Reading Luke 20:45-21:11 Ecologically: Part Nine

As the Lucan gospel unfolds, we find Jesus in the temple (Lk 19:45ff), drawing his ethical teaching to a close and turning readers’ attention to the future and to how early Christians might live into that future. I suspect we give little attention to the final segment of the preaching of the Lucan Jesus, the section we call apocalyptic. However John Haught in his recent book, Resting on the Future, invites us to a re-discovery of the biblical notion of future promise. He suggests that it resonates with the scientific understanding of an unfinished universe and points to a God who emerges out of the future that is unfolding up ahead of us. With this comes an invitation to re-engage with the apocalyptic.

Near the Temple

The section Luke 20:45–21:11 contains a complex mix of different types of narrative. But they are all situated in the same material location — Jesus is teaching in the Temple precinct or on the Temple Mount (Lk 19:47; 20:1). This context invites the ecological reader into the materiality and sociality encoded in this text.

Jesus and his listeners are surrounded by the huge limestone blocks that had been quarried out of the earth, shaped and laid by thousands of workers who built the Herodian Temple just decades before. The materiality of the stone and other Earth elements constituting the Temple, was visible and tangible. Not as visible was the experience of the workers, many of whom would have lost their lives in the building of the massive temple. All this is part of the fabric of the Lucan text.

Standing on the pavement of the great stones, Jesus speaks to the disciples in the hearing of the people (Lk 20:45) thus creating a complex web of relationships. And he speaks to them about another group, the scribes, who may have been visible on the Temple mount. They were the ones versed in God’s law through the study of that law and its interpretation for the religious leaders and the people. However it is not this work that Jesus addresses, but rather the way they appropriate material elements for their own honour. The cloth constituting their long robes and the wood of the seats they claim at banquets and in the synagogue. It could be easy for the reader to miss Jesus’ strongest rebuke of the scribes’ conduct — they “devour” the houses of widows. They appropriate the material dwelling place of one of society’s most vulnerable in an unethical way, rendering these women even more at risk. Ethics is bound up with the material.

Gifting in the Women’s Court

This is made evident in the very next episode in the story. The location is the Women’s Court on the Temple mount. In the colonnade surrounding this court were a number of receptacles for offerings — some for specific purposes like the temple tax and others for general offerings to the Temple as gift. Here the material, the social and the religious interplay and Jesus would have seen it as he “looked up”, as Luke 21:1 suggests.

What the Lucan writer highlights is that Jesus sees, Jesus notices, Jesus notes. His sight opens his awareness to the material elements around him and people placing their gifts into the receptacles. Initially Jesus sees people described as “rich” putting in gifts and perhaps drawing attention to the value of their gift as they deposited it. But something else captures Jesus’ gaze. It is a woman described as a “poor widow”. To be widowed makes a woman vulnerable; to be poor and widowed renders this woman doubly so. However she is the one who draws Jesus’ attention as she puts two small copper coins into the treasury. Her coins come in their materiality, minted from Earth elements. Society has evaluated them as the least valuable of the coins.

Jesus does not participate in this social evaluation process. He reads and interprets differently and his opening phrase “truly I tell you” functions to emphasise this difference. The text doesn’t tell us as readers the value of the gifts that the rich contribute. But Jesus evaluates the gift — it is out of abundance; it functions in an economy of abundance. Jesus’ words invite readers to reflect on the gift economy in which they participate. That reflection is challenged by Jesus’ evaluation of the widow’s gift — it is all she had to live on. Her two small copper coins are total gift.

Irish theologian, Anne Primavesi, emphasises the significance of gift within ecological thinking. She recognises that Earth gifts the human community with all they need to live on. This in its turn entails our giving for the benefit of others in the more-than-human community. It is to this that the poor widow turns our attention.

Understanding Apocalyptic Writing

As Luke 21 continues to unfold, the ecological reader is drawn into end-time/eschatological imaginings, expressed in a type of literature called apocalyptic. Theologian, Catherine Keller, says that apocalyptic eschatology “does not boldly stride toward new worlds but rather laments the self-destructiveness of this world”. The disciples’ questions: “When will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Lk 21:7), address the present of the Lucan community experiencing the destruction of the Temple, the imminent return of Jesus. The “end of the age” belongs to the future imaginary of eschatology. That future is in the hands of God, the one who goes up ahead of the Earth community; but it folds back into the present, calling that community into new ethical responsibility for the shaping of the future.

In Lk 21: 9–11, we hear described what has been and continues to be the fate of the entire Earth community — wars, famines, plagues and earthquakes. Lucan eschatology challenges us as contemporary ecological readers with a linear concept of time, to understand the cyclical concept as in the first century. The text invites us to see the impact of present actions now, not on a future which we envisage as distant and separate from ourselves in the now. To see the impact of what we are doing now as circling back on us now. For example, it is seeing the consequences of fracked earth, polluted waters and air, destruction of species and environmentally-induced human illnesses, together with earthquakes, famines and massive destruction of apocalyptic proportion, now.

Apocalyptic eschatology calls forth an ethic in and for the now. Catherine Keller says in this regard that “a responsible Christian eschatology is an ecological eschatology [which] motivates work — preaching, teaching, modelling, organising, politics, prayer — to save our planet”.

Pope Francis’s most recent proclamation of an eighth work of mercy — showing mercy to our common home — affirms such a responsible Christian eschatology. It is calling us forward with the entire Earth community to create the future into which the God who goes before us is leading that community.

Published in Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 209, October 2016.