Emigration

The experience of emigration is a stressful one. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, altogether and at the same time. In the last few months leading up to emigration from South Africa, much of my attention was taken up with paperwork and the administration required in leaving one country to enter a new one. I had little time for the inner work of what emigration might mean. One morning, while in the shower, I paused to enjoy the sound of South African birds outside my window. I recognised the sounds of the crested barbet, the piet-my-vrou, and the hadadas. I wondered what birds I would hear in Australia, and at that moment the reality hit me that I was leaving everything I knew and loved. My whole world was coming to an end. I didn’t cry, I sobbed – the primal sobbing when a piece of your soul is removed from you, without anaesthetic. I was traumatised at the relationships I was leaving behind, and that I was tearing children away from beloved family. The end of my world dawned on me and the fear of the unknown overwhelmed me.

Ten years later we are grateful for the gentle home Australia has provided. We are delighted at the safe place we have been gifted to raise a family with joy and freedom. We have been afforded the privilege of building a good life that we do not take for granted. I look back at the catastrophe in the shower and while I would never wish such a grief on my worst enemy, that moment has become a precious part of my story. The end of one chapter allowed for the beginning of a new one.

It is part of the mystery of being human that we experience moments where our world is shattered, where everything we once knew and trusted is taken away from us. Many describe the experiences that led to moments of freefall when the stable ground beneath is dissolved. Death, divorce, the loss of a job, debilitating illness, the loss of a home and everything in it, the loss of faith: such chaos is life shattering. Endings are painful, yet they are the necessary beginning of new life; this is precisely the point Jesus makes in Luke 21.

Jesus communicates the precariousness of the present in language designed to cause anxiety.

While some admire the solid beauty of the temple, Jesus declares that what looks so fixed and stable is passing away. In sum, Jesus says that:

o   our religious structures will fall apart in chaos,

o   our political structures will fall apart in chaos,

o   and our environment will go bananas – there will be earthquakes, floods, and plagues.

Sound familiar? If one chooses a literal or fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture, Jesus’ “predictions” may seem rather frightening, and imminent: Plagues?…H1N1…Covid 19… check. Earthquakes? In 2004 an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia killed more than 200 000 people in several countries. Wars? We thought the days of one country invading another were over until Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. In every century there have been disasters to predict the end of the world. From the time that Chicken Licken thought the sky was falling down, there have also been no shortage of “prophets” predicting the end of the world.

I would advise against a literal interpretation of Scripture, and, having understood the context of Luke 21 I would also suggest we allow the scripture to speak to us as a metaphor, allowing it to speak many truths on many levels.

As you know, the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is a corner stone in the Gospel of Luke. The Gospel begins with Zechariah praying in the temple (Luke 1.5) and ends with the disciples praying in the temple (Luke 24.52-53: “And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God”). In between Zechariahs’ vision (Luke 1.12) and the apostles’ worship (Luke 24), the Lukan narrative journeys from Nazareth to the Jerusalem temple where the showdown between Jesus and the powers takes place and Jesus is crucified.

The point Luke makes in chapter 21 is that the temple failed to live up to God’s ideal.  The disciples who should have known better admired the beauty of the temple. Jesus helped them to see it as it really is, he points out a widow whose poverty financed the extravagance of the temple they admired: “The Pharisees devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers”. The temple was built on the exploitation of the most vulnerable who are then literally left without a home. Things are not what they seem, the temple takes from the poor to give to the rich. The temple was the thing that Jewish people could be most certain of. Thus the destruction of the temple in 70CE by the Roman emperor Titus was more than devastating, it was as if God had died too.

When what is certain and taken for granted destructs Jesus reassures his followers that everything will work out in the end. Jesus encourages his friends to practice the faith he modelled and to trust in what he taught. In today’s parlance Jesus might say “Keep calm and carry on”.

Jesus vividly describes the end of world, in every age ordinary people have experienced their world falling apart, the centre of their world caving in. As Jesus comforted his disciples so he comforts us too. Jesus reminds us that there is a new beginning out of every painful ending, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the time. When dreams crumble, when someone you always trusted dies or worse betrays you, when your health or wealth evaporates, when you lose your “Jerusalem”, your touchstone, Jesus reminds us that things are not always what they seem, that the end of one chapter is the beginning of a new one, that out of death comes life. Anxiety and depression are on the rise, and why wouldn’t they be with how resilience has been tested since 2020. When one is in the clutches of an anxiety attack it may feel like it will last forever. Scientists assure us that 90s is as long as a bad feeling lasts. Anxiety is bad, really bad, but it does not last forever, even if it feels like that at the time.  In the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel the owner comforts the guests who feel that everything is falling apart. He says: ‘Everything will be all right in the end… If it’s not all right, then it is not the end.’ Herein lies a profound theological truth, though our trusted institutions crumble, though dreams fade, though the church seems to be in decline, though we let go of what was once self-evident, in the end everything, yes, everything will be more than all right. And if is not all right, hold tight, it is not yet the end.