THE RAPTURE is a concept bound up with and fuelled by the fear and desperation of the powerless. Its origins in the speculative theologising of first century Christianity renders its sudden reappearance in the consciousness of twenty-first century believers all the more remarkable. Though separated from their ancient co-religionists by nearly 2,000 years, the Christians of today are confronted with exactly the same stresses and doubts. How are Christ’s followers supposed to live in a fallen world? More importantly, how are they supposed to die?
The Roman Empire, at its strongest in the first and second centuries, presented to the nascent Christian congregations of the ancient world a moral and political order that could hardly have been more at odds with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Today’s Christians, living under a globalised and aggressively secular capitalism, know how they felt. If the Apostle Paul was somehow required to answer the questions of twenty-first century Christians, he would be struck by how closely they resembled the queries of his own time.
Fuelling the questions and debates of both eras is the idea of the Resurrection. Was victory over death something only Jesus, as the Son of God, could achieve? Or could all of his followers look forward to the same physical reanimation experienced by Christ after three days in the tomb? And, if they could, would they, like him, also be lifted up into the presence of the Almighty?
It is easy to imagine how attractive the idea of ascension into a blissful second life must have been to the slaves and women who made up so many of the early Christian congregations. The only problem was, of course, that in order to get to heaven they first had to die.
Or did they? Bound up with the idea of resurrection was the whole notion of what is today referred to as “The End Times”. This fallen world’s days, it was said – most dramatically in the Book of Revelation – were numbered. Christ would return to harvest the faithful and incinerate the wicked. But how, exactly, was that harvest to be accomplished? Would it be necessary for Christ to first kill his followers in order to resurrect them? Surely not. But, if the living faithful were to be gathered up alongside the dead, then there were other questions to be answered. Difficult questions.
Paul attempts an answer in his letter to the Christian congregation at Corinth:
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
It is out of verses such as these that the idea of “The Rapture” has been fashioned. It describes the practical effects of that last trumpet blast; of exactly how “we shall all be changed”. In the “twinkling of an eye” God’s faithful servants will, quite literally, drop everything (including, apparently, their clothes) and, clad only in the imperishable glory of their newly-minted immortality, be lifted up out of this world and into the presence of God. A prospect not without its attractions to a Roman slave, or, for that matter, a Roman wife. Attractive, too, if you are a jobless, homeless, opioid-addicted American. Or, for that matter, a person longing to break free of the chains of social status and the possessions out of which those chains are forged.
But it would be wrong to think that The Rapture has significance only for those who feel trapped by poverty, or who despair of ever escaping the bonds of materialism. Powerlessness comes in many guises. Great wealth and high political office do not, of themselves, make all things possible. Some issues: climate change; social inequality; securing peace in the Middle East; have exposed cruelly the shortcomings of those who believed themselves to be good people – more than equal to the challenge of resolving the world’s problems.
Confronted with failure, such people almost never look for its causes in their own fondest assumptions. How much easier it is to seek for explanations in the utterly fallen character of contemporary society. In the refusal of the sinful to give up their sinning and follow the paths of righteousness – as people like themselves have done.
If this is how one chooses to explain the failure of the good, then it is but a short step to the conviction that there are no solutions to the world’s problems this side of the Second Coming. Only when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead will evil pass away and good be set upon its throne. Didn’t Jesus tell the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, that “My kingdom is not of this world”? Does it not then follow that “this world” is not worth saving?
One could be forgiven for concluding that The Rapture has a lot to answer for. That nothing in this world is more inhibiting of right action that the fear of death, nor more corrupting of the soul than the vain hope for vindication and compensation beyond the grave. What awaits us at the other end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death is – and must remain – a mystery. The essence of Christ’s teaching is bound up with what we do in this world – not the next.
The only rapture that matters is the rapture that flows from offering love in the presence of hate, truth in the face of lies. The rapture that flows from doing God’s will – not from being named in it.