When Jesus described
the walls of the Temple being thrown down and the chaos of the End Times
tearing apart civilizations and families alike, I bet that he wasn’t thinking
about zombies. But in our culture these days, think chaos and fear and
destruction and the end of the world, and your mind is very likely to go
straight to a relentless, moaning, tottering hoard of blood-thirsty zombies.
Just look at the films that have come out in the last decade: World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, and the popular
TV show, The Walking Dead. Look at
the zombie walk on Bardstown Road in August that is played out in similar
fashion all over the world. Are there any zombie fans among us today?
In order to get up to speed on this
twenty-first century kind of apocalypse, I watched World War Z this week, and lo and behold, in one scene I thought
that I was watching our Gospel lesson portrayed on the screen: In a huge
courtyard in Jerusalem, surrounded by tall, sturdy walls just like the outer
walls of the old Temple Mount, thousands of people had taken shelter from an
outside world overrun with zombies. Truly, except for the helicopters whirring
overhead, the images of this mass of Middle Eastern people singing songs of
praise and rejoicing at their safety could have come from a movie about crowds
of worshippers joining Jesus on the ancient Temple grounds. But then, stirred
up from the singing (noise gets zombies all worked up, you know), thousands of
zombies on the outside start climbing over one another, scaling the walls like
frantic ants climbing a fence, until
they reach the top and hurtle down to earth inside the walls, chomping and
biting and hurling themselves into the now-frantic crowds and infecting them
with the zombie virus, too. At the end of the scene, “parents and brothers,
relatives and friends” have put one another to death; vehicles explode and
fires of war break out; “not one stone is left upon another,” and everyone has
lost his soul. Sounds pretty much like the days that Jesus describes in our
Gospel, doesn’t it?
I’m not the
first theologian to wonder where our present fascination with zombies comes
from and what is says about our spiritual hopes and struggles. If you google
“zombies and religion,” you get long lists of blogs and articles drawing all
kinds of conclusions. One of the best is an article written by Rodney Clapp,[1]
in which he states that our fascination with zombies comes from a reaction to
our crowded lives, where we live and move elbow to elbow with crowds of
strangers in our cities and are blasted by constant electronic messages from
soulless corporations on TV and over the Internet. Think of the girl who
committed suicide recently after the taunts of bullies followed her from school
into the safety of her home via Twitter and Facebook. Think of those of us who
try to purchase health insurance online and are frustrated by the glitches run
amok in the vast, impersonal realm of cyberspace. At the same time, we are
besieged by friends and relatives who, like zombies, turn against us because of
our politics in this antagonistic age; and we harbor a constant threat of
contagion with new viruses that spread across the globe and ecological disaster
that seems impossible to contain. Such forces bombarding us from all sides can seem
as relentless and inescapable and as lacking in compassion as the power of the
“living dead,” who mindlessly devour anyone who crosses their path. It is no
surprise to me that World War Z
begins with unrelenting news flashes about global disasters, about new
diseases, about political unrest—news flashes that follow the starring family
around as they try to enjoy their pancakes on a Saturday morning, filling their
ears with rapid-fire doom.
It strikes me,
then, that there is another angle to the zombie apocalypses that fascinate us
these days. I believe that the zombies filling our nightmares are a symbol not
only for relentlessness and contagion, but for the hopelessness that invades
our secular worldview—a hopelessness fed by our inability to take seriously
passages like today’s Gospel and first reading. Don’t we Episcopalians roll our
eyes every year when these readings about the End Times come around in November
and during Advent? We are not Bible-thumping televangelists raging about signs
of the End. We cringe at all the talk of judgment. We snicker at the
implausibility of lions and lambs snuggling up together. We would like to snip apocalyptic
eschatology (theologian speak for uncovering what will happen in the End Times)
out of our Bibles and our creeds—as the more secular among us have already
done.
