“It obliges me,” Mark Twain once said, “to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man…since it now seems plain to me,” he continued, “that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one…the Descent of Man.”[1] It is a biting wit typical of Twain, and, of course, we understand him.
Stronger sometimes than our optimism is this humiliating realism, the suspicion that progress isn’t inevitable because of who are: that human nature being what it is, human history will always be what it is—a story of the rise and fall of everything, a story of decline and upheaval as often as it’s a story of victory and achievement. To be honest, it’s a more pedigreed and powerful idea than our modern belief in progress, the idea that everything is on the decline, that there’s a worm in everything. It’s an ancient pessimism, Twain jokes about, a philosophical pessimism. Plato, for example, believed that history was cyclical, turning of course in the wrong direction. At the beginning, in the “Golden Age,” as he called it, when God ran things, history proceeded in the right direction. Now, however, “the wheel is reversed, and man is left to himself;” hence the ultimately futile toil of politics and the respite of philosophical contemplation.[2]
Sometimes this almost fatalistic pessimism becomes a type of prescient wisdom of what is to come, prophecies of impending doom. Sir Henry Wilson was the Director of Military Operations for the British Army just before World War I. In the years leading up to the war, he took his vacations in France and Belgium, right along the border riding a bicycle and taking notes.[3] He knew war was coming, and he knew where it would be fought. He wasn’t a prophet, just smart. The gathering gloom had been gathering for some time—ententes, arms races, and a strange sort of hunger for national glory that left the whole world in dry tinder until it finally exploded in 1914—when Sir Edward Grey said ominously the night war was declared, “The lights are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes.”[4]
And today, among some, there is a similar anxiety, and not just among the weird and the marginal. From the tribe of economists, a few of them point to an inexorable mathematics and to an inequality unseen in a century. The prosperity of postwar America was unprecedented they say. “All signs are, however, that it is about end.” “The crisis of 2008 was the first…It is unlikely to be the last.”[5] And it’s not just easily ignorable economists. In 2010 Nicholas Boyle, a Cambridge professor of German literature and intellectual history, wrote a book titled 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis. He wrote, “It is striking how regularly, over the last 500 years, the character of a new century has been laid down by some event, both decisive and symbolic, occurring in the middle of the second decade.” The beginning of the Reformation in 1517; the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618; dynastic change in England in 1715; the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815; and the start of World War I in 1914. “So what will be the great event,” the professor nervously asks, “that between 2010 and 2020, probably around 2015, will both symbolize and determine the character of the twenty-first century?”[6] Will it be quiet or catastrophic? Was it politics or the pandemic or both? Sometimes pessimism is prophetic. Plato, Mark Twain, politicians, and pundits. We understand them; they are not entirely wrong, we begrudgingly admit. Sic transit gloria mundi—that’s a truth that makes even the most cheery optimist tremble, a truth some have begun to speak again in earnest.
Of course, Christianity appears to corroborate this gloom—biblical Christianity, that is, not that trite anemic version prevalent today, that false faith that simply tells you everything will be okay. Biblical faith can be as sobering as anything. Such is the scorn of almost all the prophets, screaming sometimes about the growing bitter fruit of idolatry, injustice, and indifference. “[P]repare to meet your God,” Amos said—as a threat.[7] Paul warned of “terrifying times in the last days” when there will be an increase of selfishness, greed, disobedience, ingratitude, impiety, callousness, conceit, hedonism and the brutal hatred of goodness—a time when people will “make a pretense of religion but deny its power.”[8] Christianity is not your source for optimism if that’s what you’re after. It offers a more hauntingly real view of things, more harrowing and not really optimistic at all.
What Christianity offers is not optimism, but rather something else, something less tied to the fantasies of the foolish. In one sense Christianity is as dark as anything, but in another sense it is a faith utterly different than the fatalism of philosophers and angry middle-aged men. And it’s this difference which is what this gospel today is all about, and what Advent is all about; the difference being hope.
Jesus here, having done with arguments, talks about the end of the world—a time of strange heavenly signs, tribulation, and violence, a time when people will “die of fright,” he said. As darkly as any prophet, Jesus simply tells his disciples to watch and pray for the strength to “escape.” But he also told his disciples to stand up straight, heads raised—in spite of the inevitable terrors of the last days. Why? “[B]ecause your redemption is at hand,” he said.[9] Here is hope. Here is that true light in this fearfully dark darkness of ours—our redemption is close, watch for it. Jeremiah said that Judah and Jerusalem would be safe because the Lord was coming in the almost forgotten offspring of David—that is, in Jesus we believe, our hope—our Savior in this world so in need of salvation.[10]
So what are we to make of this? In light of all those things in the world today that frighten us—what are we to make of this warning of Jesus? Some will be tempted to make sense of it all. Like some facile fundamentalist, some will be tempted to diagnose and predict. YouTube seems to be the Disneyland for this sort of stupidity. Even some Catholics fall into this trap of predicting the end of the world, even though Thomas Aquinas (among many others) mercilessly ridiculed those who dared. Neither the angels nor the apostles were ever told these eternal secrets, Thomas said. Why then, do you think God would ever tell you? “[T]hat time is hidden from men,” he said.[11]
So what are we to do? What is our task? Our task is simple, and it is at the heart of the Advent message. We need to look for Jesus. In this darkness we need to look for him. We need to cut out all that shallow rubbish that passes for Christianity and look for Jesus. No shallow optimism—but hope. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example—if you know anything about him—was not an optimist. There was a thread in his spirit that was burdened, dark, depressive and even at times morose—how on earth could he have been an optimist? Yet he had it in him to stand up on that dark night in Memphis and say, “I don’t know what will happen now…But it really doesn’t matter…because I have been to the mountaintop.”[12] Stand up straight, Jesus said. Hold your head up. What are we to do? What does it look like to hope? It looks like this—“I have been to the mountaintop;” looking for Jesus in the darkness.
But what does this mean practically? We need to look for him in the word of God, and that means turning off your TV, putting away your phone, opening your Bible and reading it until you get it. We need to look for him in the sacraments, and that means living your Catholic life as if you’re actually committed to it—going to Mass every Sunday, making your confession regularly, actually praying instead of just talking about prayer. Why? Because God is in these sacred things, and what you love, you want. You spend time with the one you love; when you don’t love him, you find other things to do. The same is true with God—if you love him, you’ll be there. We need to look for him in the poor and the lonely—all of them, not just the ones we like. Some folks need to read again that terrible parable of the judgment of the nations when Jesus said, “I was…a stranger and you gave me no welcome,” a parable that should either inspire us or scare us to death.[13] We need to look for Jesus, for he is to be found—in scripture, in sacraments, in strangers, and in the poor. This is a dark world, and it could be getting darker. But we are people of hope if not optimism, people who refuse to stop looking for Jesus—and that’s my point. What are we here for? Shallow comfort or salvation?
Brothers and sisters, look for Jesus. That’s your only hope. Looking for him is the only way you can hold your head up, the only way to see that faint light far off in the invisible horizon of the darkness—your redemption, closer now than it was before. Look for him, and don’t stop looking. Amen.
[1] The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, 70
[2] Plato, The Statesman 269c-270d
[3] Colin Nicolson, The Longman Companion to the First World War, 58
[4] John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History, 30
[5] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 438, 356, 473
[6] Nicholas Boyle, 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis, 4-5
[7] Amos 4:12
[8] 2 Timothy 3:1-5
[9] Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36
[10] Jeremiah 33:14-16
[11] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supp. 77.2
[12] David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 621
[13] Matthew 25:42-43
© 2021 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
