The First Sunday of Advent, 3 December 2023, Eldroth, Clapham
‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,’ cries Isaiah to his God. How often do we hear people speaking like this at times of crisis, loss, and despair; and asking, ‘Where is God when it hurts?’, ‘Why won’t God intervene to stop the terror and pain?’
We are living through a series of traumatic events, like so many generations before us, world-changing wars in Europe and the Holy Land, the underlying nuclear threat, and the challenges to life on earth caused by the world’s increasingly-rapid overheating. And we come, each of us, with our own stories of trauma, those bereavements, those personal tragedies which at the time shattered our lives, and from which we daily seek recovery.
The Gospel of Mark was written, and is set, in a time of trauma. We will study it together through this year, and maybe it will help us to make sense of our times. [1]
It is fitting that we begin with the strange passage of Chapter 13; because here Jesus is prophesying the traumatic events that Mark’s community has just lived through.
Many generations of Christians have not been aware of this historical background, and so they have read these words as Jesus talking about the end of the world. He wasn’t; for notice, in verse 30, he said these things will happen ‘within a generation’.
Well, 2000 years later we know that the world didn’t end within a generation. So was Jesus just plan wrong, or were his words just fictions made up by the early church?
It's important to understand that Jesus was not predicting the literal end of the world. He was using language that the Hebrew prophets commonly used to prophesy about possible world-changing events, traumatic happenings that would change peoples’ worlds forever. They were using picturesque language to describe moments in history that would cause terrible loss and grief and make it seem like the sun had fallen from the sky and wasn’t shining anymore.
It's important to understand that Jesus wasn’t just predicting the future. He was prophesying. There’s a huge difference. Predicting tends to mean something will happen without a doubt. That there’s nothing one can do to change it. To prophesy is to show someone that they are on a path that will bring likely consequences. Doctors prophesy to us when they tell us that our current bad habits will likely lead to times of illness and poor health. Through their prophesies, they try to get us to make more healthy choices.
We could say that the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, are prophets. They are trying to get Scrooge to change the path he is on, a path leading him into a despised life and a lonely death. They are prophesying to him the path he is on, not because it is unchangeable, but precisely because it is. He can choose another path. He can become a different sort of person. He can… and he does.
Jesus has come to his people of Israel, the Jews, to help them see that God has a wholly other path for them in the world. They are to lead by showing others how to serve. They are to be mighty among the nations by showing the other nations how to favour the least: the poor, the sick, the left-out. Above all, they are never to use violence. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. If they choose to go down the path of other nations, seeking greatness and power like them, they will end up as other nations do eventually, when someone bigger and more powerful comes along.
And this is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel lesson. He was prophesying the terrible events which took place for God’s people, the Jews. Beginning in the year 66, about 30 years after Jesus arose at Easter, a majority of Jews launched into a rebellion against Rome. At the time, Rome was in the middle of its own civil war, so the Jews experienced some early victories. But when the civil war was put down, the Romans gave their full attention to the Jews. In the year 70, Rome destroyed and burned Jerusalem with its temple and slaughtered much of the population. This is the terrible reality that is still fresh to Mark, as he writes his Gospel in the aftermath.
So why does Mark’s story about Jesus become the first of its kind to survive and be kept? Why do we have this new kind of document in the world called a Gospel, that we’re still reading 2000 years later?
The first reason is because Jesus was a prophet who, unfortunately, was right. His fellow Jews continued down the same path and were met with the disaster he prophesied. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that 99% of scientists today are correct and that we are heading into a global warming. They warn us of undesirable events that will take place if we don’t change some of our lifestyles. And then let’s imagine that ten, twenty, thirty years down the road, those terrible events are fully upon us and are wreaking havoc in our world. Whose writings might we turn to? Won’t it be those who prophesied correctly about these events and told us what we could do to change the path we’re on?
That’s why we have the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was correct, not just about his own people, but he is correct about what makes for human beings to live in peace at any time and place. Over and over again Mark teaches us that true power and might comes through caring for the weakest among us; that true leadership comes through serving the least among us, not in seeking to be served; and the most important one: that, in Jesus, God is showing us precisely this kind of power and leadership coming true in the world.
How do we know? Because God has shown us the powers of this world doing their worst to Jesus, but then raising him to new life, as the promise that God’s way is the true way to peace. ‘In this world you will have trouble,’ Jesus tells us. ‘But take heart! I have overcome the world.’ [2]
This is so crucial! That we see, even when we fail to heed his prophesies, that God comes to us in our weakness. God comes with forgiveness instead of more vengeance, with the power of life rather than more death. God comes with the power to take the mess we have made and begin to turn it into gracious life.
Where is God at a time of trauma? God is right here alongside the struggling, suffering ones, those who have been dealt with the worst, by the powers of this world.
What is God doing in this world of pain? Through Jesus he is sowing the seeds of new life, he is helping to open up to us the promise of the true way of peace.
When Jesus tells his disciples to ‘Keep awake’, ‘Watch and pray’, he’s not telling us to bunker down and wait for the apocalypse. He’s giving us the tools by which we can face the traumas of life with faith, the challenges of the world with hope; by which we can flourish and help others to flourish.
Keep awake to what God is doing in the world around us; watch for signs of his presence in your everyday; and pray, keep praying, for in so doing, you will draw ever closer to the one who walks with you on the true way to peace.
Notes
[1] This talk draws substantially on Paul Nuechterlein, MARK’S GOSPEL AS FULFILLING THE WAY OF PROPHECY, delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI, November 30, 2014. Paul’s words, lightly edited, are in italics. Also acknowledging the influence of Paul’s notes in Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Advent 1B.
[2] John 16.33.
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