While I am certainly not saying that
we are to take today’s readings literally, I am saying that we Christians somehow
need to hang onto a vision of the future that we can share with others. We scorn or ignore today’s readings at our
own peril—the peril of our Christian hope. (See Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope.) In their imagery, today’s readings
give to our imaginations the two central images that we Christians must hold in
tension as we make sense of the world: images of crucifixion and resurrection.
Like the crucifixion, Jesus’ warnings
here in Luke speak to the pain in our lives and to the sin and death in our world. When
we can do nothing but cry out with Jesus, “God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” then we are holding on to the vision of crucifixion, of God suffering with
us on the Cross. The crucifixion of God is in the destruction of Jerusalem and
her glorious Temple by the Romans in the first century, and the crucifixion of God
is in the horrible devastation of typhoon Haiyan today. The ability to endure
pain, while enfolded in the arms of a loving God, comes from just such a
vision. Jesus’ Cross gives us hope that God is with us in our suffering, and it
is what will give us the grace to endure until resurrection.
The vision of resurrection is one of
wondrous transformation on a cosmic scale. Resurrection affects all of human
history, defeating sin and death, encouraging us with, as Nicolas Berdyaev
describes it, “’a dream of joy and freedom, of beauty, of soaring creative
power, a dream of love.’”[2]
Our text from Isaiah, while certainly not originally written with a Christian
view of resurrection in mind, is full of the same wondrous hope and cosmic
wholeness that we believe Christ brings us in his rising from the grave. It
shows us a return to paradise and assures us that creation is ongoing, and
that, however it looks, all is being made new. Resurrection imagery promises us
that God’s gracious will is still taking shape and will have the final word.
A world full of zombies is a world
without hope, a world without the hope hidden in crucifixion and the hope
proclaimed in resurrection. I ran across a quote from Karl Barth this week
about hope that sounds just like a description of those zombies splatting woodenly
into things in World War Z. Barth
writes, “All that is not hope is wooden, hobbledehoy, blunt-edged and sharp-pointed
… There there is no freedom, only imprisonment; no grace, but only condemnation
and corruption; no divine guidance, only fate; no God, but only a mirror of
unredeemed humanity.”[3]
On the one hand, when we ignore the Cross, our efforts to escape death on our
own are as futile and as unending as trying to flee a chomping horde of
zombies. Death will jump out at us at every turn. It will knock us down as we
cut off our own arms trying to free ourselves from its grasp. We will watch
helplessly as it takes our loved ones. On the other hand, when we ignore the Resurrection,
the joy goes out of our souls and the light goes out of our eyes. We ourselves
become the zombies, bound and wandering in a landscape without meaning, hurling
ourselves around with abandon and unseeing eyes.
Jesus tells us in our reading from
Luke that, in the midst of chaos, we Christians are called to testify. Like
Brad Pitt in World War Z, we are
called to leave behind our cozy lives, to come out from underneath our warm
comforters and to leave our Saturday morning pancakes, and to rejoin the fight.
We are called to hold up the Cross of a suffering God to those who only want
glory; to bring God’s presence into the dark corners. We are to look death in
the face and to proclaim new life, not just at the grave but in our daily speech
and actions; we are to look at what is old and proclaim that it will be made
new, no matter how silly that might sound; we are to speak justice to injustice
in word and deed. We are to cry “yes” to hope when it looks like “no” is the
only answer. There is no time to waste. The author of 2nd Thessalonians
knows that now is not the time to be weary, to waste our time gossiping and watching
TV. The world needs our Christian hope. Only our testimony can keep the zombies
at bay!
[1]
Rodney Clapp, “Attack of the Zombies,” http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-01/attack-zombies.
[2]
[2]
W. Paul Jones, “Inside Out as Upside Down,” in Weavings XXV: 2 (2010), 9.
.
[3]
Karl Barth, quoted in Thomas Long, Preaching
from Memory to Hope (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 124.
No comments:
Post a Comment