As In The Days Of Noah

As the enemy drew nearer to Moscow the attitude taken by its inhabitants in regard to their position did not become more serious, but, on the contrary, more frivolous, as is always the case with people who see a great danger approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of a person: one very reasonably tells the person to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonably says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not in a person's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is better to turn aside from the painful subject til it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a person generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since there had been so much gaiety in Moscow as that year ( War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy).

Then he said to the disciples, "The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, They will say to you, “Look there!” or “Look here!” Do not go, do not set off in pursuit. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of man be in his day. But first he must endure much suffering and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of man. They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed all of them--it will be like that on the day that the Son of man is revealed ( Luke 17:22-30).

In his summary of the stories of Noah and Lot, Jesus draws a dramatic contrast between days and the day. The former was a long period when human affairs seemed to be proceeding in customary fashion; the latter was the cataclysmic destruction from God for those who had been complacently absorbed in their own pursuits. And yet this day of destruction was also one of rescue by God for those who heeded his warning about what was coming and acted accordingly.

Jesus does not point to the violence which filled the earth in Noah's time (Genesis 6:11,13) nor to the infamous sins of Sodom. Though the wickedness of such a period is what stands out for God (thus in the Genesis stories), the prevailing experience of the doomed generation is that of immersion in the daily round of ordinary human pursuits. Eating, drinking, marrying, buying and selling, planting and building are not forbidden activities. But the error even more decisive and awesome than participation in the gross wickedness which calls down catastrophe is the thoughtless, self-satisfied absorption in these busy routines at a time when overwhelming disaster is about to strike.

As God called Noah and Lot out of those routines, Jesus, speaking to his disciples, does the same; for the time before the glorious appearing of the Son of Man will be filled with and comparably conducive to such immersion. In contrast, the book of Revelation and certain passages in the synoptic gospels would seem to indicate that the period just prior to Christ's appearing is to be one of great commotion, upheaval, tribulation.

If we see this latter picture of upheaval as pointing to actualities that stand out only for those who with eyes of faith discern what is happening and as pointing in part to aspects of the endpoint cataclysm itself, we are for the end time left with the basic image of deceptive quiet and business as usual, given by Jesus in the Luke 17 passage and in the parables of the unexpected thief, returning master, and the arriving bridegroom (Matthew 24:42 to 25:13), an image confirmed by Paul most clearly in 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3: "For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, 'There is peace and security,' then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape." Paul with that mention of "security" has pointed to the very word which is the key one in the rhetoric--the impelling lie--of the nuclear arms buildup.

John's visions in the book of Revelation unveiled the dark dynamisms within the Roman Empire as well as later mutations; but most of his contemporaries in the Empire could live blind to all that and heedlessly absorbed in what might best fill the emptiness of day after day.

The pre-nuclear-war present is astonishingly like the "days" of Noah and the "days" of Lot. The wickedness and the forces that impel the world toward doom are mostly out of sight or not recognized for what they are. Few see with God in his seeing. Most human beings live out day after day absorbed in consumption, production, commerce, self-gratification. And each such day moves inevitably on--unless there is a human turning around--toward that day which will be overwhelmingly unlike all the ordinary days preceding it, that day of sudden inundating cataclysm (from the Greek word for the flood), that day of fire and worse-than-brimstone raining across continents.

Throughout the Bible there is a vivid sense of the unexpected suddenness with which total destruction can come. Again and again the prophets cried out to the people around them, nearly all of whom were lulled by the seeming calm and caught up in their own affairs:

Therefore this iniquity shall be to you like a break in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant. (Isaiah 30:13)

Ruin shall come on you suddenly, of which you know nothing. (Isaiah 47:11)

Make mourning as for an only son, most bitter lamentation; for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us. (Jeremiah 6:26)

Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken. (Jeremiah 51:8)

Ancient Near Eastern political and military actualities were such that premonitions like these received fulfillment. In the siege of an ancient city the terrible change from security to destruction would come in a single hour. On the day the central city of a small invaded country fell, all fell. And the typically grim thoroughness of the victorious army was pictured by Jesus: they "will dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you" (Luke 19:44).

