Do Earthquakes Like Japan's Suggest the End of the World?

Matthew's Gospel reads:

As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?”  And Jesus answered them, “Take heed that no one leads you astray.  For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray.  And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs. (Matt. 24:3-8)

The common interpretation is that Jesus was giving us signs to look for as harbingers of the end of the world. I don’t think that this is correct.

For one, it would be very inconsistent with His firm, explicit instructions from the same discourse not to worry about or to look for when the end is coming. In fact, in this quoted passage, He actually seems to be cautioning His listeners that reading into these kinds of events can lead one astray.

However, another interpretation of His words exists which is consistent with these messages, namely, one could understand the passage such that Jesus is telling His disciples precisely that these kinds of events are not signs of the end. Remember, He is speaking here to a group of mainly Jews living in an age and with a theological outlook wherein every negative event was taken as a sign of God’s anger. These are the people who asked Jesus whose sin was responsible for a man’s blindness, and who assumed that the fall of the tower in Siloam was yet another punishment. Moreover, He knows that within a generation the terrible disasters of Nero and the destruction of the Temple were to come. It is this people to whom He’s trying to give His message not to see the end of the world behind every falling rock or crashing tower and so be led astray.

Thus, it seems probable to me that His message was, rather than that the terrible events He lists are signs of the end, that they are just simply everyday events which will happen time and time again as the years carry on. “Over the thousands of years until my return,” He says in a sense, “there will be many earthquakes, wars, and famines. These are normal. They don’t mean the end is near.”

And indeed history has been filled with wars, famines, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other such events, and there will be more in the future. I have seen claims there more occurring now than in the past. I don't have the data to evaluate that claim, but if it is true, so what? Geology and climatology are defined by long cycles of increased and decreased activity. If we are in a cycle of increased activity, all the more reason to pray and be vigilant that we may be ready when Christ calls us by name and demands of us an accounting – but no reason to read in these things that the end is near. I dare say Christ told us not to.

The Meaning of Christian Priesthood

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God created man in His own image, and God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good.  Yet in spite of such glorious and auspicious beginnings, man could not carry on more than a brief moment before the terrible ignominy of sin had torn asunder his relationship with the loving Creator to whom he owed his very being.  Since that time, the life of every human being has been driven by the great, often misunderstood longing to cross the threshold that sin has wrought and return to the loving embrace of Our Father.  The means to this reconciliation, somehow revealed by God to those first transgressors, has been handed down since the time of Cain and Abel, and so all men everywhere have always known that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. Thus has the priest always been the constant fixture in all cultures, punctuating every period of human history.  He – or in those places where men had exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images, she – has, in every place stood daily at service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, until, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son to become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

Therein lies the distinctiveness, the dignity, and the importance of the priesthood of Christ, which is the priesthood of the Church of God.  Men have sought since time immemorial to turn to God, and have employed the services of the priest for just as long.  However, only when God Himself became a priest in the person of Jesus Christ could such a ministry achieve its intended end.  Jesus Christ is our high priest, and He now continues His ministry through the hands of those men whom He calls to serve in His person at His Altar.  While Christ serves in the Holy of Holies of Heaven, the men of the ordained priesthood perpetuate His ministry on earth, making present to the people of God His one, eternal offering to the Father.  They serve not as priests in their own right, but by participating mystically in His one eternal priesthood, and as such, a true appreciation, and any real understanding at all, of the ordained priesthood can only be found in an appreciation and understanding of Christ Himself.

Carrying Our Crosses

"Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me," Jesus said," cannot be my disciple." There is a great deal of meaning behind these words, and many Christians do try to pay attention to them. Our lives will contain many burdens we must bear, sufferings we must go through, and personal difficulties we must struggle through. We are called to bear these things as Jesus bore His cross: with humility, patience, love, and even thanksgiving to God our Father. I think we understand this. We don't always like it or do it, but we at least understand it.

However, the problem is that we typically acknowledge this and move on, or we make some half-hearted resolution to do better and then go back to our old ways. What we really need to do is actually carry our crosses, and suffer with Jesus. But this is what we've been trying to do - how can we do it?

There are many answers. The one I want to focus on here is to realize just what it means to carry our cross - and what it tells us. After all, we know we have to carry our crosses, but what does that actually mean? Why do we have to carry our crosses; what difference does it make? We all have some vague idea of it, to be sure. We know that we are sharing in Jesus' suffering when we carry our cross. We know that we are offering a sacrifice of praise to God... but does this mean anything personally to us?

I'm going to say something rather shocking here: Jesus couldn't save us alone, and He didn't. He needed human help. This is an incredibly shocking, if not scandalous, thing to say - but it's the reality, and in fact we are all familiar with this fact even if we don't realize it.

We all know Simon of Cyrene, even if not by name. He's the person that the Roman soldiers forced to help Jesus carry His cross. Matthew, Mark, and here Luke, recorded it: "And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus." (23:26) This shows us that Jesus allowed another person to help Him, and this itself is rather significant. Jesus wants us to be able to play a part... He did what we couldn't do, but He also didn't hoard it all to Himself so as that we can't do anything to help.

