Mark 13:24-37
Our sisters and brothers in the Rabbinic Jewish tradition read the entire Torah over the course of the year, ending with Simchat Torah, a holiday when they read the last portion of Deuteronomy and the first part of Genesis, starting the cycle all over again, then celebrate by dancing and singing and carrying the Torah Scroll around the Sanctuary seven times.
We are not nearly that focused, disciplined, or reverential when it comes to scripture. Our sisters and brothers in more liturgical traditions, including the Roman, Anglican, and Lutheran communions, tend to have more readings on Sunday, and to treat the reading with more ceremony, while we aspire, at our best, to do fewer readings but to dive a little deeper.
I mention this because the first Sunday in Advent is also the first Sunday of a new cycle for those using the Revised Common Lectionary, something I loosely follow in planning worship here at Park. Today, we begin a year when our primary gospel texts will come from Mark. Matthew and Luke also get a year in the three year cycle, while the unique stories in John get distributed throughout.
So I’m going to begin this morning with an introduction to the Gospel According to Mark, then tighten the focus to today’s particular passage and its genre, and then connect it back to the theme for this first Sunday in Advent, which is “hope.” Which is sort of a lot, so just pick the thing you like.
The Christian Testament begins with the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We call the first three “synoptics,” for they contain many of the same elements. There is a reason for this. Mark, the shortest of the synoptics, is clearly one of the sources used by Luke the Physician and the unknown authors of Matthew in constructing those other two gospels.
The authors of Matthew and Luke also use another source, one we no longer have, but can identify from the passages they share that are not found in Mark. We call this lost text “Q” after the German word for “source.”
Finally, the Gospels according to Luke and attributed to Matthew each contain unique material, not found in Mark, Q, or the other synoptic. For example, the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are very different.
The copies we have of Mark come from roughly the same version of the gospel. This matters, because they did not have a printing press and there was no such thing as copyright or even something resembling authorial integrity. Several letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul, and a significant portion of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah, and so it goes.
Mistakes were made by scribes copying texts, and sometimes they altered or amended texts simply because they could, inserting their own agenda or attempting to clarify things. We are pretty certain this is how the infamous line in 1st Corinthians, the instruction for women to put on a hat, sit down, and shut up, got inserted, something inconsistent with everything else we know about Paul’s ministry and the role of women.
There were other versions of the Gospel according to Mark, longer versions. We don’t know if material was added to the version we now have, or if what we have is a reduced version of the longer text, sometimes referred to as “Secret Mark.” If you decide to go down that rabbit hole, be careful who you join for tea, because some of the folks debating “Secret Mark” are mad as a hatter.
Early Christian legend identifies Mark as someone in Peter’s inner circle, someone who wrote down what he remembered Peter teaching, though never certain about the order of events. Rather than thinking of the Gospel According to Mark as a first-person history, we should think of it as a collection of anecdotes.
Our reading this morning comes from the 13th chapter of Mark, which is unique in its own way. It is often called the Marcan apocalypse, one of three texts in that genre in the Christian canon. These include the last six chapters of the Book of Daniel, a text we mentioned last week as the origin of the figure sometimes called the “Son of Man” or the “Human One.” The second apocalyptic text is this chapter in Mark. The third and final, and by final I mean final, is the Apocalypse to John of Patmos, for “apocalypse” is simply Koine Greek for “revelation.”
While other texts speak of the “Day of the Lord,” these three are descriptions of a divine, violent, even catastrophic re-ordering of the world.
And as we have discussed before, while the Book of Daniel represents itself as being about a figure from the Babylonian Captivity, it was actually composed several centuries later.
The Israelites were a loose confederation intermingled with non-Israelite cities, then a homogenous kingdom under David, who conquered the non-Israelite cities, and his son Solomon, who built the first temple.
After Solomon, the Israelites broke into two kingdoms often at odds with one another. The glory days had lasted for less than a century. Some today aspire to recreate the borders of this early Iron Age kingdom. The northern half, the larger portion of the former Davidic Kingdom, fell in the 8th century, the southern portion, surrounding Jerusalem, in the 6th, with the elite and skilled artisans held captive in Babylon.
