By your endurance....gain your souls

Pentecost 26
Proper 28 - Year 
Luke 21:5-19

“By your endurance … gain your souls."

So - how was your experience of the American election, then?  Good?  Bad? 

The beginning of a new dawn?

The end of the world as you know it? 

If it was the latter, for example, do remember that people emerge from all sorts of things – World Wars, state imposed famines in Russia or China, the Holocaust and the Armenian or the Rwandan Genocide, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Thirty Years War or the War of the Roses.  In the midst of the events it will appear to those on the losing end as if the real world or perhaps just the ‘known world’ were ending.  If you tacked up a sign or scrawled some graffiti on a wall which captured the beleaguered community’s self-diagnosis or the spirit of that moment it might well read:

“No Exit”. 

There’s something quite cold, then, about the archaeologist or historian who treats this or that ten-year or even fifty-year period - as if it were just  another chapter in the human story.  You want to scream at them as they dig around toppled Corinthian columns or through the layers of bones of an ancient gravesite: “Have you no empathy?  Don’t you understand that the world ended here?”

“But it didn’t”, she says to you over the top of her horn-rimmed specs, and points with her yardstick at the layers of civilization to be found above the burnt brick and the rubble.  “Here – here and here”, she says, shrugs her shoulders and then looks at you as if you were some sort of pillock.

In the small “apocalyptic” section of Luke’s Gospel, which we are reading this Sunday, Jesus uses three imperative verbs for his followers who will live in “interesting times” – outlining the things they are to do or not do:

Verse 8: “Watch”.  From the fact that Jesus needs to say this to folks who are obviously already looking around and observing, we must conclude that the word contains some sense that discernment is more than just observation.  Open your eyes and cultivate an eagerness to see something beyond the mere facts of victory, loss and change.

Verse 14: “Decide now that you will not make up your mind ahead of time about what to say” in your defence or in the defence of your  party or your ideals.

Verse 19: “In your endurance (or patience) acquire/possess/gain your soul”.  Most English translations of the New Testament cast this as a future verb (“In your endurance you will gain your soul”) but the verb is an imperative in the original Greek text. An imperative is an instruction. There is very little which is automatic about the process. You must choose to follow it.   Waiting can just be waiting - a fruitless exercise.  But you, the faithful follower of Jesus, have taken the first two imperatives seriously, which  makes such patience a fruitful exercise. 

Discerning rather than merely watching (v.8), and refusing to cloud that discernment by anticipating every evil outcome ahead of time (v.14),  you open the door to the full possession of your own self, in its novelty and openness to God and to the world (v.19).  What could be better?  What could be more necessary right now?