Keeping Hope in Times of Trouble
Sermon Delivered by Edward L. Bleynat, Jr.
on November 27, 2005
Grace Episcopal Church, Chattanooga, TN
The First Sunday in Advent
Mark 13:24-37
Let me first thank all of you for inviting me to come to Grace Chattanooga this fine Sunday. The Smithermans are old friends of ours. My wife, Anne, is a native of Signal Mountain and practiced law with Gene here in Chattanooga. I snatched her away to come back to North Carolina. Not too much later, the good Lord snatched the Smithermans away to go up to seminary at Sewanee. So for us, this is a nice little get together.
Now, even though I am giving a sermon here this morning, preaching isn’t my day job. Lawyering is. So, when I look into my closet to pick out something to wear, I have plenty of gray suits, and plenty of blue suits—but no vestments. And it is not real easy to fit me in a pinch, especially since they don’t carry discount robes in the Big and Tall section of Belk’s Department Store. Anne didn’t even bother to look for them at Proffit’s during the after Thanksgiving shopping rush yesterday! For that reason, I need to thank Suzanne and Gene for hunting down robes so I can be properly attired today.
I’ve mentioned lawyering and preaching already today. But that’s not how I came to the business of talking to your church this morning. I did it from a standpoint of teaching and writing. Some of you are aware that I am on the verge of publishing the second book in a multi-volume series on the synoptic Gospels.
“What,” you might ask, “are the synoptic Gospels?” These are the three stories of Jesus told to us by the evangelists we call Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The word “gospel” means “good news of God saving action.” The word “synoptic” means “to see together.” So, when we talk about the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we are talking about good news of God’s saving action that can be seen together as we read these three books in relationship to each other.
There are academic questions about those relationships. For instance: which came first? And how is it that they came to be so similar, yet also to have such remarkable differences? The leading scholarly position is that Mark is the oldest of these three Gospels, and that Matthew and Luke incorporate Mark’s story of Jesus as the core narrative of their own Gospels.
But you will notice that Matthew and Luke are much longer than Mark. Where does the rest come from? When we look at it closely, we find that they also have a lot in common with each other that Mark doesn’t share. These materials include many sayings of Jesus, such as what we find in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount or Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Because the shared sayings do not come down to us in a single document today, scholars have tried to determine how they might once have been grouped. They have reconstructed a hypothetical book containing sayings of Jesus that they call “Q”—the first letter in the German word “quelle,” which means “source.”
Matthew and Luke have unique materials as well, shared with no one. In Matthew, we might think of the parable of the sheep and the goats from the lectionary last Sunday. We might also think of Luke’s parable of the prodigal son. The sources that provided these separate materials are called “M” for Matthew and “L” for Luke, respectively. The may have been oral or written. We simply don’t know, as they, like Q, are lost to us.
As you can see from this description of the relationship among the synoptic Gospels, I am wearing my teacher hat right now. But, it is time to take that hat off and put another one. But don’t worry—it’s not the lawyer hat. There will be no cross examinations today. It’s the preacher hat I need to put on.
So to make the transition from teaching to preaching in a most Anglican way, I will ask you to join in.
“May the Lord be with you”
[“And also with you”]
Let us pray:
May the words of our mouths
and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable in thy sight,
oh Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.
Amen.
The gospel before us today is taken from Mark 13, one of the most difficult chapters in the Bible to interpret. The words were written by the evangelist we call Mark for his first century Christian community. It was likely a community emerging from a period of intense persecution.
Mark 13 is sometimes called the “Little Apocalypse.” An apocalypse is a book that uses highly symbolic language; it is intended to unveil mysterious or hidden things for an audience who presumably understands much of what each symbol means. Revelation, last book of the New Testament, is the most widely recognized example of Apocalyptic literature. The genre was quite common once; archeology has disclosed at least fragments of more than 150 different apocalypses—but of only 20 different gospels.
Apocalyptic works were widely written and circulated in the centuries immediately preceding and following the time of Christ. To try to understand their purpose, rather than just taking wild guesses about what this image symbolizes or what that passage foretells, we should look at the historical circumstances that led to this type of writing.
Typically, an apocalypse arose out of persecution. Its purpose was to assure the persecuted of their ultimate escape from suffering and of their victory over the forces of oppression. Also, apocalypses typically included predictions of harsh and final judgments being imposed on the persecutors.
Troubled times—that fertile ground where apocalyptic literature grows—surrounded first century Judaism. Jesus was born and raised in that era. Within a few decades of his crucifixion, catastrophe hit the Holy Land as the Jewish Rebellion against the Roman Empire ran its course. The rebellion was crushed with Roman efficiency and brutality, and it is probable that this rebellion provided the impetus for Mark to write the Little Apocalypse, as he and his community reflected on what had occurred and what might still await them.
Their experience, as a mixed group of Jewish and Gentile Christians, was similar to the experience of many Jews who lived in the troubled time leading up to the rebellion. Poor, oppressed, and disheartened, many of their lives were centered on hope for a better tomorrow—because their today had become so unbearable. They hoped for divine intervention opening the doors to a happier time. They tended to expect that intervention would arrive in an overpowering instant, dividing history into two eras. There was the present age, completely corrupt and evil. And there was the age to come, glorious and good. Between the two was the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord, when it was expected that God would intervene directly in human history to set all things right. It is against this backdrop of fervent religious expectation that we must measure the message of Mark 13.
The chapter begins in Holy Week with Jesus leaving the Jerusalem Temple. One of his disciples looks back on the huge stones and marvels aloud. Mark’s Jesus replies that not one of those stones will be left upon another. Quite naturally, the disciples then ask when all this will come to pass.
