I’m often intrigued by the way stories with known endings continue to fascinate us. Our favourite books we reread over and over again; our favourite stories we tell again and again, even when everyone hearing them knows what will happen. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our reading of the Bible: we go to Egypt and to the wilderness, to Bethlehem and dark Gethsemane and Golgotha over and over again to read the stories we’ve been reading for hundreds and thousands of years.
This is because, I think, we enjoy stories not for their endings but for their entire experience. No ending can be satisfying without being properly set up: even stories defined by their endings and their twists like mysteries cannot be fun without having their groundwork laid ahead of time. The real fun is realizing which breadcrumbs paved the way to the ending, which we as readers missed or misconstrued along the way. Endings are nothing without the journey, and some stories are less journeys–progressions to an end–as monoliths, each piece inextricable from the rest, and removing any piece undermines all the others.
One of my favourite instances of this is the musical Hadestown, which retells in musical fashion the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the opening number, Hermes, serving as the narrator for the story, announces that the “old song” that is the play–the love story between Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as between Hades and Persephone–is a sad song and a tragedy. Right from the beginning, the audience is fully aware that things aren’t going to work out, and that Orpheus and Eurydice will fail.
But there’s another line in that opening number, “Road to Hell,” that shows why the play still works. Hermes sings that “Someone’s got to tell the tale / Whether or not it turns out well / Maybe it will turn out this time / On the road to Hell on the railroad line.”
Though never sung aloud again in the show, this line echoes unheard in the entirety of the story. The defining emotion of the play, and of this version of the story, is hope: hope that even though this is a story we already know, even though we’ve been told that it ends badly, that somehow we were wrong and that it ends well for the characters.
It doesn’t end well. As any of you who know the myth or are familiar with the play will know, Orpheus escapes the Underworld–or Hadestown, as the musical names it–and Eurydice is left behind. This isn’t a spoiler, nor is it a surprise to the audience: after all, it’s revealed right at the beginning of the show. Even more than that, it’s the point of the show. We’re supposed to know what happens. The reckless hope and optimism of the characters, particularly Orpheus, have to be tempered by the assured tragedy to come, so as not to come across as naivete and arrogance.
The Bible does the same thing constantly–nearly everything is laid out ahead of time either by God, by prophets, or by Jesus, although whether people listen to any of them is another question. Whether it is through clear prediction and prophecy, as Nathan delivers to David in today’s story from 2 Samuel, or through unexplained certainty, as seen in Jesus’ adamant lack of concern in the difficulty of feeding five thousand followers in today’s story from Mark, God and Jesus seem to always know what’s going to happen–they always know the ending.
Confusion and frustration are people’s common and understandable reactions to this, particularly the disciples. When Jesus tells the disciples to feed the people, they retort that they would have to spend two hundred denarii–a denarius being the daily wage of a labourer, the modern equivalence of this sum is hard to estimate, but would be the majority of many people’s annual salary, and would likely amount to tens of thousands of dollars–to feed the people. Elsewhere in the gospels, the disciples react with similar anger and frustration when Jesus reveals part of the future but not all of it. David, for his part, keeps his cool, but it’s easy to imagine his suppressed frustration at being told that he cannot be the one to build God a temple.
Why does this frustration arise so often? I think it’s because to each person, the present often feels like the end. Every story of history has led to this point, and right now is where it ends, at least until we write the next chapter. And however far the continuing story of humanity and of God continues, our personal stories will reach an end. David’s story will end before the chapter of God’s story in which the temple is finally built. To know the end is a nearly unbearable burden to us, because it means we know what we cannot do or what we cannot control. David will never see the day when the temple is finished. Peter is unable to control denying Christ three times. Knowing an absolute future feels antithetical to our concept of free will, and thus knowing the future means it is impossible to fully independently write our own. Such frustration is especially acute when the foretold future is one of doom and gloom–what point is there in trying, it seems, if we are doomed to fail? Could Orpheus be as jubilant and hopeful as he is if he had heard Hermes proclaim his failure?
Another of my favourite instances of end-telling in myth and legend, and one of the most well-known, is that of Ragnarok in Norse mythology. Told largely through the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, two collections of Norse myths written in the late Middle Ages, the end of the world, or “Twilight of the Gods,” as the word Ragnarok translates, is told in obsessive detail: exactly how each development will be set into motion, who will fight and kill who, who will survive and how, and almost every other detail imaginable, down to a passage that says Thor will walk nine steps after killing Jörmungandr the World-Serpent before dying of its venom. But one crucial detail is left out: when all of it will happen. Thus, much of Norse myth exists with the prophesied end of the world hanging over each character’s head, but without any understanding of when. As a result, many myths interact directly with that prophecy: Loki and the jötuns, or giants, try to hasten the events that bring about Ragnarok, and the gods attempt to delay it..
Do we not have a Ragnarok of our own hanging over our heads? We might call it Revelation, or simply the end of the world, but it seems that we exist with an expectation that something–climate change, AI, nuclear weapons, or something yet unknown–will bring the world as we know it to an end. Some people certainly seem to be doing their best to hasten it, and we and others do what we can to preserve the world we love. We don’t know when it may happen, of course, but it feels close, doesn’t it? “The time is near,” John says in Revelation 1:3. When was the last time it didn’t feel like the end of the world might be close? When has it not felt hard to carry on, since whatever we build may be torn down so soon? Can any of us remember such a time?
