To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
All swans are white.
At least, that’s what Europeans thought for hundreds of years.
“As rare as a black swan” became something of a proverb. It meant the odds were exceedingly low you would ever see or experience something.
When Europeans arrived in Australia, however, they discovered there was a species of black swans after all.
In his bestselling 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the case that the world in which we live has been largely shaped by the sudden appearance of discoveries, events, and breakthroughs that no one saw coming.
“Black swans” have far-reaching impact. And even though revisionist historians may look back and say, “Oh, we actually knew that was going to happen,” Taleb asserts that the surprise — or, more likely, the shock — is always quite genuine.
Think about any book written in 1975 that tried to predict what the world would be like in the first quarter of the 21st century.
No prophet foresaw the black swans that would change everything: the revolution of the personal computer, the arrival of the internet, the sudden fall of the Soviet Union, the discovery of dark energy in the cosmos, the rise of MAGA, the ubiquity of Smart Phones, and the election of a reality TV personality to two presidential terms.
People in the prediction business don’t exactly have it easy.
Professional prognosticators, starting with the present moment, tend to draw lines of some sort into the future. Such lines may trend up or down. But they always assume that something of the present moment is going to stay the same. That’s the problem with black swans. Unexpected developments in technology, science, or economics may suddenly put everyone back to zero.
Taleb says he has been asked on several occasions, “Tell us what you think the next 10 black swans might be.”
He has to coach himself not to laugh out loud. By definition, a black swan cannot be predicted. It cannot be foreseen. Even though we don’t want our world to be turned upside-down and inside-out, it happens all the time.
And it will happen again.
A few days before his trial and crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples that a black swan was coming. It was going to change all of their tomorrows.
The citizens of Judea were fiercely proud of their temple. It was on a par with many of the spectacular construction projects that dotted the Roman Empire. For faithful Jews, the temple was the center of the universe. It was where heaven and earth came together – where God met with his people. And it was all going to come crashing down.
“Not one stone will be left upon another,” Jesus said. His prediction came true 40 years later, in A.D. 70, when a Roman army, exasperated with Jewish resistance, sacked and burned Jerusalem. The gold that adorned the temple melted into the seams between its giant blocks. The soldiers pried the stones apart in an effort to scavenge it.
The disciples were shocked. In Matthew 24:3 they ask when all this going is to happen. And then, raising a much more spectacular issue: “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”
Jesus’ lengthy answer, which can be found in three parallel Bible chapters (Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21), has yielded 20 centuries of End Times speculation. At any given moment in church history, “prophecy experts” have been certain they have cracked the code of the timing of the Apocalypse.
In 1987, I received a small book that I still keep on my shelf: 88 Reasons Why the RaptureWill Occur in 1988. The word “rapture” is associated with the gathering of God’s people to himself during the last times. The next year the same author wrote another book: 89Reasons Why the Rapture Will Occur in 1989. To my knowledge, the author hasn’t written any sequels lately.
A great deal of time, effort, and countless trees can be saved if followers of Jesus simply take him at his word in Matthew 24:36: “But about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” From the get-go, all of our speculation about timetables is in vain.
So where does that leave us? Jesus tells his followers to stay alert, and to refuse to shift into spiritual autopilot.
Interestingly, that’s similar to the counsel that Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers at the end of The Black Swan. He challenges us to keep our eyes open for the unexpected ways in which history is always changing.
We don’t know God’s timetable for the future. We can’t predict what black swans are about to change everything.
But we can know who’s in charge of history, and that giving God our fullest attention is always the right move.
Nothing, after all, is ever going to surprise him.