The Plural of Apocalypse

When I was considering what to name this blog, I kept remembering the last shot of the last episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy has just leapt to her death in a supernatural rift between our world and a hell dimension to save the world again. The final shot shows her tombstone:

Buffy Anne Summers
Beloved Daughter
Devoted Friend
She Saved the World
A Lot

Joss Whedon, the genius who developed and directed the show for seven years, calls himself an angry atheist. I think it is Whedon’s passionate preoccupation with ultimate things that made him the perfect person to give us a televisions how that reflected on good and evil, the constant need to save the one from the other, and the difficulty sometimes in telling them apart.

Theology. Ethics. The struggle to live a moral life. High school, college, and other apocalypses.

One of the most important lessons the show taught me was that apocalypse has a plural. This idea surprises most people because they incorrectly associate apocalypse with Armageddon: the final battle, the end of the world. And in a way, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did use the word in that way, although of course the Slayer always averted it at the last moment.

So in fact, the show’s use of apocalypse was more like what we see in the Hebrew Scriptures. Our English word apocalypse comes from the Greek, apokalyptein, to uncover something hidden. When Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Amos were “foretelling” the wrath of God as acted out by the Assyrians, Babylonians, or other empire of the week, they were not, strictly speaking, telling what the future would be.

Rather, they were saying to Israel, “Look, you’ve messed up. Again. Forgetting the widows and the orphans. Concentrating wealth. Ignoring the alien among you and the poor. Again. And God’s pissed off. Now this can go two ways. If you keep on doing what you’re doing, then God will send enemies to generally smite you and the land will be laid waste. But if you turn back to the Lord and do justice, then God will bless you and the land will flourish.”

The apocalypse, the uncovering of God’s two options for the people at a point of ultimate crisis, is an opportunity. The people don’t have to take the bad route, the one that leads to siege, slaughter and exile (Don’t read the end of Jeremiah unless you have a strong stomach). The people don’t have to perish. They could repent, as the people of Ninevah did on hearing Jonah’s warning.

Admittedly, such repentance isn’t a popular choice. But it is a choice.

I believe that we are living in a time of apocalypse. The prophets are speaking. James Hanson, NASA climate scientist, says that if we don’t get the parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere down to 350 or lower, catastrophic changes in the climate (much worse than what we have experienced so far) will result.

This is not a threat. God is not changing our climate to punish us. But God made the laws of physics and gave us free will. So if we continue to poison this beautiful planet, God will let us live—or die—with the consequences of our actions.

The choice is ours now as it was so many times in the life of ancient Israel, only the destruction, when it comes this time, will be global, not local, and probably irreversible. As the writer of Deuteronomy said, voicing God’s message, “I have set before you life and death. Choose life, that you may live.”

I offer this blog as a very, very small act of prophetic apocalypse. I believe that you and I, dear reader, are called like Buffy to save the world.

A lot.