Jesus knows, flooding isn't the end of the world
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2012/dec/21/jesus-knows-flooding-end-world Version 0 of 1. With lots of flooding predicted for Christmas, it may be comforting to know that we have the authority of Jesus that this isn't a sign of the apocalypse. The whole point, he thought, was that there would be no small signs, only huge ones, written across the whole sky: <blockquote>"As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man."</blockquote> There would be wars, and rumours of wars: <blockquote>"And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come … Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equalled again."</blockquote> He also assured his listeners that these things would happen in their lifetimes. Contemplation of these sayings lessens my faith in some of the other things he said which is sad, for many of them would be excellent if true. In fact, the curious and rather comforting thing about mythical floods is that they don't end the world. They make it new. Even the most modern reinvention of a flood myth – the American idea that there really was "a Genesis flood", which is central to contemporary creationism, is clearly a comforting story. People who believe in it don't weep for all the poor drowned dinosaurs. They find consolation in the belief that everything in history is part of a plan, and their place in it is secured by a promise. The flood myths are the original form of what's known in science fiction as the cosy catastrophe. There are always heroes to survive. The dead were much less interesting all of their short dull lives. That's not how it works in real life, of course. There was nothing cosy about the stinking ruins of New Orleans after Katrina. But the dependence of civilisation on rivers has meant, perhaps, that water has never seemed a wholly hostile element. There's not even any really good reason to believe that there was some catastrophic Middle Eastern flood that gave rise both to the legend of Noah and the Babylonian counterparts. It was fashionable in the 90s to believe that the north-western shoreline of the Black Sea must have flooded in a rush, when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosphorus and drove off the neolithic farmers who had settled there. But recent research suggests it never happened like that. Much better and more interesting would have been the Zanclean flood, which filled the Mediterranean basin after the sea had nearly dried up there into a few salt lakes when seismic action closed the straits of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean was at one stage so low that the Nile ran in a canyon 2.5km deep north of where Cairo now stands – and when a fresh earthquake reopened the straits of Gibraltar, the water of the Atlantic poured in for thousands of years. But there were no humans to see it or tell stories afterwards. It happened more than 5m years ago, and our ancestors still walked on all fours. I really think that the only person who got flood legends right was Carl Jung. For him, water was a symbol of the unconscious and of creativity. The truest legend in the Old Testament, then, is not Noah's flood, but the moment when Moses strikes the rock and water gushes out. Small comfort if your pipes freeze, or your satnav drives you into a river, but flooding is only ever a catastrophe. It's not the end of the world. |