The Marcan Apocalypse (Mark 13)

Then Jesus began to say, “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” From the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 13, verses 5 and 7.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     A few weeks ago I heard a new word, ‘collapsarian.’ Collapsarians are people, and there are many of them, who believe that our society, our civilization, our world, face the imminent collapse of all systems: ecological, economic, social, political. According to collapsarians, the oil is going to run out soon, the climate is being wrecked by carbon dioxide, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, climate change will destroy agriculture, there will be no water, the economy will be ruined by excessive debt, political systems will fail, and the world will return to a previous state of being, frequently characterized as ‘a new Dark Age.’ Some of these propositions contradict each other. There are many books in print with world collapse as their theme, and there are even more websites which tell us when and how the world will end, usually quite soon and rather unpleasantly. They also tell us what to take with us to our underground shelters, supplies that they’re eager to sell us, by the way, so that we can survive the collapse.

     Today’s Gospel, and indeed the whole of the 13^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, reads like a collapsarian menu of destructive possibilities. In today’s few verses, the Temple will collapse, there will be false Messiahs, there will be wars and rumors of wars, and (especially for us in California!) there will be earthquakes, and famines too. The rest of the chapter lists yet more possibilities: persecutions, betrayals, hatred, sacrilege in the Temple, refugee migrations. There is more, but we get the idea.

     Since we hear today’s Gospel in the context of the familiar collapsarian narrative so widespread today, it is possible to be tempted by the idea that Jesus’s narrative is no different, that it is just an old version of the same idea, a precursor, if you will. But we don’t need to hear it this way.

     Scholars tell us that because Jesus is talking about the collapse of the Temple, this passage must have been composed after the historical Temple was destroyed by the Romans – in other words, decades after the time of the historical Jesus. This is possible, but the assumption here is that such an idea could not have occurred to Jesus. There is no reason to suppose that this is so. In the world that Jesus and his hearers knew, warfare was frequent, if not constant, and invading armies were not necessarily respectful of temples or any other buildings. The Temple was built and renovated and destroyed and rebuilt many times before Herod’s Temple (which is the Temple that Jesus knew). So the idea of the Temple’s destruction was likely not foreign to Jesus or anybody else.

     In reality, the world that the historical Jesus knew is the world that we know. Destruction, war, famine, earthquakes, and all the rest, are common, daily events. Jesus is not so much prophesying a future world as he is describing the present world, and saying in plain words that he expects the future world to be no different.

     What, then, is the point of today’s Gospel, if it is telling us things which we already know to be true? And Gospel, as we know, means Good News, so, where is the Good News in this woeful description? Is it Good News at all?

     Prophecy does not have to be about the future. A true prophet sees the present clearly, and describes it clearly. This, Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel.  Remember what Jesus says, in addition to his description of the world: “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.”

     Beware. That is, Be Aware. We hear Beware as an expression of alarm, a signal that we should be afraid of something. Beware of the Dog, for example. But Be Aware means just that. Be Attentive. Be Awake. Keep our ears open for the news. Keep our ears open, so that we can detect false prophets. Jesus is taking for granted that we can do this, that we can be aware without fear, that we can avoid being led astray. All he is doing is reminding us of what we can do already. He goes on to say, “Do not be alarmed.” In other words, all the bad news, the fearful events he is describing, need not carry us away. If we are aware, attentive, there is no need for alarm, no need to run after false prophets, no need to believe that there is no more to the story than one calamity after another, with no way out.

     “Do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” In other words, we are not to be alarmed, because there is an end yet to come, an end beyond the apparent ends achieved by destruction and war and falsehood. We are to be aware that bad news is not all the news, that there is Good News. “The end is still to come,” Jesus says. Later in chapter 13, after today’s reading, Jesus promises that we will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory…he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” In other words, the world that we know, which Jesus describes so well, is not the whole story. “The end is still to come.”

     We can think of the end as a future event, and, at first hearing,  this seems to be the plain meaning of the teaching. But we can also think of it as the end of our usual state of mind, in which we are limited by fearful speculations about all the dreadful things that can happen to us and to the world. Be aware, Jesus says. Do not be alarmed. When we are aware, when we let our perpetual state of alarm drop away, then we have a glimpse of the ‘end’ that Jesus is talking about. The ‘end’ is a glimpse of the world in full awareness, as it really is, free of the clouds of fear, anxiety, alarm which we bring to it.  The world that we think we know is not the whole story, and we can bring that world to an ‘end,’ so to speak,  by awareness and fearlessness.  We know that this is possible, because Our Lord says, “the end is still to come.” “The coming of the Son of Man in clouds with great power and glory,” is another way of describing, hinting at, what this new awareness may be like.

     When we bring this new awareness back to the collapsarian narrative that we hear so much today, the narrative of the likely collapse of absolutely everything, we can understand it differently. To begin with, we need full awareness of the true nature of the situation we are in. And we must drop all alarm, all fear, or we will be unable to see things clearly. Then we begin to see the world, dare I say it, as Our Lord sees it, full of potential for its, and our, transformation. Then it becomes possible for us to do what needs to be done, for then we will know what that is.

     Not that this will be easy, or quick. The last line of today’s Gospel reminds us of where we are in the work which Jesus has put before us. It is easy to say, Be Aware, Do Not Be Alarmed. In prayer and meditation, we attain the required awareness. But, as Our Lord says, it is only the beginning. Verse 8 says, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” But, of course, it is a beginning.

     Then Jesus began to say, “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” From the Gospel according to Mark, verses 5 and 7.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.