If the literal were our only path to truth there would be no poetry.
Today's gospel is filled with poetry. Christ starts by quoting Genesis:
"In those days after that tribulation
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from the sky,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken."
Falling stars? Shining moons? We know a lot more now. We all know that the moon does not shine except in reflected light. So should we jump up and down with scorn? Hardly. Christ is speaking in an apocalyptic voice, a common theme and voice of the time. But He, out of time, is always speaking in time. And the essence of Christ's intervention is his suffering, death and rising from the dead. That is beyond literal.
There was a moment in astronomy where cosmology was born. Maaeten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein were puzzling over a star the Hale telescope had revealed: 3C273. They could not make sense of its spectrum and emission lines. Then, as Greenstein said "that first terrible afternoon," they understood. 3C273 was a single point of light 5 billion light years away moving away from the center of the universe, a light burning with the intensity of an entire galaxy--a hundred billion stars forced together in a point and ignited, with a tail of burning gas the size of three galaxies. The first Quasar. Eventually it was found the average quasar emits the light of one trillion suns. One in the constellation Cepheus shines with the light of one quadrillion suns. What could possibly do that? And how can it be understood?
They wrote a paper describing it. The paper was two pages long.
We will understand many of these things in time. Resurrection, probably not.
But for now, “Learn a lesson from the fig tree.........."
Today's gospel is filled with poetry. Christ starts by quoting Genesis:
"In those days after that tribulation
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from the sky,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken."
Falling stars? Shining moons? We know a lot more now. We all know that the moon does not shine except in reflected light. So should we jump up and down with scorn? Hardly. Christ is speaking in an apocalyptic voice, a common theme and voice of the time. But He, out of time, is always speaking in time. And the essence of Christ's intervention is his suffering, death and rising from the dead. That is beyond literal.
There was a moment in astronomy where cosmology was born. Maaeten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein were puzzling over a star the Hale telescope had revealed: 3C273. They could not make sense of its spectrum and emission lines. Then, as Greenstein said "that first terrible afternoon," they understood. 3C273 was a single point of light 5 billion light years away moving away from the center of the universe, a light burning with the intensity of an entire galaxy--a hundred billion stars forced together in a point and ignited, with a tail of burning gas the size of three galaxies. The first Quasar. Eventually it was found the average quasar emits the light of one trillion suns. One in the constellation Cepheus shines with the light of one quadrillion suns. What could possibly do that? And how can it be understood?
They wrote a paper describing it. The paper was two pages long.
We will understand many of these things in time. Resurrection, probably not.
But for now, “Learn a lesson from the fig tree.........."
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