After a long and silent walk from the temple to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus was staying for this Passover season, he begins to teach his disciples about the intense suffering they can expect. He offers horrific images of wars, and rumors of war; of tribulation, suffering and death. Yet, there is also imagery of hope—the faith that all things will be set right through God.
Between the time when Jesus last walked out of the Jerusalem Temple with his disciples, and the time three to four decades later when Mark’s gospel is believed to have been written, that catastrophic rebellion I described earlier occurred. Jewish nationalists, frustrated over centuries of occupation and domination by foreigners—Babylonians, Persians, the Greek-speaking successors to Alexander the Great, and now the Romans—began a foolhardy adventure: armed rebellion against the Roman Empire. It occurred between 66 and 73 A.D. The Roman commander, Vespasian, contained the rebellion on his way to becoming emperor of Rome. He drove the rebels back within the walls of Jerusalem. Vespasian’s son, Titus, completed his work, successfully laying siege to the city.
The Jewish historian Josephus states that, when all was said and done, a million had died in the fall of Jerusalem. The circumstances he describes are barbaric. As a monument to his own victory, Titus dismantled the temple and removed it, stone by stone, finally running a plow through the middle of the ground to punctuate Rome’s utter domination. As a final reminder of the devastation Rome could inflict, he left a few building remnants standing to mark what had happened so that all would know and heed.
After the Temple was destroyed and Mark’s gospel was written—perhaps in the 70s A.D.—the church could well remember those awful days. Mark’s small Christian community was living in the aftermath of the catastrophe. To them, the disciples’ questions to Jesus about when all the things that were foretold would occur fed more central and practical questions: Where do we go from here? How do we keep hope in times of trouble?
Jesus, as he so often does, declines to answer the disciples’ questions directly. Having spoken of wars and rumors of war, he also points to celestial signs that first century Jews believed would accompany the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord. They came to expect a darkened sun and moon; falling stars and immense suffering. When these signs came to pass, that moment dividing the evil present from the good future would draw near.
The message of an apocalypse, then, is to keep hope in times of trouble. All will be made well. But what I have described so far does not sound terribly hopeful, does it? A patient reading of a complicated text will help us find this hope.
Buried in the middle, Jesus makes reference to the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory. It is an allusion to an earlier work of apocalyptic literature, the Old Testament Book of Daniel, where the prophet’s night visions include fantastic and brutal beasts. They symbolized rulers and kingdoms who had oppressed the children of Israel.
Then, Daniel’s vision speaks of a Son of Man appearing before the throne of God to do God’s bidding and restore God’s people to an eternal kingdom. Son of Man: the phrase that can mean something as simple as a human being, or as complex as an eternal and universal king. Either way, the image sharply contrasts with the vicious beasts who occupy Daniel’s other visions.
The Son of Man is a symbol of hope and deliverance. It is often associated with Jesus himself; though, characteristic of the Bible as whole, the different ways in which the phrase is used do not permit a completely clear picture of what Jesus means. But this much we can say: Mark’s Jesus is drawing on scripture, and on the memory of Israel’s deliverance from an earlier time of trouble, to promise deliverance anew. The Son of Man is the vehicle of that deliverance.
And the angels he sends will gather the elect from “the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” It is a theme of universal deliverance, where the people of God are freed from their present suffering and brought home.
“Keep hope in times of trouble,” Jesus seems to say.
But that is not all we can gather from Mark 13. Equally important with what it says, is what it omits. You see, Mark 13 contains no pronouncement of a profound and final judgment on those who oppress and persecute the disciples. Mind you, oppressors and persecutors are not allowed to go about their wicked ways indefinitely; God’s justice simply will not allow that to occur. But Mark leaves one question tantalizingly open: Might those agents of oppression—and here, I am thinking mostly of Roman soldiers far way from home doing their grim and awful duty as they understood it—might they see clearly on some later day that the exercise of raw power is not the final word? After all, within a few days of the warnings and promises of Mark 13, a Roman Centurion at the foot of the cross will witness the death of Jesus and be the first person in Mark’s gospel to proclaim that, surely, he was the Son of God.
The whole story of Jesus’ last week on earth is filled with ambiguity and paradox. Death and life. Oppression and deliverance. Pain and hope. All are present.
And so, in Advent, as we await the things to come; as we stay awake; we are left to ponder the meaning of Mark 13. Like other apocalyptic literature, it presents twin risks. One risk is that we ignore it entirely and miss what it has to teach us, failing to grasp that we are to keep hope in times of trouble. The other risk is that we obsess over signs and symbols and warnings, and so allow ourselves to get sucked into other-worldly speculation that is more concerned with reading these “signs” than with offering a cup of water to a thirsty man.
Mark’s Jesus points us away both from dismissive attitudes and from obsessive sign-seeking. He will not disclose when the end of the age is to occur; indeed, he denies even possessing knowledge of it. And he warns his disciples not to get caught up in such speculation, admonishing them instead to “Keep awake!” They are not to fall into the slumber of resignation, or the despair of hopelessness. They are to hold fast, to keep awake, to maintain hope in times of trouble. That is the message of Mark 13.
And so, I will leave you with this thought. The First Sunday in Advent begins the new church year. It seems proper, as we have reflected on the suffering of the Jews of the first century, to see what a modern member of that faith community has to teach us today. I offer this New Year’s prayer composed by a Jewish poet named Judy Chicago, nearly 2000 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. It is a prayer of hopefulness, looking beyond the end of an age and to a time not marked by violence and death, but by healing and reconciliation. This is what she has to say:
And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another’s will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life’s creatures
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.
So let it be with us. Happy New Year.