A Persian victory allowed a return to Jerusalem under foreign rule, with the Temple’s High Priest acting as a de facto leader of the Jewish people. The Persians were replaced by the successor states to Alexander the Great’s empire, first the Egyptian remnant, then the Greek remnant, known as the Seleucids.
Greek culture, referred to as Hellenistic, dominated the entire eastern Mediterranean. Greek was the lingua franca, used for commerce and governance, well into the Roman age. The Jewish elite embraced Hellenistic culture, even proposing a Greek gymnasium to train young men in the holy city, complete with nude wrestling.
This was also a period when the High Priesthood was spectacularly corrupt. Jason bribed the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, to make him the High Priest, replacing his own brother, Onias. History records the bribe as 300 talents, which you may remember was a huge sum, for each talent was more than an average laborer might earn in a lifetime. To cover the sums involved, Jason demanded backbreaking Temple taxes from the people.
A few years later, Jason found himself dismissed when Antiochus accepted a larger bribe. Eventually the struggle between those who followed Jason and those who followed the new high bidder, Menelaus, broke out into open warfare. Antiochus viewed this as a revolt against his rule, brutally suppressed the conflict, and banned Jewish religious practice.
While all of this was going on in the city, folks in the countryside were in economic distress, and angry that they were losing their culture. They had believed that if they kept covenant with Yahweh, Yahweh would keep covenant with them, insuring their independence and prosperity. When that hadn’t happened in the past, they’d blamed themselves. But something different happened this time. They didn’t blame themselves. They didn’t even blame Yahweh. Instead, they decided to burn it all down.
This happened both theologically and literally. The former was the development of apocalyptic belief, the idea that the world was too broken to be repaired, that God would intervene in history in spectacular ways. The latter saw a peasant uprising, led by a family of country priests called the Hasmoneans. Sadly, they proved just as corrupt as everyone else, and by the time of Jesus, the Romans had seized control and installed puppet rulers like Herod Antipas who were not even Jews.
Because we tend to very narrowly read the story of Jesus, we often miss the brutality of that age. When one group protested Hasmonean rule, hundreds, thousands according to the ancient historian Josephus, were hung on crosses, then their wives and children were brought out and slaughtered in front of them, with the men then left to die. If the rulers, Hasmonean or Roman, demanded extraordinary taxes to pay for some palace or war, and a city failed to pay, the residents would be taken as slaves, and the city razed. The Romans would burn it all down, quite literally. The preachers of apocalypse wanted to burn it all down, Roman rule, the corruption and greed of the Temple elite.
We know a thing or two about folks so frustrated, feeling so powerless, that they want to burn it all down. It has been the most powerful movement in U.S. politics in recents years.
Which brings me back to our Advent theme of hope. So many Christians are stuck in the apocalyptic mindset, this small little subset of Jewish and Christian expectation. They expect to be raptured out of their gas-guzzling SUVs, which may or may not involve the conversion of all Jews to Christianity and re-construction of a Temple on that mount in Jerusalem, a belief system that continues the shameful history of Christian antisemitism and complicates U.S. policy in a region already entrenched in cycles of terrorism and war, including the current catasrophe.
Ultimately, I believe apocalyptic theology is a failure of imagination.
Most of us choose to believe that holiness, creativity, and love are the driving force not only of our faith, but of creation itself, hard-wired into this amazing mystery we call life and in the complex positive chaos that calls it forth.
We are not only called to see holy vulnerability in the “least of these,” as we were reminded last week, but to also see holy potentiality. Let me say that again. When we see Christ in our neighbor, we see not only Christ crucified, we see ahead to Christ resurrected.
Maybe belief for you is pregnant virgins and zombie Lazarus, but for me belief is that the holy is bigger than our stories, as awesome as they might be, and that love wins in the end. I do not need to hope God is good. I know God is good.
My hope is that I can live into my holy potential, that you can live into your holy potential, that humankind can live into our holy potential, today, for as long as our hearts beat, and as long as this globe continues to spin in the sweet spot around that bright star in our sky. My faith is that God is with us, this day in the Chemung River valley, and on the other side of the world, where angels sang to shepherds on a clear and starry night. Amen.