HASHTAG END-TIMES

It must be a confusing time to be an eschatologist. Plague, war, and famine go riding about like three horsemen of the apocalypse, the world is suffocating into climate crisis, and globalisation is pushing everything to the brink of collapse.

But then also, you wake up to find that Will Smith has hit someone on international TV, shortly before picking up the Best Actor Oscar to a standing ovation.

I don’t remember seeing that sign in the Bible. Genie hits Zebra for dissing Hippo from Madagascar? Confusing for those last-days type people.

In fairness though, the world has gone a little bonkers. I can’t blame anyone for thinking these are the end times, even though there’s currently no sign of that third temple, and a one-world government is looking even less likely right now. But when the coolest actor in the world wrecks his reputation like that, you start to wonder what in the world is going on. Something is definitely up.

If you ask me, he’s deflecting. Chris Rock told a joke about his wife, Will Smith laughed, then saw his wife’s face. He acted quickly, and out of embarrassment, I think, slapping Mr Rock in an over compensating gesture to restore her honour. 

I have a feeling he will lose more than he bargained for with that bold move, but I also know the world is quite impossible to predict. Moments later, Will was tearfully preaching about love and protection and family, Oscar aloft in his right hand as though Uncle Phil had had a stern word with him in the green room.

There were better, more noble things he could have done.

If you want eschatological commentary then I say that, when it comes to it, we just haven’t seen anything yet. I was taught to watch Israel, to look out for seven-year peace treaties, and to watch the land for signs of the end. What’s happening now is that the world is being swept with mistrust, with war, with polarisation, in preparation for a time when everyone will have to choose. I think politics will eventually split everything East-West and as ever, the focal point will be that land. It’s worth watching it.

But it’s also worth remembering that we’re here to make a difference while we can. I’d rather be baffled and doing something out there, than equally puzzled, and dooming and glooming about it from home. What would be the point of knowing about the flood but refusing to build an ark?

Anyway, violence was not the answer there, Mr Will Smith, and there are dignified ways to protect those you love, without rushing to fistycuffs in an overly-keen display of power and privilege.

But then, as I look around, I start to think that that exact tendency, that urge to protect our own, to defend our tribe and reach for our weapons  flows through a lot of y’all and a lot of us, and a lot of the world at the moment. And it’s a sign of something.