I have heard it explained rather beautifully by Rosalind Moss, a writer for This Rock magazine and a Jewish convert. Imagine, she says, a mother baking cookies in the kitchen when her little daughter walks into the kitchen behind her and asks to help. Now the mother doesn't need the child's help; she has the ingrediants, the tools, the bowls and cookie sheets, the oven, and the ability to put it all together to make cookies. In fact, the child could never make the cookies on her own. She couldn't even reach the counter! Is the mother going to not allow the poor child to help? Of course not... she loves her child, and she wants the child to feel a part of it and to help if she likes. Jesus is infinitely more loving than this mother, and so He would do no less for us. After all, if, Rosalind says, you could go back to Calvary and hold up Jesus' arms a little bit as He hung on the cross to take some of that burden off of Him, wouldn't you?

We can see that Jesus allows us to suffer with Him, then. This in itself is absolutely fantastic - to share in God's very own work and suffering. Words cannot convey how wonderful this is! If we only consider this, how can we not carry our crosses, realizing what an oppurtunity we are passing up!

But I said more than this. I said that Jesus couldn't save us on His own - without Simon. Why does it matter that someone else helped Him? Why does it matter that Jesus allowed Him to help, even if it is an astounding participation? Let's ask, then, why did they make Simon carry the cross? The answer must be because Jesus was incapable of doing so. This is the way it was depicted in The Passion of the Christ, and it makes a lot of sense. The Romans weren't nice guys, especially when it came to executions. They were ruthless. They didn't just want to be nice to Jesus here. The only reason they ever would have done this is if Jesus was actually incapable of carrying the cross on His own any further.

There's an incredibly important distinction here. Jesus, in His Divinity, certainly needed no help. God doesn't need help with anything. But in His humanity, Jesus did need help. His human body was spent. It couldn't go any further. He needed the addition of Simon's humanity, as it were, to finish the job.

But to say that Jesus - the God-man - needed Simon is different. He was, after all, God and man, so why could He not simply have miraculously lifted His body up and kept it going? The answer is, no, He couldn't, not if He wanted to save us. Jesus became man primarily to be a human representative - a sinless human representative - to God the Father on our behalf. Some human being needed to offer God a perfect sacrifice, but because all human beings were sinful, none could. Christ couldn't offer this simply as God, because then it would be God offering God a sacrifice; there would be no benefit to humanity, because no human would have made the sacrifice. If Christ had performed some miraculous act to offer the sacrifice, then it would have essentially subsumed His humanity, and the sacrifice wouldn't have been an authentically human act. his role as human Mediator would have been destroyed, and the sacrifice would have been no good for us.

So without Simon's help, Christ couldn't have made it up to Calvary to be put on the cross. What's more, up until the point of actually being put on that cross, the sacrifice couldn't necessarily be said to have been offered, even had Jesus died on the way. His sacrifice was a spotless sacrifice, a sinless one of Christ being obedient unto death (cf. Phill. 2:8). Up until being nailed to that cross, Christ hadn't done that yet. He had gone far, but not all the way. He hadn't actually been obedient to death, because He hadn't put Himself in the position definitely to be killed yet. For example, He could have escaped, or tried to. He certainly could have sinned on the cross, too, by rejecting His death even as He underwent it, but there is something a bit different about this. This would be a different way He could have sinned, but there was still the fact that He had not yet actually gone all the way to death, not volunatarilly. Allowing Himself to be nailed to that cross was truly a consummation of sorts to His acceptance of death.

Simon made up what was lacking in Christ's sufferings, then. In fact, this is exactly the choice of words Paul used in Colossians when he explained his sufferings: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." (1:24) This is a wonderfully deep statement, in light of what we have been discussing, and it leads directly to the point of all of this. Note that Paul said that it was in his "flesh" that he made up what was lacking, just as Simon had made up in his flesh. Simon provided what was lacking in Christ's bruised and battered humanity. St. Paul said that he was doing the same.

Let's consider one more thing. Simon was one of the most common names amongst Jews at the time of Christ. Cyrene was an important gentile port city, from which the entire world could be reached. Simon of Cyrene, represents, essentially, the everyman. He is the common Jew, and the gentile from anywhere in the world. The place he took is the place that any person could take. When St. Paul bore his own sufferings well, he took the place of Simon. Paul carried his cross, and in carrying his cross, he was not carrying his alone, but that of Christ. He was adding to Christ's afflictions what was lacking, just as Simon did. And when we bear our crosses, we do the same.

And this is the reality of our crosses. Our crosses are not simply difficulties to suffer through out of praise, but to take part in the true sacrifice of Christ. They are sufferings by which we take part in the ultimate praise, the only praise ever complete enough for God, the praise of Christ's offering on the cross. When we bear our crosses, we bear His, and when we bear His, we become a true part of His sacrifice, His sacrifice of praise, His eucharistion (Greek: thanksgiving). We hold up His arms that little bit - out of love. To be His disciple, we must take up our crosses, for apart from that, His cross would lay on the ground with Him just inside the walls of Jerusalem.

This also means something very important, so much more important than anything else. It means that Jesus didn't just die for us but He died for you - personally. Every step He took on the way of the cross was for you and you personally. In the grand mystery of the Incarnation, His steps were at once for all mankind and exclusively for you. He died because He loves you - not because He loved mankind, not because He loved everyone or because He loved me or us, but because He loved YOU.

Thinking of this, our crosses must seem like toothpicks.