Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Advent One, 3^rd of December 2023

Isaiah 64:1-9
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

Happy New Year! Today, the first Sunday of Advent, the church is beginning both a new church year and a time of preparation as we look back to Christ’s First Coming and forward to his Second. Because Advent is primarily meant to prepare us for the latter, we start the liturgical year where last week we ended it, with a prophecy of the end times, the eschaton. We start this Year of the Gospel according to Mark with the Markan apocalypse. This is a bit of a problem because, as Brendan Byrne writes, it is ‘the most difficult part of the gospel for interpretation’.[1] As another interpreter I read this week puts it, the thirteenth chapter of Mark ‘is largely ignored by pragmatists, activists, believers in progress, and all who dismiss preoccupation with the end of the world as a juvenile state of human development or an aberration of unbalanced minds’.[2] Since I am at least three of those four things, you can appreciate that today’s gospel passage is not the one I would have chosen to preach on at the beginning of Advent. As a dutiful daughter of the church I will, however, do my best.

As I said last week, the word ‘apocalypse’ means ‘revelation’ and literary apocalypses are revelations of the mysteries of the future or of heaven. Today’s ‘Little Apocalypse,’ so called to distinguish it from the ‘Great Apocalypse’ in the Book of Revelation, is Mark’s version of Jesus’ farewell discourse. It is the last teaching that Jesus gives in the Gospel according to Mark, and the longest given without interruption. In the Gospel according to John the theme of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse is the mutual love disciples are to have for each other, imitating Jesus’ love that comes from the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son. In both the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke Jesus’ final words are about the mission to the Gentiles, making disciples of all nations. In comparison, Mark’s version of Jesus’ final teaching is terrifying. Yet it is also meant to be comforting.

Jesus is speaking privately to Peter, James, John, and Andrew as they sit on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, which they have just left. There, an unnamed disciple had said, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’ Jesus then warned his disciples that ‘Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’ Now that they are alone with him Jesus’ first four disciples ask, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’ In the first part of the Little Apocalypse, which we do not hear today, Jesus begins to answer the ‘when’ question by warning the disciples not to be deceived by anyone claiming that it has come, and that Jesus has returned. There are going to be wars and famines and earthquakes and destruction, Jesus says, but these will not mark the eschaton. Some commentators think that this first part of the Little Apocalypse refers to things that had already happened by the time Mark wrote his gospel, the expelling of Christians from the synagogues and the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66-70 that ended with the destruction of the Temple. Jesus warned, and by the time he wrote Mark’s readers would have known, that none of these things would mark the end of time. The answer to the disciples’ ‘when’ question seems to simply be ‘not yet’.

The second part of the Little Apocalypse, the part that we hear today, goes on to describe ‘the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished’. The eschaton will be impossible to miss, Jesus tells his four disciples, because the signs will be cosmic; the sun and moon darkened and the stars falling, descriptions that seem to come from the prophecies of Isaiah. (Isaiah 13:10,13) It will only be then that the Son of Man will come in clouds with great power and glory. Last week we heard Matthew’s prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man in glory, in which the king judged the nations. In Mark’s version the elect will be gathered ‘from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven’. In both versions it seems that some people will be welcomed, and others rejected. In Matthew’s, the nations were divided into sheep and goats. In Mark’s version only ‘the elect’ will be gathered, and we are not told what will happen to those who are not among that group. The prophecy in Matthew told us how to ensure that we are sheep; in Mark’s version Jesus tells his disciples that they are to remain faithful even if they are handed over to councils; and beaten in synagogues; and made to testify before governors and kings; even if brother betrays brother to death, and a father his child, even if children rise against parents and have them put to death; and they are hated by all. (Mark 13:9-13) ‘[T]he one who endures to the end will be saved,’ says Jesus; they will have shown themselves to be ‘the elect’.

