In this post, I reflect on a perspective that can be gleaned from Jesus's treatment of individuals, his sermons, his parables, and his comments on end times to determine how Jesus addressed the subjects of past, present, and future. I have purposely avoided calling this a Christian perspective because I'm not at all sure that many Christians would agree with my interpretation of Jesus's teaching.
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"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. " Jesus as quoted in Matthew 6:34 (KJV)
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This quote from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount sums up Jesus's way of facing the future: Don't worry about it. The future will have a whole new set of issues to address, so deal with them then. In other words, don't get ahead of the game, focus on today.
This seems to be sage advice for the times in which we live said by a man who lived in and at an extremely uncertain and polarized time and place. It was a time in which many of the people of Judea longed for glorious past of King David which was projected into the future as the hoped for Messiah that would bring such longings to permanent fruition. It was in this environment that Jesus famously stated that house divided against itself cannot stand - a prophetic statement that was dramatically played out as a major factor in the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 CE.
DEALING WITH THE PAST
Jesus's approach to this longing for an idealized past was to address it by focusing on the present. While he did not argue against this longing and kept his finger on its pulse, he demonstrated that the Kingdom of God they longed for was present now, and that it was brought into realization by how people of his time treated the least and most vulnerable. For Jesus, the past was not something to idealize or idolize but rather to forgive it in tangible ways. For example, the chronically sick and the social outcast were considered products of a sinful past. They or one of their relative supposedly did something sometime that resulted in their infirmity.
Jesus did not verbally argue against such ideologies, rather he demonstrated the injustice in them by first forgiving the sick and then healing them. Jesus understood that people learn through experience more than through intellectual discourse. A person forgiving another person's sins was considered at the time an outrageous affront to God's authority, much more so than actually healing the person. In doing so, however, Jesus was removing the person's past and bringing the person fully into the present as a person whose sin was no longer before her or him or before anyone else as a psalmist once suggested was always the case.
COPING WITH THE PRESENT
Jesus's approach to the present was in embracing its everydayness and to see life as empowering in its own right. "Consider the lilies of the fields and the birds of the air," says Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. Then there are the Beatitudes which serves as a preface to this sermon where blessedness is not defined in terms of those who wield power or possess wealth but rather by those who don't - the humble, the meek, the peacemaker, and the persecuted - people who don't draw attention to themselves and largely go about or try to go about their lives unnoticed. Jesus approached the "evils of the day" by forgiving and healing people - by addressing what is and who was presented to him.
The healing of one person is, at some level, the healing of all persons. Contrary to all appearance, we are not different from each other in substance or being, merely in the manifestation of that substance or being by the life conditions we find ourselves in at this present time - where we live, the culture we are part of, and the ideologies we adopt and adapt to.
It seems Jesus understood this very well. Jesus's approach to coping with the injustice, the evil of the day was to forgive, heal, reset, and restore justice one person at a time. Yes - he addressed the injustice of his day rhetorically, but he also did something about it one person at a time. He did not raise an army to vanquish an enemy army. Rather he loved the enemy, one person at a time and where this was received, reconciled that person with himself. In the end, he became the foundation upon which the world's largest theistic religion was built - one person at a time because the perspective Jesus worked from was that each individual is valuable; a child of God, a brother or sister of his.
Jesus was a prophet of the present, as most prophets are. As a prophet, he pointed out the ignored obvious, which most prophets do. As such, tomorrow is not the issue, today is. Jesus did not forecast a future, but explained the trajectory of current human behavior.
FACING THE FUTURE
The future of Jesus's day was largely caste in apocalyptic hues, which seem to satisfy the frustration people in every age have with the age, the suffering and injustice they feel is being done to them or being played out by those who wield authority at the time. Jesus did not waste time trying to change people's minds about their apocalyptic beliefs. He may have shared them, but if he did he brought relevance to them by making them a concern of the present not only for the powers that be, but for every individual who listened to him.
In spite of all the apocalyptic imagery he used, Jesus largely treated the future as the blank page it is in the present, a tabula rasa on which would be written the deeds of today. The future flows from the present as the present flows from the past. In the synoptic gospels Jesus admits he doesn't know when or how the end will take place. He advises his audience not to get caught up in signs or with those who claim to be a messiah. Jesus doesn't dismiss signs nor does he advise his audience to go into hiding or sell off their property, rather he advises them to stay awake and treat each other well.
Jesus's approach to history is that it indicates compassion, forgiveness, mercy and loving reconciliation will stand and anything less than that will become meaningless and nonexistent. The implication is that should the human species fail to engage in seeing this trajectory come to fruition, the world and our species will become meaningless and nonexistent. One does not have believe in an apocalypse to understand that when it comes to what we humans do, we hold the keys to our annihilation as well as our salvation. This has never been so evident as it is today.
I don't believe Jesus preached a message that ever relieved us from our humanity; from our responsibilities of doing justice, showing mercy, being compassionate, being forgiving and engaging in reconciliation. In his reported discourses on judgement, Jesus attaches what we do to each other rather than what we believe in as the true measure of faith and salvation. Read Matthew chapters 24 and 25.
It is important not to encase these metaphorical stories in concrete and make them strictly about goats and sheep, good guys and bad guys, and so on. There is such a thing as forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and reconciliation that can occur now and in each and every day hereafter. While we live we have the opportunity to forgive and be forgiven, to show mercy and be recipients of mercy, to show compassion and be shown compassion, to reconcile and be reconciled.
During his time, Jesus was setting an example of how to address the problems we are living with at the moment of their occurrence. What was and remains unsettling about Jesus's teachings and his actions was his intense focus on the present - on what he referred to as the Kingdom of God, which was not something coming around the next bend but was at hand and here for the grasping. Our treatment of the present is like reading a good mystery novel and wanting to skip to see how it all ends instead of wading through the plot as it unfolds.
There is no mystery behind the world ending. The universe will end. That's a trajectory based on scientific fact. It is no mystery that, for the most part, we are the cause of our own misery; that we inflict mental and physical pain on ourselves and others. We are witnesses to this fact's blatant display via the news media every hour of every day.
The essence of Jesus's teachings is when it comes to living now what we do now matters now. In doing what is just, merciful, compassionate, forgiving and reconciling each other to the truth of love in each and every opportune moment removes much of the human based reasons for fearing the future. In my opinion, the trajectory that Jesus's teaching has on human understanding is that we have less to fear of God's judgment and wrath than we do the judgment and wrath of our fellow human beings. God is merciful. We humans are less so, and that remains an every day problem for now.
Until next time, stay faithful.
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