Daniel 12.1-4
Psalm 16
Hebrews 10.31-39
Mark 13.14-23
When I was a boy an annual event in my church was the visit of
an itinerant preacher who specialized in The Last Things - what
in precincts of more theological sophistication I later came to know
as eschatology. These preachers held forth in a series of
learned disquisitions on such matters as the Rapture of the Church,
the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, the Millennium,
and so on; in brief The End of the World which could as a matter
of fact be expected to commence immediately. The biblical apocalypses of
Daniel, the book of Revelation and texts like today’s lesson from Mark
were presented as straightforward descriptions of future events. The centerpiece
of these proceedings was The Chart. The Chart was wall-sized and dauntingly
intricate, a kind of convoluted cosmic flowchart demonstrating how the
unsaved were to be carried past the Great White Throne and funneled down
into the Lake of Fire while the saved were to be reunited with their resurrected
bodies and transported to the New Jerusalem as it floated down to Earth.
These texts were seized upon with a weird literalism oblivious
to such matters as literary genre, the historical context of the
authors or even authorial intent. We heard for instance that Daniel
was writing about Nikita Kruschev’s imminent invasion of the
Holy Land where Russian tanks would fight the battle of Armageddon,
or that John’s vision on the Isle of Patmos of a beast with ten heads referred
to the European Common Market. In retrospect this was zany stuff
but at the time it was approached with full seriousness and with great
respect for the esoteric scholarship being demonstrated.
(This is just one of the things one misses out on by being raised an Episcopalian!)
All this came to an end at last when one speaker, forsaking the standard black and white diagrammatic format, employed glow in the dark chalk. At a crucial moment, the lights went out and there before us the flames of hell balefully glowed red and orange. The children were terrified and the saner folk in the church prevailed: we’d had enough of Last Things. I turned to science-fiction and happily forsook matters eschatological for years to come.
The dreaded Chart was an example of what not to do with these exotic texts. But what are we to make of them?
The place to turn first is, of course, real history and the biblical writers’ attempt to penetrate behind history’s inchoate appearances to its meaning, a meaning ultimately and intimately secured in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Yet the use to which that history is put is largely foreign to us today. For a writer like Mark the fabric of this world’s space and time is folded over upon itself. Events remote from one another are juxtaposed to reveal their meaning.
Mark, writing probably in the eighth decade of the first century - i.e. about 40 years after the events his gospel relates - describes Jesus as speaking about an event yet to come: the “desolating sacrilege.” But in doing so he portrays Jesus as alluding to something that happened long before: in 167 BC the Syrian-Greek king Antiochus Epiphanies tried to force the ‘backward Jews’ to give up their faith and worship the Greek gods. He outlawed Judaism and its ceremonial practices and brutally punished the many who refused to obey. He converted the Temple in Jerusalem into a temple for Zeus and sacrificed a pig - an unclean animal - on the altar. Utter profanation. The worst thing imaginable. The abomination of desolation. This incensed the Jews and precipitated the Macabean revolt and the heroics the Jewish people came to celebrate as Hanukkah.
In Jesus’ day, all this lies two centuries in the past; the Greeks are long gone and replaced by the Romans. Yet the story remained painfully lodged in everyone’s imagination, shaping fears for the future.
This is just one of the layers of meaning in today’s lesson.
We also know that there was another revolt, this one against the
Romans, that culminated in the Temple being destroyed and Jerusalem
being burned in AD 70. Probably, Mark’s gospel was
written not long after this happened though it is possible that it
dates to the years leading up to this cataclysmic event, another
desolating sacrilege. Either way, it’s clear that part of what
Mark wants to do is to report that Jesus had foreseen the catastrophe that
would overtake the people of Israel. Recall that at the beginning
of the chapter from which this morning’s text comes we hear Jesus telling
his disciples, who have been admiring the Temple, that it will be utterly
destroyed: “Not one stone will be left standing!”
For the pious Jew, whether of Antiochus’ day, or Jesus’, or Mark’s,
the thought of the Jerusalem Temple being profaned and
destroyed was an unmitigated disaster. It was the center of Jewish
identity as God’s people. For a gentile power to desecrate it or destroy
it was the end of their world, the end of their ability to function as
God’s elect people.
I want to suggest that all this, though certainly a real part
of what’s going on in today’s text, is secondary. Events closer at
hand
are, I think, foremost in Jesus’ mind as he utters his dark prophecy.
Earlier in the gospel Mark has portrayed Jesus as explicitly
aware of where his confrontation with the religious authorities is
leading. Here in Chapter 13 Jesus moves quickly toward his
Passion. His sparring with representatives of the main religious parties,
the Pharisees, the Saducees and the Herodians, has turned deadly.
