Reading: Mark 13:23-37
Be alert – keep awake – the words of this morning’s gospel ring-in the beginning of the church new year. As the calendar year moves to its close with its contradictory challenges of the busyness of the festive season, and the laziness of long summer holidays, the church calendar offers a different message: be alert, keep awake – not for busyness, not for parties and plans, but in response to an anxious world, in which huge numbers of people are suffering and hope is in short supply.
Here in Aotearoa, we wonder what changes (for good and for ill) will occur, as a result of our apparently innocent actions of placing orange ticks on voting papers yesterday; hoping against hope for decreasing debt, poverty and multi-national control; yearning for governing principles of compassion, justice and kindness. And on this Sunday, as we launch the Christian World Service Christmas appeal, we find ourselves confronted again with the appalling number of people in this world, for whom deprivation is a constant in their lives.
It’s within this context we visit what Bill Loader calls “a text of defiant hope in the context of suffering.”[1] We can recognise suffering; can we supply the hope?
Mark’s gospel emerging out of suffering that “is nearly two millennia distant from us” is as distant, for most of us, as “the terrible suffering of poverty in many parts of the world”. Into that place of suffering, the gospel writer lifts hope high – defiantly. The people of Galilee and Judea are assured there is hope for them: peace and justice will come. The human one, the one we know as Jesus – the so-called ‘son of man’ – is the source of this hope.
As people of faith from a very different context, from a very different culture, we hear this promise of hope and are invited to share in it – to share the yearning for it – and to live out our lives in an attempt to bring that hope to reality.
And yet, the gospel reading is such a difficult one for us to hear today. All this prediction of the end of the world – the sun will be darkened, the moon won’t give out light, stars falling from the heavens – and the son of man coming in clouds – all of this doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us today. To shed light on this challenging reading, I want to share with you some of New Testament scholar, William Loader’s, thoughts.
Professor Loader writes: “Mark’s hearers would have known about oppression. The earlier part of the chapter alluded to the horrendous consequences of the Jewish revolt, 66-70 CE, which ended with the Romans starving out Jerusalem before breaking through and destroying the temple. They were in a good position to read the signs of the times. In Mark’s view their times must be the last times. It is very hard for most of us to walk in those shoes. What does it mean to feel that things are so bad the only hope is going to the end of the world? The poetry of pain and despair, the fantasies of escape and resolution, challenge us to silence, to listening, to action.”
Mark’s context helps us as we consider what this might mean for us today. It’s helpful to realize that “Mark’s hearers are at one remove from these [horrific] events. They, at least, have time to gather and hear. Mark has had space to reflect and write.” As we think about our response to the Christmas Appeal, “We can give ourselves a hard time about not being right there where it bleeds, but nor was Mark, nor probably [were] most of his hearers. …The mandate is then not to ignore what is happening in the world, but to think about it, to watch, to live in the light of it and in the light of the hope which is beyond it.”
“To do so is not to focus on predicting the future in a kind of ‘I know what’s going to happen’ game, where I and my group indulge our powers of prediction or claims to privileged revelation and get a religious buzz out of applying biblical prophecy and the fantasy of believing we know. It has more to do with living with the authority which hope gives. People who have the time and space to articulate and reflect on what is going on in the oppression of people, whose suffering most often renders them inarticulate, have a crucial role for change in the world. Watchful living has less to do with speculation about the end of the world and more to do with” living out the Way of Jesus…. “Readiness has as much to do with being ready for life as it has to do with its end.”
“In their quaint way [the people of the first century] depicted global change drawing on images and symbols which mean little for us today. Their wisdom was to recognise that there must, indeed, be macrochange, if life is going to change for the better for most people. For us, the global movers are not angels and demons, earthquakes, and celestial disturbances, but [governments and] international gatherings of powerful nations able to make major decisions about poverty and the survival of the planet as a habitat. Recent crises, including the financial one, have called into being new levels of global cooperation. Espousing hope, is addressing it at both the microlevel of our particular setting and the macrolevel of global change.” Active participation in and appropriate challenge to the decisions of government and generous giving to the Christmas Appeal are some of the many ways we can enable hope today.
“In Mark’s day to ‘watch’, was to live the life of a disciple with an eye to what is happening in the world and probably with the strong expectation that history was approaching its climax. 2000 years of failed guesses and expectations have sobered such predictions, and rightly so. But with that has all too often come a withdrawal from the events of the world, not to speak from the cries of pain, so that not much watching really happens except watching one’s private footsteps and moral goodness or watching only for the terror which might strike us - while so much of the world lives the sustained, unspectacular terror of deprivation. Just having a ‘good’ sleep… is good and harmless and may have many other marketable qualities like being peaceful and stress free. It makes for attractive religion, but it has little to do with the engaged alertness which recognises the new [growth], feels the shaking, and sees what the powers of this world are doing.”
“Today’s Gospel reading, purporting to be “Jesus’ last words, become our first words in the Church’s year, a call to be awake to what is happening in our world and to be looking for and in tune with the one who comes”. As we enter this new year, this time of Advent waiting, may our living and our speaking indicate our willingness to be alert to the suffering of the world and be actively defiant in our hope. In this way, we bring in Christ’s new world.
[1] This sermon depends on, and quotes extensively from, the Lectionary resource prepared by Professor William Loader of Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. Accessed 26 November 2011. http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MarkAdvent1.htm
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