An Ecological Reading of Matthew 24:1–14

As we near the end of the Gospel of Matthew and as we turn our sights to the end of another liturgical year, it is not surprising to find end-time emphases in our biblical texts and our liturgical traditions. The question that faces the ecological reader is whether these texts and traditions can serve an ecological ethic.

John Haught in, Resting on the Future: Catholic Theology for an Unfinished Universe, speaks of three ways in which the biblical and theological traditions depict the relationship between humanity and the cosmos. He says the the third way, what he calls an anticipatory approach, can best incorporate an ecological ethic. The anticipatory approach recognises the unfinished nature of the universe and its potential unfolding which is to come, “groaning to reveal the divine”. The human and other-than-human communities are caught up in this unfolding, and invited to participate in and contribute to it in their present. It is here that we can locate our ecological ethics.

Biblical eschatology, or “end time” stories, likewise recognises that our universe is unfinished and that this has implications for the present. We tend to think of eschatology as linear and future-oriented — focusing on the fate of the universe and the human community. However, scholars suggest that when the gospel traditions were developing in the first century, the temporal focus of eschatological writing was on the present rather than the future. This was because the first-century mind imagined a future which made ethical demands of the community now — the future and the present were intimately related.

Future Folding Back on Present

Matthew 24 opens with Jesus and the disciples grounded in the material and the temporal. Leaving the Temple, the disciples draw Jesus’ attention to the collection of buildings they have just left. Jesus predicts that the Temple will be torn down to the extent that there is not one stone on another.

It may be that the Matthean community, living in conflict with their Pharisaic neighbours in post-70 CE Galilee, was writing about their own experience after the Roman War and its attendant destruction of the temple, into the life of Jesus. The narrative takes on the dimension of apocalyptic eschatology, or a “future as present”, that leads readers into the discourse to follow. It also invites the ecological reader to recognise the present destruction of species and habitats in our contemporary time as symbolic or evocative of a future cataclysm. And, like the future destruction of the temple, the narrative folds back onto the present with an ethical challenge to today’s global population.

The ecological reader caught up in the apocalyptic imagery will also be attentive to the simplicity of Jesus sitting on the Mount of Olives, sitting on the ground just as he sat on the mountain in Galilee (Mt 5:1). In each instance, the ground can be seen to authorise the story that follows.

The disciples’ questions: “When will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”, address the present of the Matthean community experiencing the destruction of the Temple, the imminent return of Jesus, and the “end of the age” which belongs to the imaginary future. That future is in the hands of God but folds back onto the now.

Read the Signs of the Times

Jesus’ initial reply to the disciples’ eschatological questions about when and what is highly significant: “Beware that no one leads you astray” (Mt 24:4). This is one of those contemporary ethical demands inherent in eschatology and can be seen to infuse the whole discourse: the end times are in the hands of God, in imaginary time, but you, the listeners/readers, are in the now, the now of ethical integrity.

As this section unfolds (Mt 24:4-8), we hear described what has been and continues to be the fate of the entire Earth community — wars and famines and earthquakes. These eschatological images are drawn from the prophets, or from the actual experiences of the Matthean audience for whom war and rumours of war, famine and earthquakes were a very present reality.

Image of Birth Pangs

I want to draw particular attention to the image that closes this section, namely the phrase “the beginning of the birth pangs”. First, it draws powerful female imagery into the unfolding narrative and reminds readers of the materiality, the corporeality that infuses all the imagery. It also alerts readers to the dominant maleness that characterises the text and which continually needs to be critiqued.

Present Actions Predict the Future

Apart from this final image, Mt 24:4-8 uses cataclysmic events from the more-than-human world to image the future potential for the Matthean community.

This stands as a challenge to contemporary ecological readers whose concept of time is linear rather than cyclical. It invites us to see the impact of present actions not on a future which we envisage as distant and separate from ourselves now, but rather as circling back on our time — fracked earth, polluted waters and air, destruction of species and environmentally-induced human illnesses. This is an ecological apocalyptic eschatology.

Present Actions Predict Relationships in Our World

The next segment (Mt 24:9-14) focuses on the breakdown of human relationships which, like the destruction of the temple, the Matthean community may well be experiencing. The material and the social are woven into the language of the text in which Jesus predicts a future of conflict for those he sends out (see also Mt 10:16-23). We find parallel language to that of Mt 24:13: “anyone who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt 10:22).

Freed to Fullness of Life

To be saved can be understood as participating in the work of Jesus and the gospel as a “freeing”. As such it includes not only a freeing of humans but a freeing of Earth into the fullness of being. Mt 24:14 suggests that such freeing/saving is a core understanding of the Gospel of the basileia named almost exclusively throughout this narrative as the “basileia of the heavens or the skies”.

This is a new ordering, a new cosmology, a new ecology in which relationships will be ordered rightly. This basileia is characterised as/by an ethic, a right ordering of relationships in the present. The end/the telos points toward the time when the ethic of the “Gospel of the basileia” has been proclaimed and lived within the oikoumenē — the entire inhabited earth, the world.

This first-century text draws us, the readers, into a future that supports our ethical life, but it also holds a mirror to the future to reflect a profound ecological ethic for our present.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 220, October 2017: 22-23.