“Because of the increase of lawless wickedness most people’s love will grow cold…”
The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 12, in the New Testament, my rendering.
(Photo credit: Outreach Magazines)
In the blistering, record-shattering summer of 2022 in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, few (? no?) rational people would say that we are heading towards a new Ice Age. On every side, from Academia to government agencies and para-government prognosticators, we hear the alarm bells of climate change and see the effects of global warming. For example, here in Canada we are witnessing a large increase in the severity of summer storm and tornado activity in the east and center.
In the region where I live, we experienced what, so far, has been a once-in-a-lifetime event called a derecho, a sort of straight-line tornado without the twisting funnels touching down, but with straight-line winds recorded at speeds up to 212 kph (130mph). It cut a wide swath (up to 100 kilometers in breadth and about 1000 km in length) through southern, central and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, leaving huge devastation in its path, and power outages from a natural cause on a scale never seen before in Ontario. The national capital area of Ottawa-Gatineau, with 1.43 million people Canada’s fourth largest urban area, was worst hit, with some areas out of power for almost two weeks as Hydro workers struggled to replace thousands of destroyed power poles and towers, transformers, and sub-stations. Overall insurable damage was $720 million, but add to that materials and labor costs to rebuild the infrastructure, and this does not speak to the devastation wrought on business, farming, industry, and commerce.
How much of climate change is due to human action over the last two hundred or so years may still be debated, but there seems little doubt that human pollution of the air and sea, and pillage of the land, particularly of the forests and sensitive ecosystems all over the world, have played and continue to play a significant role.
One of the premises of the West’s modern-postmodern culture and society is that we should keep our personal religious and spiritual convictions out of the public forum. This seems a fine ideal if we can live up to it and all are willing to participate in it equally. For people in power it is a very tough temptation to overcome, and disguising one’s metaphysical convictions as rational and scientific is a common ploy when effectuating change to the social fabric. For some decades, many Western nations seem to have made a real effort to be somewhat non-partisan in religion and metaphysical influences. However, one may be excused for suspecting that the veneer of civility and sincerity in not using power for the furtherance of favored values and morals with little regard for those of the mass of conscientious citizens has become threadbare.
In the West’s history over the last 1500 years or so since the demise of the Western Roman Empire, religion has too often been an instrument, a motivation, and a justification for some of the most terrible events in recorded history. Some of history’s most horrific and inhumane things done by humans to one another have been done in the name of Jesus Christ, to whom the perpetrators paid lip-service as the Prince of Peace and the ultimate manifestation of God’s boundless love for humanity and His creation. These failures and excesses by individual Christians holding positions of power, and by institutions claiming to act under Christ and according to His principles have provided great fodder for the secularization of the West.
Over the last hundred years, ideology has stepped into the moral vacuum, and continues to do so. The dismal record of the twentieth century amply illustrates that ideology is just secularized metaphysics with all the religious zeal and much of the sacramentalism of religion dressed up in other names. Without God, humanity creates its own form of religion and creates the kinds of laws, principles, and institutions the latest power-clique deems suited to anchor itself in place and manipulate the underclasses who must adhere to their orthodoxy or suffer the penalties for not doing so. Such penalties may be as mild as social pariah-ship and isolation, or as severe as death and mass extermination.
It is an education to consider the perception and role of love across the annals of recorded history. It would be a long and perhaps wearying tale to undertake it in detail. Books about love in all its aspects abound across the millennia and in numerous cultural expressions. We cannot do them justice here, and it is not my intent to try.
But we may consider what Jesus was talking about in the quote at the top of this post and see where it takes us.
When Jesus said that as things move towards the ultimate climax of human history (whenever that might be), “most people’s love will grow cold”, the word for “love” in the original Greek (which was actually already a translation of the Aramaic word “hooba” which Jesus would have used when talking to His disciples) was agape. This kind of love is different from sexual love (eros), parental love (storge), or friendship and sibling love (philia). It is the highest form of love, selfless, giving without expecting any return, reflecting God’s love for humanity and His creation.
Jesus was not saying that people would stop falling in love, stop having sex, or stop caring about family and friends. However, if those other kinds of love are to truly reach their highest potential, they must be ruled by something yet higher – agape. That is what Jesus was predicting would “grow cold” for most people.
What consequences ensue from the decline of selfless, giving love-commitment which does not impose some sort of controlling agenda or conditions in return? Surely it is not wrong to hope for and expect some reciprocation in relationships with one’s most significant others? Certainly not! And I am sure Jesus would concur. But when it fades away, when the beloved turn away and reject you, then what?
That is where agape emerges, if it is present and has been nurtured already.
What Jesus is saying is that in the “end-times” we will see (and it appears already that we are entering them, or are already well along the path towards them) is the strength of underlying and over-arching agape as the root strength of all love fading out of view.
The consequences of that are “the increase of lawless wickedness”, which is also one of the causes of the moral and ethical glaciation unto death of western (and world) culture and society. It is both cause and effect, like the snowdrift high on the mountainside that breaks loose and, when it catapults down the slope, brings a tremendous avalanche of devastation.
TO BE CONTINUED
World.V.You 