Our Big Fat Eschatological Wedding

Assistant teachers are the fast food workers of the academic institutions. We tell ourselves that this is a privileged step toward the future goal of professorship, but in reality it ends up as a lot of long hours flipping papers. Some years ago, I was a TA for a theology course on ecclesiology and eschatology. Eccleisology is the study of the church and eschatology is about the end. I say end because that’s all it really means technically, but most people affiliate the end with the end of the world, Armageddon and Billy Bob Thornton’s catchy phrase in the movie by that title, “basically the worst parts of the Bible.”

The last week of the quarter, the professor had to be out of town, and so I got enlisted to put 30 hours of lecture into a two hour review. Immediately my mind began to search for metaphors and parables that I could connect the information to. I have oft been accused of doing little else but watching movies and reading obscure theologians - which can be a compliment depending on whom it comes from. It’s in times like these that these two eccentricities come in handy.

The first film that came to mind was Memento. I figured that, like Guy Pierce’s character Lenny, the students probably couldn’t remember the past ten weeks very well. But more importantly this movie is an example of a story told in reverse. And it is here that a course on the church and the end could be helpful. Its very chick these days to tell stories in reverse chronological order. Even passé TV shows like ER have done it. The idea is to take the end of the story and put it at the beginning and then see how the end shapes the beginning or helps you understand it better. It’s a lot like the bible really. People tend to think that that the bible is in chronological order. You know God made the world, people gave God the finger, God put up with it for a while, then the flood. Eventually Jesus, and then the church and finally we get to the end. That’s all fine and dandy and everything, but if you think about it, everyone exists in the middle of the story.

The cool thing about the Bible is that it starts and ends pretty much the same way - perfect communion with God. If we look backward from the middle we long for the Garden to which we cannot return, but if we look forward we long for the City, the new Jerusalem, to which we wait for in hope (Rev 21.1-5).

This brought another movie to mind, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That whole movie was about the end. In one sense the movie is told in forward chronological order, but in another sense it’s not. There is no suspense wondering if they will get married or not. We all go into the movie not to be surprised by a twist ending, but to laugh at the way in which the life of the characters is shaped and moves toward this fixed event at the end. The end inspires their life in the present. This is a lot like how the church relates to the end as well.

If you think about how to relate eschatology and ecclesiology, it is like a wedding and all of life is shaped by this event in the future. The church, as the betrothed spouse, is the fiancée of Christ looking forward and preparing for this event. It’s not that all of the church’s function and life is predestined in every detail, but rather that we are shaped and drawn toward this eschatological event.

For anyone whose been engaged you know this feeling. You pop the question, set the date and then the race is on. Your life is shaped by this future event. You still have the freedom to choose the dress, what kind of filling to put in the cake, whether or not to invite your odd uncle Marvin, and so on, but the decision and preparations are shaped by the big fat eschatological wedding that is to come.

In any case, the church relates to the end times much in this way. If I were to name this class for coming years, I think I’d be tempted to change the title from call it Systemtic Theology III: Eccleiology and Eschatology, to Our Big Fat Eschatological Wedding. The church lives in the preparation and longing atmosphere when we will consummate our love for God in the end. We live knowing that Christ has popped the question to us through his death and resurrection, and now we with our mother in laws, going about the business of inviting everyone so that the table will be full at the end.

The wedding banquet is what parables like Luke 14:16-24 are about. Mathew records this parable more explicitly as a wedding feast, but regardless of the wedding or not, we are to be about the business of going out and inviting the world toward this party at the end. The communion table is just a foretaste of this party.

One might wonder about the tendency toward escapism in a reverse order ecclesiology. A few years ago when The Lord of the Rings hype was at its peak, there was a PBS documentary on JRR Tolkien. His son, I think, was responding to the criticism that the Lord of the Rings trilogy promoted an escapism into middle earth. The younger Tolkien replied that there is a difference between escape toward freedom, and an escape away from responsibility. I guess I agree here.

We exalt the hero like Andy Dufrain in Shawshank Redemption who escapes to freedom from the prison of injustice and corruption. Similarly we all recognize that to escape into a drink or a mindless sitcom while children wait neglected, or dishes pile up is to flee from responsibility. To escape from the prison of our fears and the paralysis of the shame of our failures does not lead necessarily lead to complacency and neglect. It can also lead to the freedom to embrace life anew. That is what our big fat eschatological wedding is about I think. It is the hope in the fixed date at the end when we will consummate our love for our Bridegroom in that party that puts all other parties to shame.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in his Creation and Fall, we weren’t there at the beginning when Genesis speaks of God creating the heavens and earth. Whoever wrote Genesis wasn’t there while God said “let there be light.” And yet the vision of the beginning is a pivotal tenet of the Christian worldview. So too, with the end. The Christian view of the end of time shapes us as a community that looks forward to the end events and is shaped by them.

In both cases we are given a vision not to inspire us to escapism, but to free us to embrace the pursuit of life today.