The Rapture – Should it be Left Behind?

1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
And regarding the question, friends, that has come up about what happens to those already dead and buried, we don’t want you in the dark any longer. First off, you must not carry on over them like people who have nothing to look forward to, as if the grave were the last word. Since Jesus died and broke loose from the grave, God will most certainly bring back to life those who died in Jesus.

And then this: we can tell you with complete confidence – we have the Master’s word on it – that when the Master comes again to get us, those of us who are still alive will not get a jump on the dead and leave them behind. In actual fact they’ll be ahead of us. The Master himself will give the command. Archangel thunder! God’s trumpet blast! He’ll come down from heaven and the dead in Christ will rise – they’ll go first. Then the rest of us who are still alive at the time will be caught up with them into the clouds to meet the Master. Oh, we’ll be walking on air! And then there will be one huge family reunion with the Master. So reassure one another with these words.

Matthew 25:1–13 The parable of the wise and foolish girls
God’s kingdom is like ten young virgins who took oil lamps and went out to greet the bridegroom. Five were silly and five were smart. The silly virgins took lamps, but no extra oil. The smart virgins took jars of oil to feed their lamps. The bridegroom didn’t show up when they expected him, and they all fell asleep.

In the middle of the night someone yelled out, ‘He’s here! The bridegroom’s here! Go out and greet him!’

The ten virgins got up and got their lamps ready. The silly virgins said to the smart ones, ‘Our lamps are going out; lend us some of your oil.’ They answered, ‘There might not be enough to go around; go buy your own.’

They did, but while they were out buying oil, the bridegroom arrived. When everyone who was there to greet him had gone into the wedding feast, the door was locked.

Much later, the other virgins, the silly ones, showed up and knocked on the door, saying, ‘Master, we’re here. Let us in.’

He answered, ‘Do I know you? I don’t think I know you.’ So stay alert. You have no idea when he might arrive.

There has been a lot said and written in recent years about what is widely known in Christian circles about the rapture. These two readings, among a few others, particularly the one from Paul’s 1st letter to the Thessalonian believers form the basis of the belief that Christians will one day be snatched up and taken away and that we will spend eternity in heaven with Jesus.

In this reading, Paul is addressing concerns that the Thessalonian believers had about what had happened to their loved ones who had died. Like many of the early Christian communities, they thought that Jesus’ return would happen very soon, even in their own lifetime. The Gospel reading also has Jesus telling a parable about being ready because we don’t know when he might arrive.

Now I don’t know about you, but in the Christian circles I used to be a part of in my early years as a Christian, passages like this clearly meant one thing and one thing only. The Gospel passage about being ready when the bridegroom returns was about Jesus’ return, the Second Coming, and being alert and ready for it. The foolish girls represented those who would be locked out of the great wedding feast and would therefore spend their eternity in hell.

Now I don’t want to focus on that except to say that I believe there will be a judgment, but about the nature of it, I’m not sure what I think. What I do believe though is that Jesus’ sternest words about judgment were always reserved for the equivalent of the church of his day, notably the Pharisees and teachers of the law. In fact the further people were from Jesus’ circle, the less judging he was. Why is it that the church is so often known as being the exact opposite? Research done in the US some years ago showed that the more religious people were, the more prejudiced they were. That is completely opposite to the sort of person Jesus was. The Gospel passage about the 5 foolish girls and the 5 smart girls is one of a number in this part of Matthew’s Gospel about judgment. This part of Matthew’s Gospel ends with the story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 where the ones who are told they won’t be part of the feast at the end are the very ones who thought that they were right with God. And this parable about the ten girls is right in the middle of this whole passage about judgment.

The main event in this story is the wedding feast. Elsewhere in the gospels, who did Jesus say would be invited to the wedding feast? The poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. The ones who are invited to the feast are those who God has a special concern for, as well as those who care for the poor – the ones who know him. What does the Bible say about knowing God? One passage, in Jeremiah (22:16), says that to know God is to defend the cause of the poor and needy. There are many other such passages throughout the Bible. Rick Warren, of ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ fame, has found out that there are over 2,000 verses in the Bible which refer to God’s love for the poor and oppressed.

