The End is Nigh! Occupy!
“The End is Nigh!” Delightful words, written in bold on a sandwich board or screamed out on a street corner in the ecstasy of doom. But what does it mean? Sadly our own Christian enthusiastics are too busy dancing jigs, hoisting enormous crucifixes about and berating strangers to preach about the latter days. Yet there are also exceptions. This relentless reverend does not tire in his evangelism. Once again, oh children of perpetual resistance, let us reoccupy scripture, and rescue the good news from bad translation.
“The End of the World” comes from Matthew 13, and the word translated as “world” is aeon. Aeon means pretty much the same in Greek as it does in English, an epoch or age, such as the Iron Age or the Age of Feudalism. It is a period of time defined by an overarching theme. The Gnostics had a slightly more nuanced take on it, but the simple fact of the matter is that it doesn’t mean “world”. “There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth”, as Matthew continues but something survives, though it is entirely beyond our imagination. (Rev 21:1)
The translation of aeon is so suspect that it raises questions. In 1611 when the King James Bible was produced, England was gripped by revolutionary fever. Against a background of creeping inflation, the seizure of common lands, the wording of scripture was a serious and political business. A generation before, 5,000 Cornish Catholics chanting “Kill all the Gentlemen!” had perished in a revolt over a new prayer book, and in 1605 another Catholic had failed in his Gunpowder Plot. King James hoped to calm religious unrest by commissioning a standard Bible for all Englishmen, as simple and non-provocative as possible. Whereas “the end of the world” is beyond the imagination of all but the doomiest, “the end of the aeon” was exactly what many revolutionary Bible-bashers wanted to bring about. Quite obviously, King James rejected the latter translation.
Yet censorship did not help. Thirty-seven years later, James’s son lost his throne and his head to apocalyptic revolutionaries. These same men were revolutionaries in other fields, pioneering the scientific method, overthrowing ancient concepts in medicine, in philosophy and in government, disseminating subversive ideas using the new technology of the printing press. The Parliamentary Era had begun, the Age of Feudalism was over, and the aeon drew to a close.
400 years on, parliament has betrayed us. King James was refused his bailout of £600,000 after nearly a year of negotiations, but our government pledged £500 billion to the banks less than 48 hours after the FTSE crashed. The people were never consulted.
The time is ripe for a new form of governance, and the tools are in our hands. Innovative networks span the globe, using new media technologies of Twitter and Livestream to disseminate information and coordinate the very first international occupation. King James shut down parliament, and Mayor Bloomberg shut down the Wall Street occupation, but the End is Nigh today, as it was back in the day.
The question is not whether we can bring down this hideous harlot riding the beast of post-capitalist imperialism; she is quite capable of doing that itself. The issue is whether we can look beyond our crumbling institutions and imagine something better.
The word “apocalypse” is formed of the Greek apo- (away) and kalyptein (to cover). Contrary to popular belief, and despite the spin-doctors of the chamomile King James Bible, it is not “the end of the world”, though it may be the end of the world as you know it. It is the lifting of a veil (velum in Latin, hence re-velation). Whenever something hidden is revealed or some secret dis-covered, there is an apocalypse, whether through the medium of Wikileaks or the Holy Spirit. An individual apocalypse can occur at any time, as it did with Paul’s apocalypse on the road to Damascus. It could be when YouTube awakens you to the harsh facts of fractional reserve banking. It could be the glorious revelation that money is not value, as you chew over donated food in the kitchen tent. Or it might be something else entirely.
When enough people lift the veil and remove the cover, something happens on a larger scale, as it did in seventeenth century England and first century Jerusalem. Once again, the smell of a new aeon is in the air. The time is ripe for a real new world order governed by love, wisdom and individual self-mastery. Or as one of our modern martyrs likes to put it: when all the pennies drop, the pound will fall.
In the name of the Euro, the banks and the International Monetary Fund… Amen
