Scripture: Mark 13:24-37
My sermons for the last few months have been loosely connected by the theme of “the teachings of Jesus”, and I decided to continue that theme for today’s service. I do plan to take a break from the “teachings of Jesus” idea for the rest of the Advent season and come back to it in January. There are a lot of teachings of Jesus I haven’t got around to yet, but they’ll still be there in the New Year.
I decided to stick with the teachings theme for this week though because there is a teaching of Jesus that always comes up in the lectionary readings at the beginning of Advent, and I decided not to ignore it, even though my tendency, and the tendency of many other ministers is to ignore it, with some good reason. You’ve already heard the scripture for this morning, so you have an idea of what I’m talking about. Jesus seems to be predicting the end of the world. Here are some excerpts from the whole of chapter 13 in Mark’s gospel, a section that is known as the little apocalypse:
“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; everything will collapse…When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come…Kingdom will rise against kingdom…there will be earthquakes… and famine. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs…In those days there will be suffering such as has not been since from the beginning of creation that God created until now, no, and never will be…But in those days after that suffering (this is where this morning’s reading picked up) the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven…Then they will see the Son of Man coming with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds…Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place…”
You can see why many ministers, including me, tend to ignore this passage. I mean what are we supposed to make of this? There are actually several kinds of reasons why people might tend to ignore a teaching of Jesus. Some of the teachings at first glance seem to be unreasonable, for instance some of the harsh things he has to say about families, which I still intend to get back to at some point. Some of them seem not so much unreasonable as impractical, for instance the idea of turning the other cheek, which I have also not forgotten about and will get around to talking about at some point. But what Jesus says in this chapter from Mark, and in some other places in the gospels, is different. It doesn’t suggest that Jesus challenges our conventional wisdom in some way that may be hard to fathom. It doesn’t suggest that Jesus has a higher standard for us than we mere mortals are really capable of. It suggests more that Jesus has gone a little bit, crazy, that he has lost his grip on reality, that maybe he is hallucinating a little bit, with all these visions of the sun in eclipse and earthquakes and sufferings of all kinds, with a figure descending from heaven surrounded by angels, and so forth. And on top of all this the passage describes a Jesus who turned out to be just plain wrong. “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”
In our day we have made a cartoon character out of the fellow standing on a street corner carrying a sign that says “the end is near”. We don’t want to turn Jesus into a cartoon character, but there he is saying, right there in plain black and white in Mark’s gospel, saying “the end is near”. So the easiest thing is just to ignore the fact that it’s there. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean we have to preach on it. And we can find respectable reasons to ignore it, after all.
Maybe Jesus didn’t really say this. Maybe this was something that was added on later by early Christians who attributed it to Jesus maybe remembering something he had said but not getting it quite right, influenced by the fact that forty years later there had been a Jewish war with Rome, the temple had been destroyed, much of the rest of their civilization lay in ruins and many sincere people felt like their world had ended and that the world as a whole was about to end. Many Biblical scholars feel like these words have more to do with what was going on in the world when the gospel was being written, some 30-40 years after Jesus was executed, than they do with what Jesus actually said or certainly anything he meant to teach.
Then, of course, quite apart from any Biblical issues, there is a certain style of Christianity that seems to be based on this passage and others like it. Some Christians have expected the end of the world, have made the expectation of Christ’s second coming, and in fact his imminent return, one of their core beliefs. The whole idea of a second coming of Christ is why this scripture appears at the beginning of the Advent season. It’s recognition that Christians today don’t await Christ’s first coming. That’s already happened. They await Christ’s second coming. As the Advent season goes along, the focus goes back to the story of Jesus’ birth and our preparation to hear that story and celebrate it. But here at the beginning we are reminded of this belief that has always been a part of official Christian doctrine that Christ will return.
But this is an uncomfortable reminder for many of us. There are some examples through Christian history, not too many, but some that have gained some notoriety, where people not only believed in Christ’s imminent return but felt that they had come up with an interpretation of scripture that revealed the date of that return. Of course every such effort has so far proven wrong and that has tended to discredit people who have such a hope. But others have held on to the hope, knowing that they can’t predict the exact date, but also feeling that Christians must live in that constant expectation and therefore the focus of their faith—always—should be on being prepared, having a believing heart and spirit, so that when the end comes they would be among those who will be gathered in from the four winds, as our passage today says it. And a corollary of this kind of faith usually is that since the world does not have long remaining, there is no particular point in Christians getting involved in it, attached to it, or taking responsibility for it. The world is in the process of passing away. And so not wanting to be associated with any tendency in that direction, many of us would prefer to just ignore the passage. We’re not that kind of Christian and we don’t even want to get too near those kinds of passages in the Bible.
