Isaiah 64.1-9
Psalm 80
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
Mark 13.24-37
“Keep awake!” Mark 13:37
Hurry Up And Wait!
Having to come up with a homily on today’s gospel reminds me of a story that used to circulate at Duke University when I was in graduate school there. Years before there had been a required New Testament course for undergraduates, and from time immemorial the final exam question had asked for a rendition of the missionary journeys of St. Paul. One year there was a student who did little work for the course but planned to sail through the final examination by memorizing and reproducing an essay on the expected topic. When he got the exam he was horrified to read “Write an essay in which you critically analyze the Sermon on the Mount.” Thinking fast, the desperate student began his essay: “Far be it from me to criticize the words of our Lord and Savior; instead, I shall examine the missionary journeys of St. Paul...” It being a Methodist university where piety mattered the student got his A. Like him, I’d like to duck the text at hand, but I’ll try to resist that temptation.
In the past few weeks we’ve meditated on the theme of being prepared, being ready, being awake and alert for the coming of God. Here, although we shift in our new year from Matthew to Mark, the theme continues. Various futures to be awaited are overlaid in the vision of today’s text, yet the chronology with which events will unfold is obscure, even to Jesus. But one layer I want to focus on is this: Jesus reads his own confrontation with the religious authorities of Israel in terms of those parables of unexpected and unwelcome returns. The long-absent God has at last returned in the person of Jesus but the official keepers of the faith, the Scribes and the Pharisees, are calamitously unprepared. The watchmen are asleep on duty. God has arrived in person, and they’re blind to him. Indeed, as Jesus seems to see before they do, their response to him will be that of the tenants in the vineyard who kill the owner’s son to make the vineyard their own.
The men who plotted to have Jesus put to death and put out of the way for good were supposed to be waiting for God. They knew Isaiah’s cry, the one we heard this morning: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! But that was the very last thing they wanted and awaited. Whatever they were doing as they sought to safeguard the religious integrity of an Israel under gentile occupation, they weren’t waiting for God. To them it appeared their religious duty, but it was a supreme indifference to the real coming of God.
I don’t think these Scribes and Pharisees were particularly wicked people. When, as he often does, Jesus calls them hypocrites, I don’t think we should take this in the modern sense of those who believe one thing while pretending to believe another. That would be too easy, a way to disown these characters who are really far too close to us for comfort. They cared about good things like the stability of the nation, worship being carried out decently and in order, about people behaving themselves and doing what God commands. This Galilean with his healings, his enigmatic parables, and his all too straightforward unreasonable denunciations of them, was capturing the imagination of the people, stirring up discontent, threatening to undermine the precarious accommodation with Rome and bring on a catastrophe. Surely God needed them to do this bit of dirty work and save God’s people from this lawless troublemaker. Like everyone, they cared about comfort and security, about peace and propriety, even if this meant making sure that God could not show up to make a mess of things. They wanted the heavens safely sealed, with no chance of a God breaking in to put at risk all they hold dear. As Jesus says: they cared about their religious traditions more than they cared about God. The example of the Scribes and Pharisees shows us how not to be prepared for God’s arrival. But how to be prepared?
When I was a boy being raised by dedicated Evangelicals we believed in the imminent return of Christ: Jesus could return suddenly, at any moment, and we were supposed to be always vigilant, expecting and looking forward to that return. It was a bit tricky knowing how to take this. It was a mark of piety sincerely to want Christ to return in your own lifetime (I never did), and to be confident that this would happen (I was afraid it would), but at the same time it was going too far to believe of some particular time, next Tuesday at noon, for instance, that that was going to be the time: “but about that day or hour no one knows...only the Father.” Looking back at all this now I’m afraid that this call to alert waiting for the coming of God was mostly a way to get people to behave themselves. At least that’s what it boiled down to for young people like me. The question was always: Would you want to be doing that if Jesus were to return!? Would you want to be there when Jesus comes back?! And it turned out that the things in question were just the things that good people should be avoiding anyway: I didn’t want to be in the middle of a big fight with my sister when Jesus showed up; I didn’t want Jesus to come back and find me at the movies, or at a dance, or in a bar...I didn’t want Jesus arriving unexpectedly and saying “Gotcha!” Surely this is trivializes Jesus’ command to keep awake; it makes God tame and safe, a guardian of the status quo.
For others, many now as the new millennium dawns, to be ready for the coming of God is to anticipate a cosmic extravaganza, to eagerly await an ultimate showdown between good and evil, preferably one that vindicates good people like us and metes out rightful punishment to bad people like them. This kind of waiting, even if it doesn’t become a matter of stockpiling food and guns for a sociopolitical Armageddon, or devolve into a suicidal rendezvous with a spacecraft hiding in the tail of a comet, still tends toward being an expression of resentment. It’s disconnected from Christian faith’s confession that God’s ultimate judgment takes place not ahead of us in some future out of bad science fiction, but in the historical past, on a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem. This, like the version I grew up with, profoundly misses the point of Jesus’ command to wait and watch.
