666

Dear editor:

America is awash in an eschatological frenzy of flummery. So when news about Mueller’s investigation of our pouty POTUS’s son-in-law began focusing on shenanigans surrounding foreign financing of his building in New York City, my end-times spider sense began to tingle!

People, you cannot make this stuff up. The address of that building is 666 Fifth Avenue. For all you nimble numerologists and prognosticating prophets, does the number 666 sound familiar? Ever curious, I went to Lord Google and beseeched him to reveal the mystery of “jared kushner 666 5th avenue antichrist.”

Lo and behold, Google returned 46,700 hits! The very first was “Is Jared Kushner Being Positioned As The Antichrist Of Revelation?” I guess that trumps (pun intended) all those wacky conspiracy theories about the black man in the White House, the usurper from Africa who somehow showed up as a baby in Hawaii…

Ringy dingy, people, your gilded television evangelists are calling. Fox News and hate radio are calling. Forget about Mueller, forget about whatever dirt ex-KGB thug Vladimir Putin may have on Comrade President! Apocalypse be a-coming, people. Time for white robes and waiting on rooftops for that magic bus ride called the rapture…

Except that what you believe about rapture is based on really bad exegesis. Really, really bad! Guess what? Your precious rapture has been a topic of frothy speculation for less than 200 years. But you’ve seen all those “Left Behind” movies so you know better, right? You know what’s coming next, right? Planes falling out of the sky, cars crashing, and empty cribs in the night, right?

Wrong. Today’s Christians aren’t suddenly smarter than all those dead apostles and saints and monks and scholars who were much wiser (and calmer) than us. 1948 was not the prophetic wind-up of some sort of magic countdown clock to Armageddon. Neither was 1967 or 2008 or any of the other so-called signs like blood moons and red heifers. It’s entertaining, but it’s nonsense.

So what is right? Legend has it that once upon a time, an itinerant rabbi gathered a rabble of ordinary folk and set in motion a movement not even the mighty Roman Empire could crush. He said crazy things like “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you” and “as you did it to one of the least of my brethren you did it to me.” Other men who came before him said equally insane things. Things like “the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.” They asked awkward questions like “what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

I don’t know about you, but I like this sort of crazy. A lot more than the foolishness I see on TV, and hear on the radio, and read on these pages…

Jacques d’Nalgar
Hot Springs, Arkansas

Photo of 666 5th Avenue in New York City: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-16/kushner-plan-for-fifth-avenue-tower-is-being-blocked-by-partner