Jesus said, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down.” Mark

13:2

The World Trade Center. The Pentagon. Enron. The stock market. The New Economy. The Roman Catholic hierarchy. These are just a few of the vast, powerful structures that have come tumbling down since last September 11th.

I don’t know about you, but for me, such widespread and cataclysmic ruin smacks of apocalyptic visions in the Bible: “Woe, O great city of power. In one hour your doom has come!” (Revelation 18:9). I’ve never been a fan of these bizarre and terrifying prophecies. Like the Church’s position on contraception and women’s ordination, I’ve swept these unpleasant, fantastical elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition into a dark, dusty closet in the back of my mind. I dismiss them as arcane, archaic, anachronistic—in
other words, irrelevant to my image and understanding of God. But now I’m starting to wonder: am I just not seeing something?

Doomsday revisited

In popular usage, “apocalypse” generally means a catastrophic event, such as we saw on September 11th. But in the Bible, its meaning is somewhat different. Apocalypse, from the Greek word “apokalypsis,” does not mean destruction but revelation . Of course, these revelations are always preceded by, or simultaneous with, cosmic ruin—the dramatic demise of an old, unjust order and the ushering in of a glorious, harmonious future for God’s people.

Of course, this promise of better days is meant to give us hope in a time of trial, not scare the living hell out of us. Still, given that death, destruction, and the end of time are part of the redemptive process, the whole proposition of apocalypse remains terrifying. And it is terrifying, if we can assume, for the moment, that we are in fact living in apocalyptic times.

If what we’ve been living through this past year is a revelation, the challenge for us is to see clearly what is being revealed. Of course, it’s easy to see the revelation of human darkness in the wreckage of terrorism and the scandals of corporate greed and clergy sexual abuse. But it’s not so easy to see God. God is not riding in on a cloud “with great power and glory” ready to sweep us out of harm’s way. If anything, God seems dead in the rubble, having failed to intervene in human events and stop us from committing atrocious acts of evil against one another.

God among the ruins

But maybe that’s as God intends. In all the apocalyptic tales, divine intervention comes after destruction, never before or during. Perhaps in our flawed understanding, we expect God to save us from suffering rather than let us learn, grow, and deepen through our human experience. In all spiritual traditions, suffering is not only the ground of enlightenment and redemption but also the connective tissue that binds us together in community. Remember the profound sense of connection many of us felt in the weeks after the attacks? It seems God’s revelation may live in our hearts and move through our bodies as we reach out to love one another in times of sorrow.

These interventions of the heart, these moments of salvation and grace are small, often invisible, and we easily overlook them when our image of salvation remains stuck in the glorious, other-worldly images of apocalyptic literature. The deep challenge of apocalypse is to see God’s presence in all things, even in something as ugly and mangled as the ruins of the Twin Towers. It is to recognize the signs of the times as “the beginnings of labor pains” (Mark 13:8), as the new world begins to take shape around us.