Those who actually rule are playing cat and mouse with this clever and
dangerous Galilean, probing for the opportunity to hand him over to the
Romans to be gotten rid of for good.
In this context, Jesus’ foreboding, his realization that defeat
and disaster looms, has as its main focus his own coming death.
Surely he does not fully separate his personal disappointment, the
anguish and shame at being rejected by his own people, his
inexorably approaching public humiliation and execution, from the fate
of the Israel that seeks its salvation without him, without
God. The Jesus of this gospel knows who he is and he knows what
is soon to befall him.
Mark’s own sense of hopelessness and horror resonate with what Jesus feels as he moves toward his arrest and crucifixion. Both Jesus before the fact and Mark after are acutely aware of the enormity - the infinite enormity - of the crime, the sacrilege of all sacrileges: Jesus a condemned criminal nailed to the cross.
Viewed from the outside, what’s coming is one more turn of the
wheel of meaningless history. A personal tragedy but nothing
important. Just one more sufferer, one more added to the endless ranks
of the obscure dead; executed criminals or innocent
victims - perhaps the difference not counting for much in the long
run. But the fantastic language of apocalypse signals that here
we’re shown not the outward pointlessness but the inner meaning, the
divine purpose at work. Jesus depicts his own death in
terms of cosmic disaster, a doom to engulf everyone, the end of the
world.
All through Mark we’ve heard Jesus condemning the religious authorities, forecasting their doom in coming judgment. “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand!” God’s Law was God’s gift to his people, a way for them to make concrete their trust in God, a means to make their daily lives a sweet dance of gratitude to their God. But the self-righteous and powerful turned that Law into a tool for justifying themselves and lording it over others. They replaced God’s way with a religion like all religions, a system of condemnation and control. Women, children, the poor, the diseased, the crippled, the gentiles, the unwashed, the impure, the needy sinners have been judged, found wanting and cut off from God. Jesus speaks like an Old Testament prophet announcing the Day of the Lord, when God brings a climax of terrifying judgment upon a world that delights in moral and religious propriety while oppressing the weak and blocking their access to God. Those self-justifying scribes and Pharisees, those protectors of the Law who proudly plop their big contributions in the Temple collection box are really devourers of widow’s houses. But judgment is on its way. Not one stone will be left standing. The end of their world is upon them. The kingdom of God is at hand.
If they had been able to look ahead thirty years or so, what they would have seen, the Roman’s destruction of the Temple and the decimation of the Jewish nation, would have terrified them. But that’s the lesser thing. The greater thing, the Last Judgment, the End of the World, was much closer. They helped bring it about but they did not know it for what it was. It was what Jesus did foresee, his own murder. The Ruler of the Universe put to death for sedition. The Creator punished for blasphemy by his all too religious creatures. Truth declared a lie, beauty bloodied, goodness himself counted among the wicked. This not at all conspicuous killing is the desolating sacrilege, the catastrophe that brings everything into judgment and lays waste all that seemed secure.
When Antiochus profaned the Temple and when the Romans burned it the world was about its business. The self-assuredly and self-righteously powerful humiliated and crushed the weak. God’s way in the world was held up to ridicule as a lost cause. That’s what it looked like in the sacrilege that happened between these two events. Jesus’ defeat was in reality the victory of God’s judgment on this world and its ways. But that judgment was not the destruction of those judged but their salvation. Our salvation. This is a judgment that does not look like judgment and a salvation that does not look like salvation. Yet we know that it’s here alone that God saves. Out of despair and death he calls forth life and hope.
Of course we’d find it preferable for God to save us by some
more sensible means; by the conventional means of triumphant
power that takes account of how deserving we really are, after all.
Yet the world in which that might be a possibility came to an end around
AD 30 outside the walls of Jerusalem. We’d like God to save us from
pain and loss and death but by and large he doesn’t; no more than he saved
his own Son our Savior. Later today for All Souls we’ll name and
remember the dead. God did not deliver them from whatever loss their lives
held. Nor did he save them from death. Yet he saves them: their lives are
safe in the resurrected Christ. He saves us in - not from - our pain,
loss and death.
The other day I saw a video about the Sudan. It reminded me that
this is exactly how the God made flesh in Christ works. It
showed thousands of Sudanese Christians in refuge camps. A few
years ago they were animists, worshipping trees and cattle but their culture
has been obliterated by the country’s genocidal, fundamentalist Muslim
government. Yet they were dancing and singing hymns, each one grasping
a little wooden cross. They clung to that piece of wood as though
it alone had pulled them out of the wreck of their past lives. In the midst
of untold disaster, their world at an end, these people have turned to
the crucified Jesus.
Let’s make it our prayer that we too will put our hope in him.
Amen