Hope at the Edge of the World
“Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord of heavenly forces: Days are coming when all that is in your house, which your ancestors have stored up until this day, will be carried to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. Some of your sons, your own descendants whom you fathered, will be taken to become eunuchs in the king of Babylon’s palace.”
-Isaiah 39:5-7
If you’ve made it this far in my experimental devotions this week, congratulations! Our final subgenre is post-apocalyptic horror–stories of people struggling to survive after our societies break down. This subgenre contains multitudes. 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers where all of humanity is replaced by alien doppelgangers, The Last of Us where society has collapsed due to an infection that reanimates the dead, and the classic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last” where a bookish introvert survives nuclear destruction only to immediately break his glasses are all examples of post-apocalyptic horror.
The thing that nearly all post-apocalyptic stories have in common is that they aren't really about people surviving after the world collapses. Those stories of survival are largely a framing device for the underlying questions, “How did this happen?” and “How could we have prevented this?” At their core, post-apocalyptic horror stories are warnings to fix things before it’s too late. In other words, stories about the apocalypse can teach us how to help build a world worth saving.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a work of pure Cold War hysteria where the assimilation could easily be read either as communist expansion or Macarthy-era uniformity. Either way, the point seems to be that the overhomogenization of identities into a collective is dehumanizing. The Last of Us is a “zombie” show with an environmental theme. The contagion that causes the plague is a fungus which has adapted to infect humans due to rising global temperatures. “Time Enough at Last,” as well as many other episodes of The Twilight Zone are warnings about nuclear proliferation and calls for disarmament.
The clearest place we see these same concerns in Scripture is in the writings that came about during and immediately following the Babylonian exile. This was such a collective psychic and spiritual wound for the Hebrew people. They were God’s chosen people! How could this have happened? How could they end up as foreign hostages and slaves once again? A good portion of the Hebrew Bible stuggles to answer these questions. Books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, two-thirds of the book of Isaiah, and countless Psalms were composed in this period. All of them largely coming to the same conclusion: God didn’t turn God’s back on us, we turned our back on God. We mistreated the poor, the widow, and the immigrant. We pursued wealth and power so much that we gave up our vocation to be a priestly nation. We sought our own good when we were called to serve the world.
These Biblical writings didn’t just highlight how the exile happened, but they also served as a guide for the people of the future. “When you finally return to the Land, don’t make the same mistakes that we did before! Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God! In that way you’ll be a shining city on a hill. All the world will stream to Zion to worship the Lord because you lives and actions are such a stellar witness to the nations.” Here’s the thing about the Biblical apocalypse–it’s not really about the end of the world. To be sure, it’s about the end of a world, or more precisely the end of a way of being in the world. But it invites us to imagine something different. It invites us to become co-laborers in bringing about a new kind of world.
Rev. Ryan Young