Why do I mention Ragnarok instead of simply talking about Revelation? They are both predictions of the end, in similarly extensive levels of detail. Revelation comes from our own canon of writing, after all, and isn’t something we talk about often. It also has some delightfully strange details, like in chapter 20 when Paul says that the Devil will be thrown into the pit for a thousand years, but–and I quote from Revelation 20:3– “After that he must be let out for a little while.” Fascinating! So many questions!
But it is precisely because we don’t talk about Revelation that I didn’t bring it up in the first place. Revelation isn’t a big part of our faith–which is a good thing, I think. It’s one of the weird skinny books in the New Testament that are hard to find, and its contents are among the decidedly less relevant to daily life. Importantly, it comes at the end of the Bible. Never does Revelation hang over the books that come before it, or influence the events of prior books. Revelation is a prediction, but to us it’s also a conclusion, or even an afterthought.
Conversely, Ragnarok is a major part of Norse mythology, or at least of the parts of it that survive into popular culture. And crucially, Ragnarok is not described at the end of works that include it but at the beginning. Ragnarok is described mostly by two of the eleven poems in the Codex Regius version of the Poetic Edda and by five chapters of the Prose Edda. The two poems, the Völuspá and the Vafþrúðnismál, appear first and third respectively in the Poetic Edda, and all five related chapters of the Prose Edda appear in the Gylfaginning, the first of three books to appear after the prologue. Ragnarok is not an end that concludes its story, but one that is clear throughout. It’s foreshadowing, not epilogue.
There’s a flip side to the desolation of knowing a tragic ending. When we know the ending does turn out, we can push through even the lowest lows, knowing it will be okay in the end. Lingering doubt replaces the hope of tragedies, and perhaps for a moment we wonder: maybe it won’t turn out this time. But it does. Our doubt flies away like a tumbleweed in a hurricane and we feel the triumph we knew was coming all along. Instead of the sudden swoop of a tragedy from hope to sorrow, we get a sudden rise from doubt to joy, and just as our sorrow in a tragedy is heightened by the hope we felt moments before, our joy is all the greater because of all that struggle and doubt.
In our own lives we feel this, too: in any uncertain pursuit, the greatest confidence amounts to believing, to knowing that we will prevail. That’s what faith is: believing and knowing that God is with us, taking care of us, writing an end for us where we will be safe and loved. Instead of feeling despair at not being able to control the ending to our own story, as the disciples sometimes feel, we feel the peace David feels when he’s told that even if a temple to God is not part of his story, it is part of the story. We don’t need to control every part of the story, nor should we want to. Lack of control can be frustrating, but it can also be comforting: God is taking care of some of the work so that we don’t have to.
There’s one part of the Ragnarok story that I haven’t told yet. After the battle and the fire that ends the world, one place, Iðavöllr, survives untouched. The sun, before she is consumed by Jörmungandr the World-Serpent, births a daughter sun said to be at least as beautiful as her mother. Six lesser gods, Viðarr, Válli, Móði, Magni, Baldr, and Höðr, all arrive and recount their memories. They find the same golden game pieces that all the gods once used. One account describes a powerful being that will rule over everything–interestingly, this is thought to have been added to the myth by Christian authors, so perhaps it’s not an entirely pagan story. Two humans, Líf and Lífþrasir, also survive and repopulate the earth. Even this story, one that revolves around and is defined by its apocalyptic ending, continues on afterwards.
This is a section of the myth not often talked about, and yet it changes the meaning of the whole thing. Ragnarok is a disaster, of course, and an end, but it isn’t the end. The familiar world is destroyed, but there’s a world that continues on.
So I ask again, do we have a Ragnarok hanging over us? Maybe we don’t. It’s felt like the end might be close for a long time, but we’ve made it this far, haven’t we? The world will change, of course; we know that. Some parts of it, no doubt, will end. But there will be a world that continues on after. Even Revelation isn’t just the end: it describes what the world and the city of God will be like after.
So what do we do with all this? As John Oliver often says with about five minutes left in his main story, what can we do about it?
To begin with, we can know our place in our story. God’s story has been happening for a long time before any of us–that’s why we’re here–and it will continue long after us. And I think we can take comfort–not despair–in knowing that at least part of our ending, and the ending, are already written. We are not uncertain about God’s love: we know God will love us and care for us forever. We may not know how Jesus is going to feed five thousand people in an afternoon, but Jesus does. We–and this is the point I’ve been trying to make it back to–may not be the ones to build the temple, but we can trust that whatever temple God needs will be built. This is what our faith is; it’s believing that the outcome of the world isn’t in doubt and isn’t random, but that God is with us and is guiding us to a place, already defined, at least in part, that is good. Maybe that’s why we love stories with known endings so much: they’re an exercise in believing and having faith that things will work out for the characters we love. In most instances, that faith is rewarded, and things do work out. Other times, the ending is tragic and our faith is tested, but there is beauty present in the story all the same. Maybe it’s why authors and storytellers hint at their endings, tugging at the marionette-strings of our faith as they guide us along towards that end that we already know.
The end is written. We are dust, God tells us in Genesis, and to dust we shall return. We are dust that is part of the great course of God’s story, and will remain part of that story even once our chapters conclude. This may be the chapter in which we build God a temple, or perhaps, like David, we must wait until the next generation for our children to do the work we cannot. This may be the chapter where the temple is destroyed, and we may have to wait several chapters more before it is rebuilt. But the end is written, and the end is God, and the end is love, and there is no end to God’s love. So let us live as part of God’s story, part of the same story that we read.
And maybe it will turn out this time.