Fortunately, there is that section at the end where Jesus says, “About that day or hour no one knows”, not even the angels in heaven. So beware, he says, keep alert, stay awake. And preachers of a more this worldly bent can breathe a sigh of relief and focus in on that part of the passage. We can talk about being attentive, not sleep-walking through life. Maybe in a good modern fashion we can try to connect the idea of being attentive that Jesus does bring up here with the concept of mindfulness. Or we can talk about waiting in general, the kinds of waiting we do as human beings, and the spirituality of being hopeful, or patient. There are lots of possibilities for preaching in that last part of what Jesus has to say, and they all have the distinct advantage of ignoring that first part about the end of the world and the Son of Man descending from heaven on the clouds and so forth. Thank God we don’t have to deal with that; there are alternatives here.
And there’s nothing wrong with those alternatives, many of them. But it may not be such a great idea to ignore that first part after all. For one thing, wrestling with parts of the scriptures that are not particularly to our liking, or maybe even offensive, can sometimes be productive. And, on general principles, it’s something that is good to do from time to time. If we only pay attention to those parts of the Bible that confirm what we already think, then why bother with the Bible at all?
But more than that, in this case the call to pay attention to a part of the Bible that can tend to be neglected by some of us may also be a call to pay attention to part of ourselves that needs some attending to. We don’t have to buy in to the specifics of what Jesus seems to be saying here or to the kind of language he uses or certainly to the conclusions that some have drawn from this passage. You don’t have to buy into an apocalyptic world-view that sees some cataclysm about to descend on us bringing an end to the human adventure. On the other hand, in this era of warnings of ecological disaster, in this post 9-11 world where we have had it brought home to us that mayhem can strike at any time, in this time of financial failure and in many ways of institutional failure, in these times of radical uncertainty that we live in, is it really so hard to relate to the first part of this scriptural passage?
Let me put this another way. I believe Jesus’ message to us here, beyond the dreamlike images and the prediction that the end will come while the current generation is still alive, which if Jesus thought in any literal sort of way, he was wrong about, beyond all of that, I believe that Jesus’ message to us here fundamentally is that human life is always radically uncertain, and if we turn our attention away from that, if we turn our spirits in some other direction, if we pretend that anything else is the case, we will simply be deluding ourselves. The question of whether we pay attention to that part of the scripture is actually an important one, because the question that lies behind it is whether we pay attention to that part of ourselves. On an individual level, of course, it is true that our lives are uncertain, and to acknowledge that in our spirits affects all sorts of things, from our need to give thanks for every moment of our lives to our need to trust God. Being in denial about the uncertainty of our lives does not help to nurture the kind of spirituality we need.
In a like manner the uncertainty of our lives is writ large for us these days. Of course we don’t need the gospel of Mark to remind us of our current array of crises. What Jesus’ words may suggest, however, what they suggest to me as reflect on how I might relate to them in spite of how foreign they sound to my way of thinking, what they suggest to me is that in the light of God (which I understand to be where Jesus lived), in the light of God this world is always an impermanent reality, can never be counted on to give us our source of stability, can never be where our spirits are grounded, and is always in a state of crisis.
In this regard a memory from long ago occurred to me as I was sitting with these thoughts. It was from the ‘60’s, which as some of you remember, was also a time of crisis. I forget my exact surroundings, but I was listening to a speaker who was speaking on the church in relation to the Vietnam war, the difficult struggle toward civil rights, racial unrest, assassinations, and so forth—addressing what many felt to be the irrelevance of the church in the light of all this. In the course of his remarks, I remember him saying that all the stuff going on around us might seem like a crisis to us, but that was only because we were naïve, comfortable, protected, privileged white folks who had this very limited and restricted idea about what constituted a crisis. He said that African Americans in the United States had been living in a state of crisis since before a single African set foot on this soil. For African Americans, he said, the sixties was not a crisis. America was a crisis. And for poor people and powerless people in our own country and around the world the crisis did not come with the sixties. It had been there their whole lives and the whole lives of generations before them. The idea that the sixties was a time of crisis, he said, was true from only a very small and privileged perspective, and if we were going to be ministers, he said, we had better learn to speak from a different perspective.
Which led him to go on to a theological comment of sorts. He said he was not a theologian, but he was a Christian, and he had always felt that Christ coming into the world had put the whole world in a permanent state of crisis. When measured against the words of Christ, the spirit of Christ, the vision of Christ, the world cannot be in anything other than a state of crisis. In the light of Christ, who lived in the light of God, the world is in an ongoing state of crisis, has always been in a state of crisis, and Christians or Christian churches who fail to appreciate that are not on a faithful path.
I cannot say this was a life-changing experience for me, but it was, obviously, a memorable one, and looking back on it, I’m sure it was one of the many things that allowed me to become a Christian. I can’t say I’ve taken it to heart and lived every day as though we were in a crisis situation. I suspect we humans aren’t quite cut out to do that. But there is a truth in what I heard that day that I recalled as a result of my encounter with our scripture for today, strange sounding as it may be to our ears. And I relay that thought to you at the beginning of this Advent season. Advent this year may not be quite a business as usual Advent season. But then again, if we stop to reflect on the coming of Christ among us, Advent was never has been a time for business as usual, and never should be. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 30, 2008