In modern wars destruction and defeat have been more protracted and sequential--at the very least (as with Poland in 1939) a matter of a few days. But with the imminence of nuclear war we are fully returned to something like that ancient transitoriness. The demolition of the central substance of even the largest collectivities can come in part of a single day.

If the days and the day of Noah and Lot are prototypes for the nuclear present and its imminent end, then what is happening now and what is ahead can be added to those biblical stories as prototype for the days and the Day of the Son of Man. It is not given us to know the relation between the day of the bomb and the Day of the Son of Man. (His Day could precede and prevent the day of the bomb, though biblical apocalyptic would seem to point away from that possibility.)

But to discern the content and feel of the days of the bomb is to understand the same for the days of the Son of Man: frantic consumption, immersion in the commonplace and in diversions from the commonplace, undercurrents of anxiety leading not to any turn-around but to denial of the imperiled fragility of the present by seizing it, all right up to the day of the bomb.

There is the possibility that prior to a nuclear war there will be one or more relatively localized nuclear disasters through accident or very limited use of nuclear weapons, perhaps by non-aligned countries. Accidental nuclear explosions have almost occurred a number of times, as in 1961 when a B-52 bomber with two 24-megaton bombs crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina, and five of the six interlocking safety devices in one bomb were triggered.

The hope has been sometimes expressed that such a disaster, by confronting the peoples of the world with the actual ghastliness of the destruction, suffering, and death hanging over us all, might bring on the change of heart and mind needed for the worldwide halt and turning back. Such a result is possible. It may be that under God even this most extreme warning and opportunity will come.

There would be vast news coverage of such a disaster, horror and fascination in every country, an upsurge of good intentions and high-sounding appeals. But the fact that after the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy it still was not possible within the U.S. to enact desperately needed gun control legislation, shows the unlikelihood, even after a relatively limited nuclear disaster, of moving toward general disarmament--a move that would be fraught with far greater attitudinal, technological, and counter-lobbying difficulties.

A turn back from development of nuclear power plants might come following the shock of a great power plant disaster, for national and personal "security" as threatened by enemy groups would not be directly at stake.

But the immense momentum of nuclear weaponry would very likely override whatever intensified resistance might result from a limited nuclear disaster. Except for the immediate victims, there would be a general and gradual return to living out the contemporary counterpart of the "days" of Noah and Lot.

For Noah's contemporaries and the people of Sodom there were no experiential or common-sense grounds for supposing that flood or fire was about to sweep them away. There was only Noah's warning and, right at the end, that of Lot.

And in the days of the Son of Man there are no such grounds either for awaiting his Day. There is only his word.

The days of the bomb are in this regard different. Common sense, reason, political analysis, if directed toward the current world situation, show that in the long run, continuation of the nuclear arms race and its vertical and horizontal proliferations will almost certainly bring catastrophe on much or all of the human race. But day-by-day immersion in consumption, getting ahead, and building (weapons most of all) holds both general populations and political leaders back from any decisive discernment of that longer run. And even when there is the professed rationale of buying time through nuclear terror, that time is frittered away.

The image of travail is frequently used by the prophets for the sudden agony of a day of destruction. The preceding days and the people who teem within them are a womb widening with the dire pregnancy which convulses into travail and birth on the concluding day. It is in this fashion that the day of the bomb and the doom of the last Day are hidden within these ever-so-ordinary days. People who say, "There is peace and security," are trying to put to rest anxieties, the dim sensing of a day.

The word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows, "Son of man , what do you mean by this proverb common throughout the land of Israel: Days go by and visions fade?

"Very well, tell them, 'The Lord Yahweh says this: I will put an end to this proverb; it shall never be heard in Israel again.' Instead, tell them:

'The day is coming when every vision will come true.' " (Ezekiel 12:21-24)

In any succession of days there is for each day, in the balancing of general human experience, a chronological sameness. They are experienced as "duration leading nowhere." But that bland sameness is illusion. For each day feeds into the next in an unrecognized progression toward the day of destruction. Each day deposits into the mounting cumulative weight, like layer upon layer of snow on a steeply sloping mass. Each tightens the tautness which draws the trap (as the biblical image has it) to its springing point.

