Too bad we missed the Millennium! It was 1996, the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus, according to most biblical scholars. No matter. It's easy to ignore biblical scholarship, and celebrate the new millennium next year. Or, you may be among those procrastinators who will bring in the new millennium on January 1, 2001, the real beginning of the 21st century - there being no year zero.
But, of course, the real problem is not this historical subtlety but "what will happen to my computer?" That is the real meaning of the Millennium - the Year 2000 Problem, the Millennium Bug or Y2K, as we have come to know it, the quirky way computers get confused about dates. I don't really understand it all, but I am having my computers made compliant - just in case!
However, for some the year 2000 has other meanings. There are religious fundamentalists who believe this is the long expected year of the Parousia - the Second Coming of Christ - to usher in a thousand year reign. There are pre-millennialists who literally believe Jesus will come to reign in Jerusalem, and post-millennialists, who believe this millennium is symbolic of a blessed time of outer peace and inner harmony.
There is a long tradition of Christian millenarianism stemming primarily from the New Testament Book of Revelation. The Devil will be imprisoned for this early biblical millennium, after which there will be the cataclysmic battle of good and evil at Armageddon to usher in the end of the world and resurrection of the dead for the Last Judgment. Revelation is not my favorite book of the Bible.
One Christian computer guru believes the new millennium will bring the long-awaited apocalypse which "will call into question science, technology, the free market and the welfare state. It will call into question all of modern humanism. Christians will be in a position to win this battle. I'll put it bluntly," says Gary North, "Y2K is about handing out blame. The corporate judgment of God always is."[1] This, of course, is in stark contrast to our Universalist heritage of universal salvation in which the corporate judgment of God is about handing out love to all people.
The better known Jerry Falwell is selling a $28 videotape, "A Christian's Guide to the Millennium Bug." He urges Christians to store food and water in the basement, endorsing a SafeTrek foods survival pack at about $5000 for a family of four. He recommends having a gun handy: "If I'm blessed with a little food and my family is inside the house with me, I've got to be sure that I can persuade others not to mess with us."[2]
Lest you think these are aberrations, it seems one in four adult Christians - more than 26 million people - expect Christ to return in their lifetimes. According to the Millennium Watch Institute which charts such things, there are more than 1,200 self-proclaimed prophets predicting one form or another of gloom and doom in the year 2000.
These apocalyptic views are commonplace throughout recorded history. When the seas failed to boil after the year 1000, Christians took a rain check until 1033, the 1000th anniversary of Jesus' death. The sight of Halley's comet in 989 raised fears of the Antichrist's arrival. As one contemporary Asian observer wrote, "The passing of the first millennium changed the world as we knew it. When God did not end it all, man pursued his business with new vigor, seeing himself, not his maker, in control of his fate."[3] It took a thousand years to get the point.
What are we to make of this on Easter Sunday 1999? My dilemma is dramatized by a clever two-panel cartoon from a Canadian newspaper which first shows the proverbial long-haired, bearded figure in robe and sandals striding down the street ringing a bell and carrying a sandwich board sign, "Are you prepared to meet the Millennium?" In the next panel we see the back of the sign which reads, "Ralph's computer adjustment service - free estimates."[4]
There are zealous practitioners of technology and zealous practitioners of religion who both believe in TEOTWAWKI, a phrase coined with tongue firmly planted in cheek by columnist Dick Doherty, who says it is an old Native American word meaning the end of the world as we know it. Both groups miss the meaning of the new Millennium. Computer geeks are not the meaning of the millennium, nor are apocalyptic religionists, much as they are getting most of the press.
Spiritually, the meaning of the millennium has to do with an opportunity for humanity in general, and each of us in particular to assess who it is we are, where we are going and why. Biblical scholar Roland Emerson Wolfe once opined that, "Religion is the only area of present-day knowledge where practically no progress has been made in the last 2000 years."[5]
I'm not sure I agree with Wolfe, but it is at least a debatable point - one that should intrigue us at this cusp of human history. For example, what is the meaning of the Christ of faith for us? For me, very little, except as I try to understand what makes my Christian friends tick. What motivates them? What prompts them to think what they think and do what they do? I need to understand historically why the myth of the resurrection is so central to them - and why it does not move me. The cross is a powerful symbol -but for me, not accepting the resurrection literally or symbolically, it connotes death more than life, and it is life I must lead 'till death do us part.
