A Little Apocalypse
Because we gather once a week to explore these texts, we can lose our feel for how quickly these episodes with Jesus are taking place. Today’s conversation with the disciples happens just one day after Jesus was tipping tables in the Temple and engaging in feisty dialogue about marriage and taxes and generosity. It also happens just one day after a conversation with a scribe about what matters most – loving God and loving neighbor.
So….on the heels of criticizing particular religious leaders – largely for practices that exploit the poor and oppressed under the guise of faithful religious practice – Jesus describes the destruction of the Temple.
Then in a private teaching with Peter, James, John and Andrew, Jesus warns further about signs to come – war, political strife, earthquakes and famines.
After that suffering and hardship, Jesus tells of the disruption of the cosmos – and then the Son of Man coming on the clouds.
Jesus suggests that the destruction of the Temple is just a foretaste of a more universal dismantling of what is known. And he says that he has no specific knowledge about the “when” of all of this – only God knows. Meanwhile, he counsels, keep awake.
In bible study circles, this text is known as the “little apocalypse,” which distinguishes it from the big one, I guess, the second coming of Christ as described in the book of Revelation.
But it also falls in line with a genre of apocalyptic descriptions that are woven throughout the Hebrew texts, particularly Daniel, but also Isaiah, Joel and Zechariah. When Jesus says:
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
25 and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken…
these words echo Jeremiah and Ezekiel. His reference to a fig tree echoes Isaiah. Descriptions of this kind of destruction would have sounded familiar to the ears of his listeners. The prophets spoke of these things – and not in the abstract. They often spoke of these things right in the middle of seasons of turmoil.
To place the gospel in the context of its writer, we need to remember that Mark’s gospel is the earliest – likely written in the wake of the actual destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. So…the destruction of the temple would be a major life event for those gathering in the original community of hearers. It wasn’t a vague prediction….it had happened.
Perhaps hearing these words while gazing at the rubble would serve as comfort and also promise – the destruction of the temple is not the end of the world. But stay awake, because the end will come. The rhythms of war and strife and natural disaster will continue. And God will gather God’s chosen at the appointed time.
This week as I worked with this text, I was reminded by colleagues that this was read in the narrative lectionary on March 29, 2020… by my calculation that was two weeks after the US shut down in an effort to stop the spread of COVID 19. It was the beginning of dramatic stories out of New York City about abandoned streets and people scared of opening windows in their homes. It was the beginning of mask debates and death counts. It felt very much like the end of the world.
How do you remember that season?
What I remember most, and it is probably an imprecise memory because time does that, but what I remember most was sitting in the ashes of the season with my young adult daughters – one who found her Senior year at American University abruptly interrupted and the other who was unceremoniously shipped home after two years of Peace Corps service in Guyana – from a spot that was 8 hours of travel into the jungle of South America to the jungle of a plane full of sad and scared peace corps volunteers arriving at JFK – and remember that NYC was a ghost town almost by this point – at 3 a.m., processing through customs with a single duffle bag, the only thing they’d been allowed to carry out of the country.
So I remember sitting with them silently in our living room. Safe. But with everything they knew completely upended.
The reality is that over millennia, humans have faced monumental seasons of disruption and destruction – like the famines that drove Joseph’s brothers to Egypt, like the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE when the King of Babylon conquered Jerusalem, like the destruction of the temple in 70 CE by the Romans, like the destruction of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, like the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the tsunami in Sri Lanka, like crippling famine in Ethiopia, like September 11th, like the COVID 19 pandemic.
And any one of these things destroyed someone’s proverbial Temple.
And the beat goes on. Sort of. Changed. But life continues.
Over the years, movements have used scriptures like today’s one to try to pinpoint the exact time and the circumstances that will lead up to the moment when God resets God’s creation once and for all, heralding God’s reign.
And time and time again, these movements have been wrong.
And time and time again, people have FOUGHT to be on the right side of history when the final destruction comes. Time and time again, people have used God’s power to claim a higher ground, to pit one worldview against another, to name who is right and who is wrong.
In fact, it is happening in Jerusalem in these texts. The religious authorities are threatened by the way folks are gathering around Jesus and his teaching. They are worried that if he is right then maybe they are all wrong. They may be out of power soon.
The gathering crowd needs Jesus to be the Messiah that they expect. One who will ascend to power (where power is about political might). And when Jesus won’t meet that expectation, they will fall away, demanding his crucifixion…because what they are waiting for is a complete reset of the playing field – which they understand as systems of political and economic power.
Please hear me say this: I don’t mean to suggest that an ultimate resetting of God’s creation isn’t going to happen – but I do believe that part of what Jesus is teaching here is that God’s timing is not ours to know. And therefore – and here’s some of the good news – there is nothing you (o mortal) or I (o mortal) can do about it. But also, when the time comes, God will be with us. Just as God has been with us through all of the little apocalypses of our lives.
So rather than be consumed by what we think might be coming at us, rather than sorting those around us by “in and out” or “right and wrong,” Jesus is teaching that our best work is to keep awake to what is right in front of us – here and now. To keep focused on the work that is before us. To do what is ours to do.
And if we roll back to last week’s teaching from Jesus – that work is to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
So we are called to keep awake. To do the work. To love God and to love one another.
To not fret. To not participate in the world’s divisive violence. And in fact to actively seek to be a peaceful response – a source of love.
Beloved, we are called to keep awake.
May it be so.
Amen.
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