I begin with a story.
It’s a true story, told to me by a trustworthy woman who many years ago, when she was still a child, was briefly traumatized by the 24th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, part of which I have just read to you. Both her family and her church understood the heart of this chapter to describe what has come to be known as the Rapture Theory:
Then two will be in the field;
One will be taken and one will be left.
Two will be grinding meal together;
One will be taken and one will be left.
She had been taught that all of a sudden all true Christians would be raptured (that is taken directly to heaven) and all others would remain behind to suffer the horrors of the coming reign of the Antichrist.
The child was nine years old at the time. She lived close enough to home to walk to school each morning and to return on foot in the afternoon. On this particular afternoon, she found an empty house. Mom wasn’t there. Daddy, who usually worked at home, wasn’t there. Her little brother, to whom she thought of herself as another mother, wasn’t home. She searched the house. She called their names: “Momma, Daddy, Little Brother.” In terror, she drew the logical conclusion that the rest of her family had been raptured and she had been left behind. She felt, in her own words, panicked, abandoned, doomed.
The story, I’m glad to say, has something of a happy ending. Mom, Dad, and Brother arrived a little later. They’d been at the cabin by the lake that the family owned. They’d lost track of time. They were very sorry.
I can’t read this passage from the Bible without recalling my friend’s story. I want this morning, therefore, to show you why I reject the Rapture Theory, why I understand this passage in a very different way, and why I much prefer the “reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah” that has also been read for us this morning.
First, and perhaps most simply, I don’t believe that the Jesus who said “Let the little children come to me” (Luke 18:17) would also have endorsed a theory that terrified children.
Second, the Rapture Theory is a very recent one. It can’t be found anywhere in nearly two thousand years of orthodox Christian theology, whether Roman, Eastern, or Protestant. It first appeared among small marginal groups in the mid-nineteenth century, and made its major and highly influential entry in the early twentieth century notes of what is known as the Scofield Reference Bible. In the notes, mind you, not in the biblical text itself. The Scofield Bible remains influential among those who are fascinated by the potentially very detailed fulfilment of every last biblical prophecy. Its most notable impact on popular culture, however, even among those who have never come close to touching– let alone reading– a Scofield Bible, was the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels (published between 1995 and 2007) and movies (ranging—if my Google search was correct) from 2000-2023).
Third, and perhaps most importantly, preempting both the Scofield Bible and the Left Behind series of novels and movies, is the simple fact that Jesus himself seems already to have explained the meaning of this passage earlier in chapter 24, before today’s gospel reading. According to Matthew’s account, Jesus’s disciples met him as he walked out of the temple in Jerusalem and asked him about the future of the temple buildings. Jesus replied with a question of his own:
You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.
Both Mark’s and Luke’s gospels report something very similar. Whether before or after the event, depending on how you choose to date the gospels, all three synoptic gospels here refer to the destruction of the temple by the Roman armies in 70 CE. The latter part of the chapter, which I read, speaks, I believe, of that same disaster, when some would be killed and others would survive. This is, after all, the nature of warfare. Had my friend been taught this distinction when she was nine years old and living in twentieth-century small-town America, not in first-century urban Jerusalem, she would have had no reason to fear that she alone in her family had been left behind. Perhaps she would have worried briefly—as was the case—that something else had delayed her family, but she would not have been terrified by a misguided reading of the biblical text.
The destruction of the temple was not, of course, an imaginary Rapture but it was nevertheless a disaster of another kind, a brutal case of military aggression. I’d like therefore briefly to balance today’s gospel reading with the very different and more attractive promise of peace that we heard earlier from the book of the prophet Isaiah. I won’t reread the whole passage, but I will remind you of the closing paragraph:
The Most High shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nations shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
The nations, of course, have yet to reach the complete, sustained fulfilment of this promise, but we can, I think, agree that it points in a far more positive direction than did the warning of the destruction of the temple in Matthew 24. We can also recall, as we approach the Christmas season or more immediately the start of the Advent season, the succinct renewal of this promise of peace in Luke’s account of the Nativity, where we learn that a multitude of angels sang
Glory to God in the highest heaven
and on earth peace, goodwill among people.
We can also choose to be encouraged by the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where Isaiah’s promise is incised on a granite monument: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
We have a choice. Our default mode as human beings tends to be one of fear. And we live at a time when the media actively encourage our fear. It’s to their financial profit to do so. Just as it was to the financial profit of those who embraced (and still embrace) the Rapture Theory to market multiple apocalyptic novels and movies. It’s too easy to yield to the temptation to allow the daily news and perhaps sometimes to allow our conversations with friends to heighten our fear, to govern our mood and our attitude to life. That’s one choice. Or, as a different choice altogether, we can trust God’s promise that in Christ there is peace, however incomplete that peace may yet be. We can yield to fear or we can rejoice in the promise of peace. I recommend the latter choice: faith in Christ, the prince of peace, whose birth we celebrate this advent and Christmas season.
In keeping with this, there is, I’m glad to say, another happy ending to the story with which I began. My good friend, panicked as she was by her fear of the Rapture, not only rejoiced at the return of her missing family, but has now lived for many years in full confidence of the grace of God made known to her—to us—in Jesus. She knows that she is loved by God and though she knows that human life is not without its frightening moments, she trusts God to give her peace. To quote from the final paragraph in today’s second reading and so to complete the trilogy of readings, “from the letter of Paul to the Romans,” she has “put on Jesus Christ.” Paul urges his readers—he urges us—to do the same: “to put on Jesus Christ.”