Matthew's mountain--climbing and changing

Matthew 24:36-44
Jesus said to the disciples, "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."

Alexander Shaia in his work The Hidden Power Of The Gospels speaks of a central task, a question that each Gospel asks. This question was forged by the lived experience of each actual community whose struggles gave birth to a Gospel text. Shaia identifies the Jewish Christian community of Antioch, reeling from the destruction of the Temple and struggling to understand the newness brought by their puzzling Messiah, as the progenitors of the Gospel of Matthew, and identifies the burning question of Matthew as: How do we move through change?

This opening text of Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary brings us face to face with the image of change as presented by Matthew's Jesus immediately before his Passion. Sadly, this imagery has been cherry-picked and cobbled together into a lurid brand of selectively-literalistic apocalyptic literature and rhetoric that I say runs contrary to the Gospel's use of it. Popular contemporary Christian apocalyptic is used to hammer home the veracity of certain presentations of the Gospel, for the most part culturally and politically conservative presentations. The imagery of apocalyptic can be employed, as has many "fire and brimstone" teachings through the ages, to literally "scare the hell" out of people, to authenticate the voice of various forms of religious authority and assure obedience to it. An even less savory use is to give a sense of entitlement and assurance to those who have decided they are "the faithful", coupled with an edge of unpleasant satisfaction at the comeuppance given to the unbeliever. After all, what does one do if one is "Left Behind"?

But I do not think this text provides any of these doctrinal assurances or affirmation of entitlement. Jesus says something simpler: the ordinary is deceptive, for nothing is ordinary. The purposes of God are deeper than we can understand. There is unpredictability hard-wired into our ordinary-seeming lives. This is a deeply subversive message, both to our own understanding as well as to the voice of static religious or political authority. Jesus does not say that the good, the pious, the doctrinally or politically correct will be "taken"; only that there will be deep and unpredictable disruption of our lives and our relationships and of our understanding of "the ordinary." What to do, how to be in such a reality? Like a householder on guard--live as a Watcher. Watch! Wake up! Traditional angelology spoke of an order of angels called "Grigori", the "Watchers." Do like a Watcher, and watch! Wake up, look, learn!