The days of the bomb we experience mostly as succession. But closer analysis, quite apart from Christian faith, shows them to be progression--toward the unknown day. With the daily passage of time, the momentum bearing humanity onward in the nuclear arms buildup increases, relations between the countries of the world become more and more destabilized, and the obstacles to disarmament become still more formidable.

The turn toward disarmament could have been made so much more easily in the '50s than later. Somewhat wiser U.S. political leadership (which might have resulted from other election returns) could have actualized what was quite feasible. Dissipation of days and years has brought a constant narrowing of what seems feasible politically. As even more sophisticated weapons systems (most notably the cruise missile) are developed one after another, the prospects for fully reliable inspection, and thus for any reasonable assurance about national security in a disarmament process, grow ever dimmer.

The determinative content of days is the uneasy optimism that things will continue as they are. Yet current preliminary refutation of this is to be found already in the fact that within the nuclear underside of these "days," enormous changes, from 1950 to 1960 to 1970 to 1980, took place. These years brought almost the worst imaginable technological progression (apart from wholesale firing of the weapons). And as Ralph E. Lapp pointed out in Kill and Overkill, the real test of deterrence is not whether it has worked till now but "the shape of the world it has created--and the outlook ahead."

Watchfulness
Warning of the Day which is to come like a thief, Jesus urged, "And what I say to you I say to all: Watch" (Mark 13:37)--be alert as a sentinel, expectantly reckon with a coming at any time, discern the in-breaking nearness of wrath and rescue. The lulling, apparently endless succession of ordinary days makes that very difficult.

But if in these days of the bomb we do bring ourselves to reckon with the imminence of the day of holocaust, discernment of this sequel to "the days of Noah" can be for us stimulus to heed that command, "Watch!" The nearness of that technologically arranged-for day intimates the same for the Day beyond all human arrangement or postponing. And if we are drawn out of the somnolence of days into watching for that day, there is for us in the nuclear dimension a subsidiary watching.

But consider a strange puzzle: If the day of the bomb comes, can there be still after it the days of the Son of Man with the commonplace busyness of usual human pursuits and with circumstances that people would describe by saying, "There is peace and security"?

For any human being there is the shorter or longer succession of days and then the day of death. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (Isaiah 22:13; 1 Corinthians 15:32) is a reckoning with the individual's day but only to the extent of turning from that to absorption in transient days.

Biblically, generation follows generation. For some generations there is nothing like a focal collective day of judgment. A generation passes because through the days of the years, death removes persons one by one. But then there comes the generation of Noah, of Lot, of Jeremiah, of Jesus, and the day envelops it. Out of the sowing of the wind through unsmitten generations comes the whirlwind which strikes down that generation. God's encounter with the generation brings to a new culmination the dynamic legacies of rebellion and guilt, a climactic calling down of the day. "Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles some of whom they will kill and persecute,' that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it shall be required of this generation" (Luke 11:49-51).

To the persisting stain of all that past blood they added for themselves the blood of Jesus and followers of his. On them the day of Jerusalem's doom came. How somber to be in a generation (and all too much a part of it) which is actualizing a planetary repeat fulfillment of those words.

The day of Sodom's destruction and any comparable day intimate the last Day. But for the people of Sodom who perished on that day there is still the more awesome and determinative day: "I tell you that it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you" (Matthew 11:24). That day is no less imminent for generations that have slipped serially away, like that of Bismarck and William McKinley.

For each of us, beyond whatever nuclear fire may sweep over us, there looms a far more intensely trying fire: "Each man's work will become manifest; for the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done" (1 Corinthians 3:13). We will each be refined by that fire of love—or will be shown to be, to the innermost of who we are, dross.

Prelude to that day is today, as opposite of days; "behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2); "exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).

Dale Aukerman worked with Sojourners' peace ministry and was a Sojourners correspondent when this article appeared.