Jesus foretells climate change

καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς συνοχὴ ἐθνῶν ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἤχους θαλάσσης καὶ σάλου

Luke 21:25b, SBL Greek Testament

Just a note to comfort those who feel that to acknowledge even the possibility of climate change would be tantamount to denying the Lord. Relax, He talked about it.

In Luke’s version of the “Synoptic Apocalypse”, we read the lines above. The NIV renders this as “On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea” which is already pretty clear, once you consider in what circumstances the roaring and tossing of the sea would suddenly be of concern.

After all, anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes near the sea has seen storms, even impressive ones. The point at which this becomes of concern, is when the sea is no longer sticking to its historic (in human memory) boundaries, and threatening to advance. The Old Testament even says that God has set those bounds (Psalm 104).

But Jesus doesn’t say that the waters will again cover the earth: He does warn that, along with signs in the sun, moon and stars, that

“upon the land a contraction / narrows or holding together [as in a trap] of nations in perplexity, [from] echoes and rolling swells of the sea…”

My too-literal-for-comfort rendering of Luke 21:25b

So nations in perplexity and finding themselves in a literally reduced state by the behaviour of the sea (which would cover both sea level rise and the increased incidence of storm surges, which are the predicted and increasingly experienced chief symptoms of rising average global temperatures) seems a good fit with anthropogenic climate change.

So before you say, “huh! If the world is getting warmer why are we having such cold weather…” or some other failure to understand the science of complex systems, please consider that the global conversation around climate change and the increasing evidence for this change (collapse of polar ice, disappearance of glaciers, increased incidence of catastrophic weather events, increases in average global temperature), what is happening – including the conversation itself – actually looks a lot like the fulfilment of what Jesus said was coming…