Apocalypse Revealed

Text: Mark 13:1-8

In a learned discussion about this reading a while ago, the general consensus was: What the heck?

For two thousand years we have been hearing the same old predictions about the end of time. The signs of things to come by now are cliche. Nation against nation. Famines. Earthquakes. How can these be signs? Wars and rumors of wars, hardship and hunger, natural disaster, and let us add disease—these are the story of civilization.

Buildings are not supposed to fall down. Floods are not supposed to wipe out villages and cities. Crops are not supposed to be lost to drought and bugs. But they do and they have always done. For centuries people have tried to fix the end of time by using events like this as markers. But the events are so common that they do not distinguish one time from another.

When these particular words were written by Mark, chaos ruled. They were probably written during, or just after, the First Jewish-Roman war, in which Israel attempted to rebel against the oppressive Roman occupation. It was not a successful revolt. The result devastated the Jews. Many fled Palestine, and many others were enslaved.

Like hicks visiting the city, the disciples earlier had been amazed by the grandeur of the Temple and the size of the stones. But the stones were pulled down, just as Jesus predicted, by the Romans, a prophecy that Mark in hindsight was confident reporting. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This massive and elaborate structure was God’s house and the geographic and spiritual center of life, and had been standing for five centuries.

Jerusalem had been the center of commerce, politics, and faith. Imagine New York, DC, and—I don’t know—the Vatican rolled into one. To see Jerusalem destroyed was to see the end of a nation, and the certain end of an era—a centuries-long era. It would have seemed like the end of the world. There would have seemed to be no more future.

When the things and people at the center of our lives are destroyed and taken away, clocks stop ticking. The future disappears. Day follows day, but nothing advances.

People who suffer trauma—wars and floods and fires, but also loss of someone they love—feel that the ground under their feet is no longer trustworthy. The things that keep them safe cannot be counted on. The seawalls will not hold. The skies are no longer innocent. There is no shelter. There is no protector. Things are no longer in their right places. It is chaos.

You can therefore see how the prospect of the end of time might seem to be not horrible but comfortable. A relief from suffering and from the struggle against suffering and from the exhaustion of hoping.

The destruction of the second Temple was, it turned out, the end of something old and the birth of something new, just as Jesus foretold. The center of faithful life continued its slow turning toward the rabbis; and some instead chose to follow a preacher, prophet, and healer named Jesus. Little ended up to be the same as it had been. It was a new age. Just not the one people expected.

Events need to have meaning. We are not comfortable thinking that things just happen for no reason. Not one stone was left upon another; all were thrown down. But here we are, two millennia later, living ordinary lives. Life does go on.

Yet to know this would not have helped the people in Palestine. It was not the continuation of the world that they longed for—but rather some scheme that would place their present mess in God’s context. When you see all these things, Jesus tells them, do not be alarmed. These are not just bad things. They are part of a larger plan. They are just the beginning of a new beginning. (Not even the labor pains, but just that beginning of contractions when you think it is maybe time to get the hospital suitcase out of the closet.) They—these events—make sense because they point to the future.

When there seems to be nothing more than day to day, when every day seems to be a copy of the dark day before, then even a tiny glimpse of the future—any future—is life-saving. That day when you see that tomorrow might be different from today is the day when you can begin to hope for salvation and healing.

When we read scripture, we have to think: where do I stand in relation to this text? Is it written for me? Is it about some particular thing or some general principle? Apocalyptic texts like this one in Mark—the whole chapter is like this, not just the verses we heard—texts like this make us ask those questions more urgently.

We might decide that we are only observers to a long-ago event. It’s a story. The lesson we take then is what it tells us about Jesus with his disciples. It tells us about how what kind of leader Jesus was, for example.

Or we might decide that since Mark was written decades after the death of Jesus, it only tells us what kind of thing the writer Mark was interested in about Jesus. That Mark sees the events in Jerusalem as having to do less with Jewish-Roman politics and more to do with the nature of Jesus. Events in history are subordinate to the story of Jesus and are more like props in that drama.

Or we might decide that this text describes something not so much in the life of Jesus but in our lives. That the text is prophecy for us. It describes a time in history, but it is our history. If we do that, as some do, we search for clues in the words that help us determine when all this is going to happen and, in particular, whether it is soon. So Jesus’ advice to his disciples—be aware! watch out!—is really advice to us. We need to be attentive.

Or instead, we might decide that the text is (for us) not about Jesus’ time or Mark’s time or our time. It is rather a way for us to know God, to know who we are, and to get an idea of what we are to do. It is grist for the mill of our faith. It has the same force and effect as the parables Jesus tells, the words from Paul in his letters, the stories of king David, the songs of the psalm. We might decide, then, that this apocalyptic story is timeless, just as all those other ways we hear God’s word are. No more, and no less, than those other ways.

Our response to this story and other apocalyptic stories like it in Daniel, for example, or in Revelation, reveals much about us: it reveals our own deepest hopes and most profound worries about God. It tells us about ourselves as well as about God. It tells us about guilt and shame and about gratitude. About whether we accept God’s forgiveness. And about where God is.

So you might in the end decide that this particular story tells us the same old thing, the same old thing that the Bible has been telling us for more than three thousand years. That God is here in the workings of the world. That all things in the world are God’s. And that God is good.