This will give you an opportunity to testify. -Luke 21:13
 
In our Wednesday evening Eucharist this week we marked the feast of St. John Chrysostom (349-407 C.E.), apparently known in ancient Antioch as a preacher so spellbinding that people wouldn’t noticed their pockets being picked as they listened to him. He was later made a bishop against his will, only to be exiled for ruffling too many powerful feathers. This turn of events probably accounts for the gospel passage assigned for his day, Luke 21:12-15, about being persecuted and brought before powerful rulers. Such circumstances “will give you an opportunity to testify,” Jesus declares. Don’t even “prepare your defense in advance,” he says, but rely on the “words and wisdom” of God whom no one can “withstand or contradict” (Luke 21:15). 
 
During this week in which, hour by hour, the news has been reporting on whether any witness will be allowed to testify at the impeachment trial of the President of the United State, a week in which lawmakers are actively seeking to prevent witness testimony, Jesus’ words resonate as strikingly unshackled, utterly free. The passage itself takes place among apocalyptic commentary from Jesus. “Not one stone” would remain unturned in the very temple in which he was teaching day by day leading up to his arrest. The power structures of his world were falling away, crumbling under the weight of their own corruption, as wars and natural disasters signaled “dreadful portents” (Luke 21:11). 
 
“I feel like I’m living into an apocalypse, or maybe a Sci Fi movie,” someone commented Wednesday night, as we discussed this reading. I have found myself feeling that way as well. I read far too many “dreadful portents” in the news. 
 
It’s not that I think the world is literally momentarily coming to an end (though if you add in growing environmental catastrophe, not to mention periodic nuclear bluster, it’s hard to argue the case isn’t getting stronger).
 
I do, however, think we have “signs of endings all around us,” as the hymn puts it. Apocalyptic rhetoric such as Jesus’ names reality starkly. It reflects in the future tense upon terrible truths located in the present. Apocalyptic texts convey blistering political critiques, exhibit A that the Bible is anything but apolitical. And although texts such as Luke 21 speak to their own contexts, they also project far beyond their borders. They vividly imagine the judgement and destruction of corrupt systems because those living through them had to know such systems did not finally rule the day. Jesus and the prophets before him knew that corruption cannot finally stand. And in fact, corruption’s fundamental transitoriness, its lack of strength and permanence, calls God’s people to stand grounded and tell a larger story, a story that does not avoid but actively names lived reality. 
 
When Jesus says “this will give you an opportunity to testify,” he is issuing a call to bring the insights of a much larger narrative, a story both horrible and hopeful, to bear upon the present day, to help expand our imaginations to live in and respond to that day here and now. That narrative is a story of creation and corruption, of oppression and freedom, of death and resurrection. It is a story of how the God who made us free will not leave us alone, that God who created us in God’s image calls us to live into God’s likeness. It proclaims that God who in Jesus Christ proclaimed good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the release of the oppressed, the year of God’ s favor (Luke 4:18, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2), that God calls us to live, breathe, and embody this story together.  
 
In all that is unfolding this week, amid lack of testimony, there are “dreadful portents.” Where exactly all this is going we don’t know. In its midst, we are called to be alert, and in our own right, in our own contexts, with our own lives, to testify.  

Peace,
 
Cameron