By Chris Hughes
In his 2010 sermon for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, Bill Leonard shared his views about the End Times. “If the rapture comes and I’m still on this earth,” he said, “I’m not going.”
“I’m going to hold on to a tree,” Leonard said. “Because I’ve been reading the New Testament, and I’ve decided I better stay right here with Jesus.”
It’s a peculiar answer to the complex question in the Christian faith known as eschatology, since most eschatological models do not involve personal choice. Jesus comes back, the elect or good or faithful are carried off and the rest stay to suffer. Many have re-ordered those elements over the years, but the idea remains the same. Faithful Christians find the Emergency Exit right at the moment of the world’s greatest suffering and do not have to endure it.
People have been imagining and telling the story of the end of the world for millennia. Beginning in the late Babylonian exile, Jews came to the startling realization that their suffering might never end. Zion might never be restored, and if recent events were any indicator, humanity would get more and more wicked as the years progressed.
There must be a drastic and dynamic response from God in order to correct this. God must be powerful, justice must be swift and everything must be made right. How could God be called “good” if things weren’t fixed at the end?
Religious leaders continued to ponder over this idea and so even the times of Jesus are plagued with talk of the end. John the Baptist yielded the good news that people could be saved; they only needed to repent for the end was near.
No doubt it is biblical to envision and pray for God’s new creation and imagine what the re-ordering of history will look like, but is it Christian? In other words, is it like Jesus for us to hope for immediate evacuation, devoid of trouble and trials suffered by those left behind?
Is it Christ-like to spend life-savings and charitable donations on research, pamphlets and billboards on predicted end time after end time rather than on the people around us suffering every day?
Is it like Jesus to use the eschaton to scare people out of hell the night before his return instead of calling people to a life of discipleship that requires much more?
When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom, he said that even he did not know when it would come. When he described what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, he spoke in parables, allegories and riddles that pointed to its nature.
He described a father with a prodigal son who, upon the son’s return, threw the whole town a party.
Jesus talked about a woman who lost a coin and turned the whole house upside town in order to find it. When she finally did, she spent it all on a party.
And finally he spoke of a lost sheep, and the shepherd who left the entire flock in order to wrangle up the lost one.
We often read these stories from the perspective of the lost son, coin or sheep, but they are actually about the finders. More than simply assuring us of our own salvation, Jesus wants us to follow the examples of the father, woman and shepherd — to risk everything to go after the lost and disillusioned, to turn over every piece of furniture in the hopes of finding them and to celebrate to high heavens with everyone else when they come home.
If these stories teach us anything, it’s that following Jesus means harder work than bailing and pulling a rip chord when the going gets rough.
If the End Times really are upon us, we would all do well to decline the opportunity to escape — not because we do not want heaven, but because there will be a lot of work still left for us to do right here on earth.
While some Christians would rather buy billboards, traveling vans and countdown websites, I think I’m going to grab onto the deep-rooted tree right next to Bill, and ask if it will be OK for me to stay there with him and Jesus until that last ones come home.