school year as a cataclysmic time, accompanied as they were by other disastrous events—the tragic school shooting a year ago in West Nickel Mines, Pa., the suicide of Lee Eshleman, the bloody massacre at Virginia Tech and, just weeks ago, a flood that engulfed Bluffton’s campus and devastated many nearby communities. In the background was the drumbeat of larger, distant disasters—the endless bloodletting in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur and the ever-gloomier statistics projecting the devastating effects of global warming.

It would be wrong to forget the important differences in scope and intensity among these events. The genocide in Darfur is not of a piece with the breakup of a marriage. Yet for those who remain alive and committed to Christian faith, the losses associated with any personal or global disaster are occasions to walk by faith and not by sight.

In the biblical tradition, disaster is often construed as both the result of sin and a context for remaking the world. The world is annihilated by a flood; God’s people are uprooted and taken into exile; Job experiences the destruction of his family and property; Jesus is killed on a cross. The faithful response of God’s people to such disasters is what we Anabaptists have called yieldedness: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord,” sighs Job. “Not my will but thine be done,” murmurs Jesus.

Such yieldedness is often viewed as passive acceptance of reality. But true yieldedness is a witness to the watching world that the apparent world is not the true world. The real world is the one inaugurated by God’s deliverance of Israel and by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

We who walk in the light of the resurrection know that Christ has conquered the powers of sin and death. While many of these disasters are the result of human failure and sin, we know the prayer of Jesus: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” All too often, we who are blinded by the powers of sin and death know not all that we do. We harm others and are harmed by others, not knowing one another or the long-term effects of our actions.

The good news of the gospel is that God forgives our blindness and is redeeming the groaning creation despite and even sometimes through our failures. Thus, the moment of disaster is for Christians a time of apocalypse, of seeking to align ourselves with the One who “makes wars cease to the ends of the earth,” who “breaks the bow, and shatters the spear” and “burns the shields with fire” (Psalm 46:9). The renewed world that is manifested in the wake of apocalypse is not an unearthly ideal; it is instead the historical and material reality of God’s reconciling people who have “come out of great tribulation” and “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb” (Revelation 7:14).

When, in the wake of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Mennonite Disaster Service discovered opportunities to remake itself, it yielded to God’s purposes and God’s Spirit as it was revealed following a horrific storm. When, in our own lives, we experience disasters, the truthful response is a posture of cross-bearing yieldedness to what John Howard Yoder called “the grain of the universe.”

Yielding is neither an escape hatch from the world’s troubles nor a formula for getting our way. It is rather the path of love, the path of those who follow Jesus Christ in life, against all worldly wisdom and habit. Even though we know this path to be narrow and hard to find, we share the journey with God’s people and are guided by the Holy Spirit. And we experience joy and gratitude as our lives witness to the time when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Gerald J. Mast is vice chair of the board of The Mennonite, Inc.

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Additional Notes

Gerald J. Mast is vice chair of the board of The Mennonite, Inc.