Holy Week, Day 4: On Learning to Love in a Loveless Age

In Jesus’s teaching during this week, we get a description of the events of the last days, prior to His Second Coming, the ‘end’ of the world.  The word ‘end’ here is the Greek telos, which transforms the text for me.  Telos does indeed mean end, but it implies the idea of a ‘end state of a thing’, a thing reaching it’s potential – that is, going from a state of potentiality to actuality – and therefore ‘flourishing’ it what it is meant to be.  Telos therefore implies a growth process, and a final fulfillment of that process.  So, if we are interested in the telos, we are also interested in how we get there – that, is, we are interested in the end state to be achieved, and also the means by which we reach that end state. 

So, the ‘end’ of the world seems to imply that there is a final ‘end state’ – and a good final end state, by the way – which can only be achieved by a certain process.  And indeed, Jesus tells His disciples that when they witness the terrible events of the last days, they should not be troubled, but they should understand that ‘it is necessary for these things to happen’ … in order for the telos to be fulfilled. 

And the events will be terrible indeed.  There will be false Christs who will mislead many.  There will be wars, rumors of wars, and … well … just lots of rumors (conspiracy theories), lots of deception.  People will rise up against people; ‘people’ here comes from the Greek ethos, so it seems to imply troubled race relations.  And there will be famines, pestilences (pandemics), earthquakes.  There will be the persecution of those who have taken upon them the name of Christ.  And there will be problems within the body of Christ as well – many will fall away, be offended, and betray one another and hate one another.  The ‘love’ of many will run cold.  ‘Love’ here is agape, which is charity, the pure love of Christ.  Agape is the love that Heavenly Father has for Jesus, and it is the love that Jesus has for us.  And it is the love that we, as followers of Christ, are meant to learn and develop toward all of our fellow human beings.  This love will run cold in the last days.

So, one message here seems to be that it is necessary for bad things to happen in order for the ‘fulfillment’ of all things – some kind of completion of us as God’s children, and/or the world.  While the events are awful, and also surely coming to pass, I do find a kind of comfort in knowing that these bad things are for a greater purpose – or, at least, will be used for a greater purpose. 

But there is another message that needs to be articulated here.  As individual children of God, we too, have a telos.  We have an ‘end state’, one of ‘final flourishing’, and that is to become like Christ.  The way that we become like Christ is by developing agape – unconditional, Christlike love for our fellow human beings.  So there is a tension here.  In the last days, agape will run cold.  But, as followers of Christ, we must not let this happen to us.  We must not let our love for other people run cold.  The last days are going to be days of fighting, enmity, bad will and profound struggle, but somehow we must keep loving people in spite of this enmity.  We must fight against evil, but not against people. 

The Russian Christian existentialist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that we need to see people as ‘carriers of evil’, but not as evil in themselves, and this strikes me as exactly right.  He argued that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart.  How do we love people who are doing very bad things?  How do we love people who hate us?  We must understand that there is still good in them, just as we are trying to develop the good in us.  Solzhenitsyn only came to understand this himself in tremendously difficult circumstances, where profound enmity and hatred was showed toward him.  In this sense, perhaps it is in these conditions of the last days that we can gain a deeper understanding of God’s love, and how to develop it in ourselves.  Here’s to hoping.