As I said last week, we are meant to be scared by these apocalypses. Just as the prophecy of the sheep and the goats was meant to make us commit ourselves to living as sheep, so today’s teaching is meant to encourage disciples to ‘stay awake,’ to continue to faithfully follow Jesus despite persecution. In both cases we are being reminded that how we live as we await the Parousia matters. After all, we do not know when that day or hour will come, Jesus says, and goes on to tell his disciples the story of a man who went on a journey, putting his slaves in charge, each slave with their own work to do while the man was away, and commanding the doorkeeper to be on the watch to let the man in again when he returned. Since the doorkeeper did not know at what hour the master would return, whether ‘in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,’ the only sensible thing for the doorkeeper to do was to stay awake all night, so as not to be asleep when his master returned. Jesus then says that what is true of his first four disciples is also true of all the others who have followed him down to our own day, ‘And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

Most of us in twenty-first century Australia struggle with apocalyptic literature, with its division of humanity, and the rejection or punishment of some. I am certainly not a fan. But that is because apocalyptic writings are the literature of the oppressed and dispossessed, and I am neither. Apocalypticism arose among people who were powerless and had little chance of fighting back against their oppressors. The Book of Daniel, which is quoted in the Little Apocalypse, was written in the second century BCE when a Greek Emperor was threatening to destroy Jewish worship in Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation was addressed to Christian communities facing persecution in Asia Minor. Mark’s Little Apocalypse was probably written for followers of Jesus who had already been thrown out of Jewish synagogues and who were experiencing the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish war. In every case these revelations were written for people who had suffered for their faith and could expect more suffering in the future. They were written for people who could say, in the words of Third Isaiah: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!’ When no one will listen, when the bombs are falling, when the children are starving, when the ‘justice system’ offers only injustice – then ‘apocalyptic’ is the appropriate tone to take.

Apocalypses are meant to make us afraid, but they also offer us the hope that when no one else will hear, God listens, and when no one else does justice, God will. Apocalyptic writings argue that no suffering happens without witness, because the God who sees the fall of a sparrow sees all who suffer. Apocalypses reassure that no persecution will go unanswered, because God is the ultimate judge. They offer those who are suffering the comfort of knowing that their suffering is not meaningless, because everything is in the hands of the Father who oversees all things. This is the comfort Jesus offers his disciples immediately before his own judicial murder, that Mark offers his readers, and that we can hold onto today if we are suffering, too.

And if we are worried that we will be unable to ‘stay awake’ between now and the eschaton, then we have the opening of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians to reassure us. We know, because we have read the rest of the letter, how far the church at Corinth was from the ideal Christian community, the conflict within the community, the misuse some members made of their knowledge and the gifts they had received from the Holy Spirit. Despite this, Paul begins his letter, ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and gives thanks to God for this fractious community, because it is a community that has been created by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. The spiritual gifts that have divided the Corinthians, the speech and knowledge of every kind, have the possibility of being used for unity rather than division because they are gifts given to the whole community to strengthen them as they wait for the Parousia. Paul can give thanks for this misbehaving church because God is always faithful, even when human beings struggle to be, and so it is always possible for humans to ‘be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ to be among the elect, to be sheep and not goats. We may worry, understandably, that the master will find us asleep when he comes unexpectedly. Paul does not, because Paul knows that God’s grace will enable us to endure to the end.

Today, the First Sunday of Advent, is Hope Sunday. The Little Apocalypse, terrifying as it is, offers us the hope that no suffering is meaningless, and that the chaos and confusion of the world will not have the last word. Paul’s greeting to the church in Corinth offers us the hope that we will have the strength to ‘stay awake’ through God’s grace. Looking forward to Christmas, we remember that the story of Christ’s First Coming ended not with his Crucifixion but with his Resurrection and Ascension, and so we can look forward with hope to the day when Christ will come again. Full of hope, we can say with the Prophet Isaiah: ‘From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.’ God is always with us, and so we look for God in the world and in our lives with hopeful expectation, during this season of Advent and always. Amen.

[1] Brendan Byrne, A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel (2008), p. 196.

[2] Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark (1983), p. 236.