And that’s part of what I think it means to be ready. How much are we doing for others? Martin Luther King said that that is life’s most persistent question. The question that every one of us will be asked on that day will be ‘how did you love?’ How did we treat the ones on the edge? How did we treat the ones who we didn’t really like very much? Heaven’s streets are full of people like that.

One of the best lines in a song I’ve heard is from Irish singer Sammy Horner’s ‘I saw Heaven’. The song is about how we always see heaven as this place where we want to end up, and that leads us to ignoring the poor because we’re so excited about the fact that we’re going to heaven. But it’s actually in the eyes of the poor that we see heaven. One of the lines in that song says,

‘they say that heaven’s streets are paved with gold, yet its citizens all seem to be broken poor and cold. I saw heaven when I looked down.’

God is close to the poor and the suffering. And to know God is to love the poor and the suffering. It is about basing our life on the Christ who served others, and who loved the outcast and the broken. That’s what it is to be ready. It is like building your house on rock, the wise ones, and building your house on sand, the foolish ones. It’s also like the old hymn which says, ‘On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand’. God loves people. He loves the world. Every evangelical’s favourite verse says it – John 3:16 – God so loved the world.

And that’s where the Thessalonians passage becomes relevant. This passage comes about as a result of some people in the Thessalonian church being confused and concerned about what had happened to their deceased loved ones. Because the consistent view in the early church was that Jesus would come back soon, the natural question when some of the believers died was “what’s going on?”

This passage is the main one on which popular rapture theology is based. This is a theology which says that believers will be snatched up to heaven when Jesus returns, and those who don’t believe will be left behind for a time when the earth will suffer a period of tribulation the likes of which it has never seen before. And so you have stories and movies like ‘Left Behind’ which are based on this and a few other verses where people will simply disappear and be ‘caught up’ in the air when Jesus returns, as Paul says in the Thessalonians passage. To visualise it, it looks something like this:

The tag line that usually goes with this is ‘Where will you be when millions disappear?’

This view has been around for about 150 years, mainly in the United States but also in the UK and Australia. It’s so popular that the ‘Left Behind’ books have sold more than 50 million copies.

The danger in this kind of thinking is not just that it is not biblical, but that it has a very dangerous impact on people’s view of the world. It promotes a view that all that matters is saving souls because our final destiny is heaven with God, and for those who reject God, their final destiny is eternal torment in hell. And so therefore, working for social justice becomes something that is not really very important, or even ungodly, because it is a distraction from the real Christian mission of getting as many people into heaven as possible.

The effect that this has on people’s lives today is frightening. For example, there have been people in the Bush Administration who have been advising President Bush that efforts to deal with climate change are a waste of time because Jesus is coming back soon to take us to heaven and the earth will be destroyed anyway, so what’s the point of working to improve the earth? In fact, let’s get what we can from it.

And so we have policies that look at how much we can exploit the earth’s resources. Ending pollution doesn’t really matter because this world isn’t really our home anyway. This thinking is popularised in many songs that we sing in our churches. ‘This world is not my home, I’m just passing through’. Keith Green sang many years ago, in his beautiful song, ‘Make my life a prayer to you’, “I guess I’ll have to trust and just believe what you say. You’re coming again, coming to take me away”. You also sometimes see bumper stickers on cars saying something like ‘Warning. Car will be driverless if rapture occurs’.

But if we look at this passage in the light of the context of what the rest of the New Testament says, we see that Jesus’ return is actually about God putting the world to rights. It’s not about us being snatched away to spend eternity in heaven, it’s about God coming here. Heaven is coming here.