Karen and I are great fans of the PBS program The Vicar of Dibley, a situation comedy set in a Church of England parish remarkably similar to St. George’s. One day the vicar quotes Jesus saying something about rich men having a hard time entering the Kingdom of Heaven to her Senior Warden, David Horton. Horton responds, saying “Jesus had a lot of damn wacky ideas!” It seems to me that, if nothing else, the Senior Warden had at least the beginning of a real understanding of Jesus. He saw that this Jesus won’t do as an inspiring, if archaic, model of conventional morals and civic virtue. This Jesus said things that if taken seriously would call into question everything about us, all our careful strategies for being right and righteous. The God we wait for, the God whose once and future advent in Christ we celebrate today, comes in a way that makes no sense by this world’s lights.
The best way to find out what waiting and being alert consists in is to listen to Jesus himself. Recall Jesus’ condemnation of the Scribes and Pharisees: what’s the evidence for the charge that they care not for God but for their own way of doing things? I think the answer is this: Jesus accuses them of caring more about their religion, its forms and traditions, than about their fellow human beings. These were the religious leaders who were outraged that Jesus ate with society’s outcasts while having no concern that these people were social outcasts. These are the religious leaders who were more impressed with the fact that Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath than with the fact that someone is healed. Jesus goes about the countryside healing lepers and blind people, returning once-dead children to grieving parents, freeing people from demonic powers, feeding hungry multitudes...but these leaders, shepherds of the house of Israel, care only that he fails to show proper respect for the ceremonial law, that he’s associated himself with the morally, socially and religiously suspect. They revealed that they had no real desire to pay attention to God by showing they had no interest in what God cares about: human beings in their lostness, hurt and need. Jesus vividly sees the coming cross; he knows the depth of God’s implacable love, what he is ready to give -- and ask -- for the sake of human need. Had Jesus’ opponents made this concern, God’s concern, their own, surely when Jesus appeared among them they would have been awake. They would have rejoiced to welcome their long-awaited messiah, as surprising the form of his appearing might have been to them
Let me quote another Senior Warden, a real one a bit closer than Dibley: she was discussing the possibility of engaging in a minor ecclesiastical irregularity -- I think it was a baptism during Lent, or something like that -- she summed up her view on the matter in two words: “People first!” As David Horton, that good man of the world would tell us, that’s a damn wacky idea. But the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.
If we want to be attentive to God, to be awaiting his coming, we’d better be focused on what we know he cares about. We’d better be willing to give up whatever needs to be given up if that’s what it takes to do God’s work in this world. From last week’s appalling lesson in Matthew’s Gospel we know what that work is; we know what God cares about above all things: remember who the goats are and who the sheep are.
There’s an expression from the military, probably from World War Two: “Hurry up and wait!” To our ears it’s paradoxical: the troops are always being ordered about, forced to quickly march off to some location just so they can wait around doing nothing. “Hurry up so you can do...nothing!”. For us “waiting” connotes not action but inactivity, an in-between time, in which we do nothing of significance because it’s not yet time to act. But, as St. Paul told the Corinthian Christians in this morning’s epistle, our task is to be waiting for the revealing of our Lord, Jesus Christ; he’s not telling us to bide our time. He’s telling us to hurry up and wait: to get to work because Christ has come and he’ll come again.
So it seems to me we have a crucial part of an answer to the question. To be faithfully waiting and watching for God’s coming is to be at work building that Kingdom in which the hungry are fed, the loveless are loved, the unacceptable are accepted; the broken in heart, mind and body are picked up and made whole; the good news that God cares and acts is proclaimed -- in word and action -- to all manner of human need. We know that we’re trying to do what by any reasonable human calculation is impossible, but that’s fine; it’s God’s work of reconciliation we need to hurry up and be at. It’s not one more human plan to make things a bit better. We need to escape the temptation to push God’s Kingdom off into a realm of wonderful but impractical ideals, or to send it away into an eschatological future that’s always coming and never arriving, but to live it now, in all the ambiguities of our present situation and with all the inadequacies of our present selves. We need to ask: are we living in ways that make sense only if it’s true that Christ has come and Christ will come again? Only then are we awake and not asleep. To be alert to anything else, no matter how valuable -- to correct theology, to morality, to beautiful form in worship -- without being alert to this is to be asleep, not to be on watch for God’s coming. Our prayer to God must be that he will give us insight and courage so we do not delay but get busy and wait, that he will give us the faith to keep awake.
Amen.