Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
17^th of November 2024

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Mark 13:1-8

At both the beginning and the end of the church year we are reminded that all things come to an end. We began the year of the Gospel according to Mark with the Markan or ‘Little’ Apocalypse, distinguished from the big apocalypse that is the Book of Revelation. When we listened to it last December I quoted a commentator who said that this thirteenth chapter of the gospel according to 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’. Yet on this second last Sunday of the church year we listen to it again, once more being reminded of the dangers of the world and warned of the vulnerability and briefness of life.

As I wrote the Reflection this week I was listening to the funeral service of Rev. Dr Michelle Cook, the Moderator-Elect of the Northern Synod, which was being held at Nightcliff Uniting Church in Darwin. Michelle, who was two years younger than me, died suddenly, utterly unexpectedly, after a minor road accident. Her death has reminded so many people, in the Uniting Church and beyond, that life is both precious and precarious. Here in Australia many of us assume that we will reach that ‘average life expectancy’ of 81 if we are men and 85 if we are women, and would feel profoundly cheated if we were told that we were going to die before 80, let alone before 50 as Michelle did. But we human beings are vulnerable creatures, and there is no guarantee that we will exit this life in the same order in which we entered it, dying peacefully in our sleep in extreme old age.

It is of the uncertainty of life that Jesus speaks in today’s reading or, rather, of the certainty that all things do and will end. Having told a disciple admiring the Temple that one day it would be destroyed, Jesus then speaks privately to Peter, James, John, and Andrew as they sit on the Mount of Olives. Jesus’ first four disciples ask him, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’ They probably could not imagine a time when the Temple, the absolute centre of Jewish life, described by the Roman historian Tacitus as a mountain of white marble adorned with gold, would not be there. But all the things that humans create do come to an end, just as all human lives do.

‘When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.’ Jesus is speaking and Mark is writing apocalypticism. Apocalyptic literature is the literature of the oppressed and dispossessed. It arose as a genre among people who were powerless. Later communities which were facing similar sufferings could then take older apocalyptic texts and repurpose them for their own situations. So the Book of Daniel was written in the second century BCE when a Greek Emperor was threatening to destroy Jewish worship in Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation, which repurposed the Book of Daniel, was addressed to Christian communities facing persecution in Asia Minor in the first century AD. Apocalyptic literature comforts suffering people by reassuring them that when no one else will hear, God listens, and when no one else does justice, God will.

The author of the Gospel according to Mark has taken elements of the Book of Daniel and other apocalyptic writings, and is rewriting them for his own community. His community had already been thrown out of Jewish synagogues. They were either experiencing the Roman-Jewish war, or the aftermath of it. In this sermon Jesus reassures them that the events they are seeing around them are not the end-times. He warns them, ‘Many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and they will lead many astray,’ because the Jewish rebels against Rome were claiming that their uprising would bring about the messianic age and that all faithful Jews should join the rebellion. In contrast, Jesus is telling his followers and Mark is telling his readers that the messianic age is not going to be brought in by violence.

Jesus speaks of war, but while the Jewish rebels believed their war would bring about the ultimate liberation of Jerusalem, Jesus says that it would bring about destruction. His followers are not to engage in violence; they are to imitate Jesus himself as he goes uncomplainingly to the cross. But neither are they to be alarmed by the wars and rumours of wars that surround them. There will be a messianic age, an age of justice and peace, and ‘the one who endures to the end will be saved’.

We tend to think of ‘the age to come,’ the end-times, as a time that will follow this age. But it is not that simple. You have probably heard about the two Greek words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos, which we still use in words like ‘chronological,’ is time that can be measured, in seconds, minutes, hours, years. Kairos time, on the other hand, cannot be measured, It is the right time, the perfect moment, The messianic age is measured in kairos time. It has come, with Jesus; it will come, at the end of chronos time; it is here among us now, whenever peace and justice are made manifest.

Today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures is a story of kairos time, of God listening to an oppressed woman and putting things right. Hannah has all the pain and hunger of a woman who wants children and cannot have them, in a society that would see her lack of children as something God has done to her. To add insult to injury, Hannah is mocked for her barrenness by her co-wife. At the very moment their husband Elkanah is offering sacrifices to the Lord to cover their sins, when peace and unity are most to be savoured, Peninnah is taunting Hannah for having no children. Elkanah loves Hannah, and believes she should be satisfied with him, that he should be more to her than ten sons, but Hannah longs for a child. So she does what people in her situation have always done and will continue to do for millennia. She calls on God. Because she is praying silently and out of the fullness of her heart rather than approaching the temple of the Lord with appropriate sacrifice and ritual the priest Eli thinks she is drunk, but Hannah explains that she is a woman deeply troubled, pouring out her soul before God. Eli then blesses her, and it seems God hears her, because in due time Hannah conceives and bears a son she calls Samuel, [God has heard] ‘for she said, “I have asked him of the Lord.”’

Hannah then sings the exaltation that we sang today. Hannah’s song is the other side of the apocalyptic literature in which the oppressed call out to God. It is the celebration the oppressed sing once they know that God has heard them. Hannah’s song rejoices that the Lord is the one who brings to life, who gives children to the barren, who feeds the hungry, who makes the poor rich, and exalts the lowly. She looks to the future and celebrates that God ‘will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed’. She sings of the Lord who is our rock, strength, and protection. She reminds us that only the Lord can grant life.

We are about to enter Advent, when we, like Hannah, will be waiting for the birth of a first-born Son. During Advent we will hear Jesus’ mother Mary sing a song modelled on Hannah’s, in which she praises the God who upsets all expectations, and voices the deep and dangerous hope that in response to human injustice God will bring justice. This is the hope offered by Christmas, that God has not left humanity alone to suffer, that with the birth of Jesus the messianic age has begun, that as we live in chronos time, kairos time is breaking in. As today we see tyrants rising and democracies in trouble, children dying and warmongers mocking the restrictions that we thought humanitarian laws had placed on international violence, disasters natural and unnatural, the untimely deaths of people deeply beloved, can we hold on to the faith of Hannah and Mary that God intends peace and justice, and that one day the messianic age in all its fullness will come?

Apocalyptic literature both warns us and reassures us that everything human will come to an end. We and all those we love will die; this knowledge of human vulnerability can both scare us and remind us to appreciate every day we have. Oppression and injustice will also come to an end, the time will come when God judges and rescues all things, although we do not know when that will be and Jesus refused to give Peter, James, John, and Andrew a date. In the meantime, Jesus has reminded us that the proliferation of wars and rumours of wars, earthquakes, famines, does not mean that God is absent. Even as people suffer and grieve, they are held in the hands of the Father who oversees all things. Our lives are fragile, vulnerable, precarious, precious; they are also planted on the rock that is our God, our strength and our redeemer. ‘Do not be alarmed,’ says Jesus. ‘The pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world,’ sings Hannah. Can we listen to both, and despite all our vulnerability still let our hearts exult?

That celebration is part of our calling as Christians, to join with Hannah and sing, ‘There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like unto our God’. Thanks be to God. Amen.