Raise Your Head to Meet the "End-is-a-Beginning"
For those reading with me through the Book of Revelation, or really for all of us living in times of disaster, the “end” is near. Not the end, but an end.
The optimistic gospel writer Luke is not your typical street-corner preacher. He’s far more approachable than the book of Revelation, which, I’ve learned in my deep dive research over these five years or so, barely made it into the Bible. Luke sees Jesus’s followers sprouting as a tiny seed in backcountry Nazareth and spreading as leaven through the entire Roman imperial loaf. Luke’s vision is an inclusive, generous one in which all people, especially women, children, and those in poverty, are uniquely positioned to receive God’s good news.
But even the hopeful Gospel of Luke tells of an apocalypse, too (along with Mark and Matthew). Check it out:
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. (Luke 21:25–27)
Luke’s optimism is unable to evade the existential terror of the end’s advent. Rome’s catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple—a collective traumatic event—lingers right there in Luke’s urgency, before this passage and behind this text. Jesus warns his followers that nothing will be left of Herod’s beautiful stones. All will be destroyed. Flee, therefore, he says, to the mountains. With such cataclysmic headlines breaking in his day, Luke, too, joins the apocalyptic chorus of heavenly powers shaken, of the mysterious Son of Man’s arrival, of moon and sun, stars and seas, waves and earth suffering distress.
The biblical scholars shrug, explain such portents away, and tell us not to worry. Matthew, Luke, and Mark, they tell us, all expected Christ to return in the first century. That clearly didn’t happen, so we’re off the hook from disturbing and irrational cosmic visions. Christ didn’t come back; it’s been two thousand years, and Christians are either still waiting or have intellectually moved on.
Our collective subconscious knows better.
If we are honest, we’ve always been on a precipice. The end has always been, and always is, near. Some of us coast breezily through life while some of us face such paralyzing despair and crippling addiction each day. Regardless of our life’s circumstances, and the differing heights and depths of our suffering, none of us escapes the shattering fact that there is an end, that death comes for us all, whether we are ready or not. It can feel like we are waging Armageddon, and we are. The kingdom of heaven’s arrival causes heavenly and earthly bodies to quake.
The awakening of Spirit in our own lives, far from being a smooth sail, is often a disruptive apocalypse.
In spite of all that we face simply by the fact of being alive, Jesus’ posture of faith is to have us stand up and raise our heads. Spirituality for Luke’s Jesus is not a temporary balm in Gilead to ease our pain. It’s not a pill to help us sleep through the thief in the night; not a bottle of fine wine to dull the arrival of the unexpected day. The day, the end, the Son of Man’s appearance, is not only an end, it is also the dawning of God’s realm. Jesus counsels us in Luke’s Gospel to meet justice’s realm not with cowering trepidation but with confidence that redemption is, in fact, drawing near.
In the spiritual life, sometimes disaster and salvation link arms.
Photo by Raphael Nast on Unsplash
The writer Ken Wilber distinguishes between what he calls translative and transformative spirituality. Translative doesn’t fundamentally change much. It fits into our pre-existing categories. It’s spirituality that grafts onto hungry egos. It greases wheels of the self separated from God by promising ever more insight and higher knowledge, “Your Best Life Now,” or “God’s Five Practical Steps to Spiritual Happiness.”
Such spirituality fits like a glove with consumer capitalism.
It’s not all bad: translative spirituality helps us cope and make meaning out of life’s ups and downs; it’s what largely constitutes organized religion. But it does not break with the self or the world’s established order. It conserves and protects the status quo, the principalities and powers of the “way things are.” Transformative spirituality, in Wilbur’s words, is completely different.
It “does not fortify (the) separate self, but utterly shatters it.” It brings “not consolation, but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution.” —Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber
It takes great courage to stand up when the end, which is really a beginning, is near. It takes great courage to raise our heads with full awareness of the earth’s labored groaning, with raw admission of our own vulnerability, and claim that redemption is coming. Amidst our tremendous failures, we are still capable of astonishing good.
We’re far too used to kneeling, or hunching, or bowing heads with hands pressed in devotion. Yet Luke tells us to stand, to raise our heads, take a knowing look at the world as it is, the end in all its plausibility, and keep looking, be alert, because if we turn away, we will miss the arrival of God.
As a boy raised Protestant, the end times was always a popular preaching topic. But now later in life, I have come to see that there is a terrible mercy in the apocalypse… not as spectacle, not as divine vengeance, but as the unbearable intimacy of God with the unraveling of all things. Luke’s vision, for all its hope, does not flinch from the chaos of a world in labor, groaning toward some impossible birth. And isn’t this the scandal of incarnation? That the holy does not descend to rescue us from catastrophe, but enters into it, so completely that the distinction between disaster and salvation blurs.
The scholars are right, of course, in their dry way: Christ did not return on first-century clouds. But they miss the deeper, more unsettling truth: He never left. The end is always near because God is always near, not as a distant judge but as the presence that haunts every collapse, every crisis, every quiet and unrecorded death. The "Son of Man coming in a cloud" is not just an event we await, but a reality we inhabit… if we have the courage to stand and lift our heads, to see the divine in the crumbling of empires, in the panic of nations, in the addict’s trembling hands.
Wilber’s "transformative spirituality" is I think, at its core, the shock of this recognition: that the self must be shattered because the self is the last idol, the final barrier to the unbearable truth that God is not safe, not separate, but here, in the blood and sweat of a world that is always ending. To stand in the face of that is not optimism but defiance. A refusal to look away from the wreckage, because the wreckage itself is where the kingdom breaks through.
So yes, the end is near. But only because God is. And that is terror, but it’s also grace.
Love this idea to stand up and face the winds of life, it is just a new beginning! Thank you, love and blessings to you and all.