“I
am the Alpha and the Omega,” says God, “The first and the last, the arkhay and the telos.” Since I know all of you are experts in Ancient Greek I
won’t spend too much time on this but, for my sake, let’s review exactly what that
means. God is the Alpha and the Omega—already we’re using Greek terms here. The
Greek alphabet runs from Alpha to Omega, like our A to Z. God is also the first
and the last, and finally the beginning and the end—the arkhay and the telos. At
first blush it seems like those words are just repetitive. If God is the first
and the last then clearly God is also the beginning and the end. Silly
Greek-speakers, English must just be a more efficient language.
But
actually the two words here—arkhay and
telos—are far more interesting than
that. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, into what is called the
Septuagint, the first words in Genesis 1 were “En arkhay ayn ho logos.”[1] In
the beginning was the word. About two
thousand pages later, give or take whatever kind of Bible you’re reading, God
is professed to be both in the beginning—the arkhay—and in the end—the telos. The word telos conveys both a final destination and a purpose. So, the telos
of creation is not just the end of the world but its ultimate purpose as well.
We have no word in English that can give us the same depth of meaning of telos, which is a shame because it means
that our language does not allow us the same ability to see an end as definitively purposeful.
It means it is hard for us to understand that God is not only the creator of the
world, and God is not only the one who will bring about its end, but God is
also the telos—the purpose and end for all life.
One
of the major lessons to be learned throughout John’s Revelation is that God is
God and we are not. The telos for creation is not that we would be happy or
comfortable; instead, the ultimate purpose of creation is the God we know through Jesus Christ. The only way we achieve
any purpose of our own is by this God, apart from whom we are subject to all
the plagues and various bits of nastiness that Revelation details. Life without
God is life without purpose. Yet, many of us still experience moments, or even
long periods of our lives, in which we lack purpose, which can lead to crises
of faith: How can it be that God is the ultimate purpose of creation when we
feel purposeless ourselves?
It should be no
surprise that a recent survey of college freshmen who identify as Christian
showed that when it comes to their most influential Bible verse far and away
the most popular is Jeremiah 29:11. Jeremiah 29:11 might be familiar to many of
you; it goes like this: “For I know the plans I have
for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you
and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Those are the plans
we love to imagine God having for us. Who doesn’t want to prosper and have a
future with hope? We all do. But Jeremiah 29:11 is also cherry-picked out of
one of the bleakest books in the Bible. Seriously, go read Jeremiah, and see if
that’s the context you imagined for that verse. We want God’s blessing upon those
who are loyal to him, but when we believe that that is how God works we make
the telos all about our own immediate well-being, ignoring all those who have
gone before us who have sacrificed everything up to their lives for the sake of
the good news of Jesus Christ. Jeremiah’s point in 29:11 is not that God is
going to prosper us as individuals; instead, Jeremiah is reinforcing that our
hopes are in this God whose plans include not just you and me but also the arkhay and the telos; the beginning and the end.
I worry about the rise of Jeremiah 29:11
Christianity not just because it is taking scripture out of context; more than
that, I worry because it sets an expectation that the purpose of the universe
is to make you and me happy. It sets us up to be selfish. Now, I also know that
many who hold Jeremiah 29:11 near and dear to their hearts do so because it has been a great assurance in times of difficulty. I get that, but I also think
that true assurance is found not in a promise that God has good plans for your
life but that there is a God, in fact, who has plans for all of creation.
As we’ve read through Revelation
over the course of this summer one common thread woven throughout is that this
is not about you. Time and again John is unsure where to center his worship; there are elders around the throne and angels and archangels; we
can hardly blame John for worshiping at the feet of the angel. But the angel
tells him, and through him us, “I am a fellow-servant… Worship God.” It’s the simplest idea but one of the toughest to do. Worship God. Not X, Y,
and Z. There are many things that you would rather worship. I know. I find
myself worshiping before shiny new bicycles every time I enter a bike shop.
Perhaps you find yourself worshiping a new TV or car or lawn mower, or an
attractive person, or a leader, or a sports team, or a philosophy, or a
political party. I don’t know, but trust me, you’re worshiping something.
You’ve probably heard me say before,
as we’ve gone through Revelation, that this book can be summed up with two
words, “Jesus wins.” But now that we’re at the end of things I think it’s important to realize why
this is. Jesus wins not so that we can have lives of comfort, nor does Jesus
win so that we can live lives without the annoying need to worship God, nor
does Jesus win so that we can feel free to waste away the life we have been given. None of this.
Jesus wins so that we can live and live fully, so that we can die and die
fully, so that there is a telos to all of this we see and experience here.
Jesus wins so that there is a purpose to the end, so that when God says that he
is the beginning and the end—the arkhay
and the telos—we can know that
creation has a destiny that has been echoed through the prophets—through
Jeremiah, as well as Isaiah and Moses and Elijah and all those who have gone
before.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give
you hope and a future.”
It’s all true. Every word of it. But it’s not a present
thing; it’s a telos thing. The “you”
is not singular but plural. You need to be from the South to know the
difference: “For I know the plans I have for y’all,” says the Lord, “plans to
prosper y’all and not harm y’all, plans to give y’all hope and a future.”
God does have plans for us. We do have a future filled with
hope. But the promise is bigger than us as individuals. It is about the
ultimate purpose of creation—it is all about the telos. This matters
profoundly, because when tragedy strikes and when things that don’t make sense
come upon us as they all too often do we are free to step away from the
language of God’s plan for us as individuals and step into the promise of a purpose
for all of creation. If you have lost someone near and dear to you it was not
God’s plan to rip them from your lives, but it is God’s telos to redeem them
and you and all of creation. If you feel lost yourself and rejected, as if cast
aside from God’s blessing, it is not that God has turned a blind eye to your
need; rather, God holds you through trials with the promise of ultimate
purposefulness. There is no guarantee that you won’t get struck by lightning,
no promise that your life will be easy—for goodness’ sake, ask the martyrs who
appear again and again in John’s Revelation—your life might be hard, it might
be senseless, some days it might be terrible. None of those realities mean that
you are rejected or forgotten or that God’s plan has somehow passed you by. In
fact, if Jeremiah and the prophets and John’s Revelation suggest anything it is
that your life will be hard—if not in your living then certainly in your dying.
But that is not the final word. We know because God is both
arkhay and telos; there is nothing before him nor after. So, the end of all
things is not your life, nor your death, nor even life in the world to come.
The end of all things is Jesus Christ—God incarnate—the telos of all creation.
So there is no end, no purpose, no matter that exceeds God’s self. That is our
comfort in times of difficulty and our final assurance that when this world
fades away we will experience the fullness of God’s self. It’s not about us;
it’s about God.
Thanks be to God.
[1] Sorry for no actual Greek
font and butchering the transliteration. This is a sermon, not an academic
paper, and blogspot doesn’t like Greek.
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