So when we read passages like this one where it talks about meeting the Lord in the air, we need to look at the context of what this meant to people living in the Roman Empire in the 1st century. New Testament theologian N.T. Wright says this about it:

The emphasis is on going out to meet the King to escort him back into the city. It is Jesus coming to earth. When we celebrate Palm Sunday every year the week before Easter, what are we remembering? Jesus coming into Jerusalem, and what happens? People line the streets and put out palm leaves for him and welcome him into the city. At the end of Revelation, at the end of all things, what happens? The new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to join with the earth. This is all imagery of heaven and earth coming together at last. When Paul is writing to the Roman church, he says that the whole creation is waiting for its renewal.

This is not about Jesus literally coming down on a cloud. Just like we say that the sun rises and sets, yet we now know that the sun doesn’t really rise or set, but that the earth moves in relation to the sun, we can read this passage about Jesus coming on the clouds of heaven as meaning him being present with us. The Greek word for his - ‘parousia’ - actually means ‘presence’.

When Jesus returns, which I believe he will, it will be to put the world to rights, not to take away his faithful ones from the big bad world to go and be in some other geographical location.

And that’s why we must work for the good of the world, to love the poor and do all we can to love what God loves. That’s why works of justice, caring for the earth, and loving all who come across our path, are so essential. They are not optional add-ons to the real message of saving souls. God is coming back to put the world to rights and we are called to participate in this work. That is why Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you or among you. The kingdom of God is not some future heavenly existence. It is here and now, and we are called to help bring in the kingdom as part of our mission of following Jesus. That’s why Jesus prayed ‘may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’.

As N.T. Wright says, our mission is to be envisioned in terms of “what would it look like if God were running this show?” That’s where our kingdom work in the world is subversive. We will not be stopped by barriers to our bringing in the kingdom. And so, when it is appropriate, we will engage in civil disobedience, we will take an unpopular stand against injustice, and we will make noise about the poor missing out the most in the current financial situation. We will be the fragrance of Christ in a world of stench.
Sometimes it looks something like a stand that Shane Claiborne and some friends took in Wall Street in 2006. They were given $10,000 which was formerly invested in the stock market and they decided that this money belongs to the people, not to the elite who walk through the doors of the New York Stock Exchange every day. So, in a beautiful display of the fragrance of Christ and the subversion of the empire of greed and excess, some of them dressed up as business people, some dressed up as homeless (some were homeless). Some of them had worked on Wall Street and some of them had slept on Wall Street. With banners that had simple messages like ‘love’ and ‘hope’ written on them, they went to Wall Street and gave away $10,000 because they wanted to show that this money belonged to the poor, the marginalised, the refugees. The clip below tells the story better than I ever could:

Isn’t that a great example of subversion of empire? Much of what Paul wrote in the New Testament was politically subversive because it was saying that Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar is not. What these people did on Wall Street was a small part in putting the world to rights again, about the last being first. It was a courageous statement of the kingdom coming on earth, right in the middle of a different kingdom which cannot last. It was saying that another world is possible and that those who are trapped in poverty must be freed of that, and for those trapped in riches, there is freedom available for them too.

The mission of the church is about bringing in the kingdom, walking with the Jesus who walked with the poor and the forgotten. That’s why this passage in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is not about God snatching us away forever but about God in fact coming here to put the world to rights. to see it as the popular rapture theology does is to see it differently to Paul’s whole theology in the rest of his writings. Paul would have been out there, with Jesus, on Wall Street too saying that another kingdom is here, a kingdom where justice and love reign, a kingdom which is much more real than the empty promises of success and wealth. Straight after this passage in 1 Thessalonians, Paul adds that they are to ‘walk out into the daylight dressed up in faith, love and the hope of salvation’.

With the law of love written on our hearts, and the Spirit of God overflowing out of us, our mission is to be a part of the bringing in of the kingdom. That is the hope that we long for, that God is putting the world to rights, that there will be a day when there will be no more tears and no more pain. And like Barack Obama said in his victory speech on November 4, evoking the spirit of Martin Luther King, I promise you we will get there. We as a people will get there. Amen.