You know you don’t know

You never know what’s going to happen next. Minute by minute, day by day, hour by hour. It might seems that your life is dull, predictable and routine, and most of the time it is, but it doesn’t have to be that way; that’s just the way it is right now. You never know what’s going to happen next. You know if you heat the water in the kettle enough it will boil, but that’s only because it always has, not that it inevitably will, not that you’d bet your life on it, not unless you like the idea of samovar roulette. Don’t bet your life because one day that pot will just not bubble no matter how long you wait, and it’ll be the day when you’ve confidently taken out the wager on your immortal soul with the devil at the crossroads at midnight. “But it’s always boiled before!”

You don’t know the supermarket is going to have what you want when you get there; increasingly  the shelf is empty; even less often can you be certain you’ll be able to afford it when you do. You just don’t know. Good things, bad things; you can be certain your life will have a share of each but you never know what it’s going to be most of (hint- it’s not good things) and you never know what’s going to happen next.

Most times the bad things that happen in life don’t send you a warning letter three months in advance: ‘I’m the person who’s going to scrape the side of your car in the supermarket car park and then drive off in a couple of weeks time and just wanted to drop you a line to introduce myself.’ Ping! ‘Hello it’s your front tooth; I’ve had a good run but I’m giving up my position in your mouth soon’. ‘Good morning. Sorry to disturb you. I’m one of the trees in your garden. I think I’m going to be bored after I’ve filled your garden with sticky buds, dead leaves, conkers and rotting blossom, so next  month I’m going to push my roots into your sewer and block it.’ If we knew the bad things were coming we’d try to get out of their way or stop them or avoid them, and sometimes we’d succeed. That we don’t is because we never know what’s going to happen next. Yes, the most unlikely, one in a million things happen all the time: that’s why most weeks someone wins the lottery, just not you. But it could be you (it won’t be). Lightning strikes a few unfortunates every year, but who and where and when, nobody knows, even the guy flying the metal kite in the thunderstorm might get lucky.

Our foreseeing is fuzzy, our predictions blurry, our planned out futures, approximate. Sometimes our guesses are accurate: that’s just coincidence. We don’t know. That’s just the way it is.

However; one of the things that you can always predict is going to happen, without fail, 100 per cent dead cert, every year for the past, well the best part of the past two thousand years, all that time, you can guarantee every year, at least, that someone is going to predict the date of the end of the world. Twenty twenty-five did not disappoint. This year just gone, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela predicted the Rapture would happen on September 23rd 2025 none the less. The claim was soon picked up by fringe evangelical Christians and whizzed round the world of social media before sanity could get its boots on.  September 23rd needless to say has been and gone and it seems that there were only three people good enough to be ‘caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air’ and thus nobody else noticed the beginning of the reign of the saints presaging the end of the world. You, me and the rest of us are left behind with nothing more to look forward to than a thousand years of tribulation before the conductor clips our one-way ticket to the fiery furnace. 

Either that, or the person God told the end-date to was, once more, wrong. Again. As all his predecessors have been: from Munster’s radical Baptist Bernard Knipperdolling (they don’t make names like that anymore) to Cromwell; from Qing China’s Taiping Rebellion to the Seventh Day Adventists.  All, always, wrong. Such is the enthusiasm for The End that nobody ever seems to read writing on the tin. Because, instead of a sell by date on the packaging, the world comes with the explicit warning ‘nobody knows the date or time’. God, alas, didn’t add the codicil; and that means you as well. Could be, as he is omniscient, the ultimate know-all, that periodic humiliation of millenarian hubris is all part of the divine plan. But maybe there’s another explanation. Here it is.

Let’s say one of the Date-of-Domesday  people were right. God had decided to stop teasing and had given that person the inside knowledge of when he’s calling time on the whole shebang. For the first time ever in history a person has been gifted with knowledge of the precise date and time of the end of the world. Judgement day is now the last entry in their planner. Let’s imagine they’ve strapped on  their ‘the-end-is-nigh’ sandwich–board and set off tramping up and down Oxford Street. And then, for some reason–perhaps their eyes weren’t swivelling as much as usual, perhaps they had the gift of the gab, perhaps it was just that the time was right– but this time around people actually believed what our lone prophet was proclaiming, decided that the writing was most definitely on the wall, were convinced the apocalypse was incoming.  What would their response, what would our response to the news be? Mostly, I imagine, not debauched abandon but feverish being on our best behaviour, trying to convince God that, despite our past misdemeanours, we were good people all along, just, perhaps distracted by the ups and downs of life. Now, God, you have all our attention. 

All great and good, better late than never and so on.  At some point in the future some people will have the opportunity to react in just that way. But for the rest of us, we will not know the date or the time.

It is a human constant that if we know the date in advance and that date is far enough into the future then we will put off doing what we have to do till we absolutely need to do it. There’s a reason that, for the best part of a decade,  lastminute.com was the most popular site on the web. Procrastination  comes naturally to the children of Eve.

The devout are not exempt. In the early days of Christianity it was not uncommon for a believer to put off baptism as long as possible; best, the thinking went, you should partake of this sacrament on your death bed. This was because of the belief that any sin you committed after baptism was a mortal sin. So you put off baptism as long as possible so you could sin as much as you wanted, before you had to give it all up. Not unlike what is now, sadly,  St Augustine’s most famous quip ‘Lord make me chaste, but not yet’. The practice of deferred baptism eventually died out because it’s not based on any actual component of faith, and was really about trying to have your cake and eating it. Putting off the moment of commitment till the very last opportunity as well as being a somewhat risky one in the years before modern medicine, is also somewhat cynical and quite probably sinful. And not, in the last analysis, faith.

Now ‘faith’ is a tricky word, a slippery concept; we all sort of know that it’s important but are hard pressed to define exactly what it is; is it a noun or a verb- do you ’have’ it or do you ‘do’ it; that mountain won’t move– do you then lack faith?

Alas, I’m not going to spring an easy answer on you, because, if there is one, I don’t have it.

But. Though you might have faith of a sort in response to  witnessing the son of man descending on the clouds of heaven with his reaping angels in tow, the real McCoy is the faith of those who have not seen.

Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Faith makes us cut across the grain of our procrastinating  second nature;  we can’t put it off any longer, we have to commit now. Faith makes us resist our instinctual and habitual reluctance to only do it when we have no other choice— not insisting that we have to see it with our own eyes; not waiting till there’s no doubt, but risking it all on the crazy ideas of the man on the Cross. How can they not be true?

Is faith a noun or a verb? Well it’s both of course, but for most of us it’s a thing we do and it’s acting as though the the propositions of our faith, the Christian vision, the  promises of Jesus; it’s acting as though those things are true, and it’s acting that way in the absence of any irrefutable evidence  that they are true. 

So

While it might be better to know in advance if car scrapes and blocked drains are going to happen so we can avoid, mitigate or prepare for them, that’s not the case with our faith. We don’t know the date or the time when Christ will come again, because not knowing makes us better prepared to greet him when he does, not knowing bolsters our faith. 

Here’s what Jesus says:

Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.  Blessed are those …whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.  If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are they.

Is it the middle of the night? Is it near dawn? We don’t know. We can’t know. We shouldn’t know. 

The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;  nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.

We need to be ready. Not at some point in the future, but now. The time is coming; the time is already here.

You never know what’s going to happen next. 

But you can know what’s happening right now.