Apocalypse or Renewal?
A homily on apocalyptic scripture, uncertainty, and the everyday signs of hope through which new life emerges.
The other day on the internet, I saw this cartoon. A patron was going into a library and he couldn't find the book that he was looking for. So he went to complain to the librarian. And the librarian says, "Oh, the apocalyptic section has been moved to current events." In one sense, we can laugh at that. But in another sense, there's a grain of truth there. Or as my friend Renee would say, "It's true, but not that true." So let's look during this homily at what might be a truer portrait.
Apocalyptic writing flourished in the two centuries before Jesus's birth. Under Alexander the Great, the Greeks conquered the then known world. Previous conquerors allowed the Jews to worship their own God, but the Greeks wanted their culture established throughout the whole Middle Eastern world. So the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes openly persecuted Jews faithful to laws such as not eating pork in the second century before Christ. His proclamation is in the first chapter of the book of Maccabees. And when he desecrated the temple with the statue of Zeus, the Maccabean revolt broke out. An anonymous author wrote the book of Daniel that we heard from today to give faithful Jews hope of God's vindication and strength in the face of persecution.
Today's first reading answers the theological problem which Antiochus's persecution raised. What was the fate of the just and innocent Jews modered for keeping God's law?
The vision in Daniel 12 translates Israel's belief in God the Creator into belief that the same creator can awaken the dead. This passage is a radical vision of resurrection from the second century before Jesus. Fittingly, Christians often use this passage at funerals. Its imagery testifies to confident faith that the just pass into the care of God at death.
Communication is a two-edged sword. Communication brings constant threat into our living room. Weather extremes make climate change very believable. We plant earlier in spring and except in St. Louis Obispo, we sweat more in hotter summers. Rains come down in downpours that flood rivers and homes. lava flows in Hawaii make beautiful film footage long as one's house isn't in the way. We remember the hurricanes by name.
Today's gospel refers to natural desasters as trials that we suffer, not signs that the world is about to end. Mark's gospel refers to wars, earthquakes, and famines as birth pains, the labor of learning to love one another and create a community of peace on Earth.
Like us, the people for whom Mark wrote the first gospel knew about threat and loss. Jewish freedom fighters revolted against the Roman Empire in AD 66. Near the end of the four-year war, the Roman 10th Legion lay siege to Jerusalem. The soldiers surrounded the city for months to starve the citizens into surrender. When the Romans finally attacked, they destroyed the temple completely, leaving not a stone upon a stone. In destroying the temple, the Romans ended the ancient Jewish religion, its traditions of animal sacrifice. And so the synagogue took its place. Today, only the temple's Western wall survives, the holiest of sites for Jews where they daily gather to pray.
Today's gospel assumes an audience that experienced all of that. And that needs courage to face devastation and persecution. We contemporary Christians bring our own measure of worry as we become the audience of Mark 13. And many of us today are worried. Mark 13 is often called, quote, "the little apocalypse." Apocalyptic perceives the world locked in a catechismic struggle between the forces of good and evil.
In AD 70, shortly after the destruction of the temple, Mark wrote the first gospel for Christians unsure of what was coming to birth, unsure of themselves, of what was good, what was evil, unsure even of Jesus. Mark places the whole of the apocalyptic discourse in the mouth of Jesus as he sits on the Mount of Olives across the valley from the temple. Today's gospel contains two answers to the question of when Jesus will come again.
Some early Christians think Jesus will come again in their lifetimes. They insist Jesus promised, quote, "This generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Why is the gospel ambiguous about when the world will end? To answer that question, we have to understand what a gospel is and is not. People passed on Jesus's teaching orally for 40 years before Mark wrote it down. As people told Jesus's teachings and stories about Jesus, they not only passed on what Jesus said, they also used the stories to interpret current events in their lives and to answer questions he hadn't answered. Mark is writing in the wake of a cataclysmic event that demands interpretation, the destruction of the temple, which happened about 40 years after Jesus' death. It coincided with Jesus' eyewitness disciples reaching old age and with the deaths of Peter and Paul, who were martyred in the mid-60s shortly before Mark wrote.
Mark recognizes a second early Christian voice in his apocalyptic chapter. This voice does not say that Jesus is going to come again in our lifetime. This voice says, "Only God knows when the end will come." The signs of chaos Mark describes around us today--global warming, extinct plants and animals, persistent drought, oceans that teem with plastic. However, Jesus also gives us a positive image of sap rising in the fig tree and green leaves bursting forth. Indeed, we live in chaos. But what is chaos except a sign of something new emerging? What if the future is not scary but full of hope, every day a new creation? What signs of hope do we see? Perhaps it is the teen who is volunteering and finding his or her passion to serve. Maybe it's the person who always, always recycles and reuses. As Pope Francis mentioned, and I quoted in the introduction, it's the little details.
Ilya Delia, my former professor, is a Franciscan sister who writes on Christ in cosmology. In her book, The Emergent Christ, she encourages us to quote, "Allow the spirit to take hold of us and liberate us from fear, anxiety, and desire for power and control." We can live in the risen Christ who empowers us to participate in this new creation. God, the spirit will wake us up from our closed, perhaps mediocre, lives. The spirit lures us into openness to new life and lures us into finding hope.
Diana McElintol, a liturgist who often comments on the Sunday readings, summarized today's gospel in this short phrase. Third verse, the same as the first.