I am moved by the Jesus of history, that Hebrew prophet who walked the very same hills of Galilee that I walked last summer, who strode the very streets upon which I walked in Jericho and Jerusalem, in Nazareth and Capernaum; the prophet who spoke to the people of his day so powerfully that some among them attempted to capture the meaning of his words in poetry - the gospels that have been heard and read and followed as well as disregarded down through the centuries.
In an age of stimuli overload, whose pace is too fast for human consumption, whose ethic is obsessive self-interest, whose inventions fast outstrip our capacity to use them wisely, I need to be reminded that towering above the ages is a simple carpenter and teacher who is called the "man for others." Such a figure grates upon my conscience - his very historical existence stands over against the values of our consumer culture.
The human dilemma at the millennium is not about being computer compliant or worrying about the end of the age. It is about being ethically compliant with the best we know and how we can bring some semblance of love and justice to this age. Both preoccupations - computers and cataclysms - divert our attention from the spiritual question: what are the powers that enable us to live life with zest and meaning?
At the recent Large Church Conference in San Diego I attended a workshop on spirituality in which we were asked to introduce ourselves by standing, giving our name, our church and one word or phrase that described what spirituality meant to us - it became a kind of liberal religious wave as we went around the room. My phrase was "to be is to be for others," though I was intrigued by a longer statement of my mantra, "We exist to bring wholeness to women, men and children, to translate that into compassion and action in a hurting world."
We were reminded that many of us are refugees from hedonism, materialism and consumerism, that we have been too often separated from those mysterious but real sources of our existence - nature, our ancestors, our friendships, our inner universe of the spirit. The word spirit derives from the word for breath, atman in Sanskrit, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin, ruah in Hebrew. Spirituality is like the wind, we can't see it, but we can feel its effects - it is that which cannot be seen but is life-giving. Our culture just isn't comfortable with the unseen. Even angels now have a TV persona.
How little are humanity's religious impulses considered as we approach the millennium. Even in Israel, the Holy Land, there is a project to enable the "believer" to walk on water - on the Sea of Galilee, presumably to imitate what Jesus surely didn't do. A concrete ramp is being built a few inches below the water's surface. I can see it now - thousands of tourists bringing home pictures of their loved one's walking on water. What a trivialization of religion! What a symbol for the millennium!
On January 1, 2000, I expect there will be a good many surprised people. A few computers may go down. There may well be some confusion. The age will not come to a cataclysmic end. Jesus will not come again. So what are WE going to do? We might remember that after the first millennium, when God did not end the age, people got back to the business of living with new vigor knowing that they alone were in command of their fate.
We need to put aside for a time our prophets of doom and gloom - both technocratic and religious - to sit down and think about one of the towering figures of these two millennia: A prophet who raised some most disturbing questions about how we should live.
A prophet who called into question the folly of war by urging his followers to turn the other cheek - a potentially hazardous undertaking in a dangerous world.
A prophet who challenged the powers and principalities of his day and thought that each person was the salt of the earth - be they our own kind of those of different hues and persuasions.
A prophet who thought more of the poor than of the rich, who saw the "folly of riches that stifle alike those who have not and those who have."[6]
A prophet who told parables that broke people out of their provincial ways to realize the Good Samaritan was anyone who stopped along life's journey to help another wayfaring soul.
A prophet who was unafraid to lay down his life for his friends.
A prophet who so moved his followers they believed he could never die, but must be always with them.
A prophet who, quite unintentionally, launched one of humanity's great living faiths.
A prophet who will always speak to me as - simply - the man for others.
However, those considerations are evidently too hard for our age. The British historian Thomas Carlyle expressed what might well be the modern attitude toward Jesus. "If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it."[7]
Which shall it be, then?
The Christ of creeds
Or the Jesus of history?
Which shall it be?
The religion about the Christ
Or the religion of Jesus of Nazareth?
They are not the same.
The Christ of creeds leads to assurance, confidence in miracle, mystery, authority.
He suspends the ordinary rules;
He is veiled behind a myriad dogmas; he puts an end to doubt.
The Jesus of history comes to us as brother,
One who bears the mark of the fellowship of pain;
Subjects himself to human hate, the anti-miracle;
Tears away the shroud of distant gods;
Disturbs our sleep with demand of love
By an authority deeper by far
Than a thousand creeds
Or ten thousand dogmas,
The authority of one who lived for others.I hope he'll be remembered.
Obscured by centuries of violence,
Clouded by countless creeds,
Dissected by a thousand scholars,
Preached from a million pulpits,
Mouthed by a billion lips,
Crucified by willful distortion
And innocent ignorance.
I hope he'll be remembered
In simple, unadorned humanity.
return to main page