Hello fellow Bible Nerds! As promised, this week I’m beginning a new Sunday feature which will focus on the Gospel Lectionary text for each week. My hope is to stay a few weeks ahead, so that my clergy friends who are preparing sermons and might find these posts helpful can have them ahead of time. If you enjoy these posts, as always, please like, comment, and share them so more people can find them.
Additionally, as we approach Advent, I’d remind you that my book, Advent Can Still Change the World: Bringing Christmas Past into Christmas Present, just released, and might be helpful during the upcoming season. Each book has a QR code that grants you access to a discussion guide, and video content designed to focus on each chapter.
Alright, commercials are over. Let’s dive in.
The Gospel text for the first Sunday of Advent comes from Mark 13. In the three year, A-B-C cycle, of the Lectionary we find ourselves in Year B, the year of Mark. This, my friends, brings me so much joy because the Gospel of Mark is not only the first Gospel to be written (that we know of), but it is also the best Gospel. Matthew, Luke, and perhaps even John in some cases, use Mark as a springboard for their own narratives. In fact, Matthew incorporates more than 90% of Mark, and Luke more than 60%. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mark is constantly blushing.
The text for this week is Mark 13:24-37. This passage is often referred to as the “Little Apocalypse,” because it 1) has apocalyptic literature vibes, and 2) it’s shorter than the book of Revelation. It’s important to remember that apocalyptic literature is a kind of Jewish writing that seeks to pull back the curtain and show readers what’s really going on behind the scenes—how God is still at work—even during times of suffering. This was the exact situation in which Mark’s readers found themselves.
Think about the context: Mark is likely writing in the immediate aftermath of the failed Jewish revolt against Roman occupation. Jerusalem was defeated and the Temple lay in ruins. The world as they knew it had come to an abrupt and tragic end. In the Gospel of Mark we see the author sifting through the rubble of a defeated people and a destroyed city, looking for something hopeful to offer in the aftermath of the end of their world moment.
Before we talk about this text and Advent, we should first talk about how this passage has been (mis)used and (mis)understood eschatologically, meaning how this text has been interpreted to be about the “End Times.”
This is not how Mark intended this passage to be understood. Writing sometime near the year 70 CE, Mark has Jesus warn his listeners about the possible fate that awaited them. This means the events depicted in Mark 13 likely belonged to the author's and his audience's recent past, rather than to our future. The earliest followers of Jesus interpreted the fall of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple to be a vindication of Jesus and his message. For Mark, if the people had followed the non-violent vision of Jesus, instead of the path of violent revolt against Rome, the events of 70 CE would never have happened. Hindsight is always 20/20. In that way, Mark is a kind of “I told you so.”
For some followers of Jesus, when he didn’t literally appear and Jerusalem fell, they had to deal with their unmet expectations. If Jesus didn’t return and establish the Kingdom then, it must be happening later. Jesus must be returning in the future, they decided. At some point, when all the necessary events of prophetic fulfillment had occurred, Jesus would literally return to earth. I don’t think that is what Mark had in mind, but to say that this understanding has affected Christianity (not to mention, at times, American foreign policy) for the worse would be an understatement. It has led to so much hysteria and fear-mongering, bad exegesis of Scripture, and, too often, to an abdication of our responsibility to partner with God right here and now to bring the Kingdom—God’s New Society—on earth as it is in heaven.1 Further, the brand we know as dispensationalism in Evangelical theology is a fairly recent invention. The whole “Left Behind” notion didn’t emerge until the 19th century.
In short, Mark 13 (and its Synoptic siblings) is not about our future but about the context of Mark and his audience. It wasn’t about the end of the world, it was the end of an age—it was the end of the world as they knew it. In this sense Mark 13 still has something important to say to every generation of interpreters, as we, too, must decide whether we will heed both the warning and the call of Jesus.
This leads me to ask a question: Why do the Gospels, in each year of the Lectionary, all begin with an apocalyptic text? I mean, Christmas is about nostalgia, joy, and hope. Not “the sun darkened, the moon lightless, and the stars falling from the sky,” as in Mark 13. Why start the most wonderful time of the year on such a non-festive note?
Several years ago I was giving a sermon on fear, so I began by asking people of what they were afraid. You can imagine the usual suspects: spiders, heights, enclosed spaces…and those were just mine! However, one person raised a hand and said “Dying alone.”
It was a real downer in the moment—the technical, theological term is “buzzkill,” I believe, but it was also honest, and spoke to something many of us probably wanted to ignore or avoid. Our own mortality is not a comfortable subject, after all.
Beginning Advent with an apocalyptic passage feels similarly jarring, yet it’s also brilliant.
Every year, right about this time, I start seeing pictures and posts on my social media timeline that are unexpected. My green-thumbed friends are all posting about their excitement, because their seed catalogues are starting to arrive. As we move toward winter, and creation enters the death part of the life cycle, they are confidently planning their Spring gardens, looking toward a new season in which life will thrive and creation will be renewed.
That’s the power of beginning Advent with an apocalyptic text like Mark 13. It reminds us that Advent is a season of hope, and that it begins in this age, this moment, but looks forward to a new age, a new kind of world.
Advent is about the end of one world and the birth of another, and it’s about the decisions we make that shape what that new world will be like. Will it be similar to this age, full of vengeance and violence, or will it be a new age of justice and peace? That is ultimately up to us.
For God’s new world to be born it will surely require our participation. We are invited to volunteer as midwives, scrubbing in to help make God’s New Society our reality. In the words often attributed to Meister Eckhart, a medieval German Dominican priest, theologian, philosopher, and mystic: “We are all meant to be mothers of God…for God is always needing to be born.”
We are always potentially living at the end of the age. The world as it is, marred with injustice, suffering, and oppression, is not the way the world has to be. A new world, a world of justice, peace, and possibility, is waiting to be born. It is possible, but not guaranteed. That’s why God is looking for collaborators. In Mark 13 Jesus warns his listeners about a worst case scenario—about what happens when humans choose violence, vengeance, and retribution. Throughout his ministry he also presented an alternative possibility, one in which we love God, neighbor, self, and enemy, which brings that new world into being.
Advent beckons us to take seriously our role, our calling, to bring this world of our best dreams and imaginations into reality.
May we heed Jesus’s challenge, to “keep awake” in these critical days in which we live. It is no time for sleeping, after all! There is good work—the work of love—that desperately needs our attention.
May we conspire with God, and one another, to bring that new world of possibility into our reality.
May it be so.
Amen.
My friend Brad Davis coined this language and I LOVE it!