Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
November 14, 2021
Scripture Reading: Mark 13:1-8
How many times has the end of the world been predicted? In recent years, I think of the Mayan Calendar prediction that said that the world was going to end on December 21, 2012. Ronald Weinland has also been on the news a couple of times, having predicted the end of the world in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2019. A bunch of self-proclaimed prophets claimed that the world was going to end in the year 2000. Going further back in time, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, thought that the world was going to end in 1836, and Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church, thought that the world was going to end no later than 1600. In fact, if you were to believe every publicized prediction of the end of the world, the world should have ended almost 200 times in the past 2000 years!
But Jesus, in our reading today, tells us that no one knows when the world is going to end. Not you. Not me. Not world-renowned theologians. Not popular televangelists.
The reading that ______ shared with us today falls into the category of “apocalyptic” literature. In the bible, the best-known apocalyptic writings come from the book of Revelation, but you also find apocalyptic writing in the gospels, and even earlier, in the Book of Daniel. They tend to be filled with vivid images, and can be confusing or scary.
And pop-culture has taken this idea of apocalypse and run with it. In this genre, something has happened to cause the collapse of society, and often the death of the majority of people. Margaret Atwood’s Mad-Addam Trilogy would fall into this category, with environmental collapse as the cause. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndam is an older example, where humans lose their eyesight and the country is taken over by triffids – murderous walking plants. The scariest book I have read in recent years was Second Sleep by Robert Harris – this is set almost 2000 years after the destruction of civilization as we know it due to a massive collapse of the Internet.
I have mentioned before that I don’t do scary – books or movies – and that I have a very low threshold for what I consider to be scary! And so I generally stay away from these apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books and movies. Almost without exception, they portray the world that comes after the apocalypse as more violent, more dangerous, more fearful, than the world before the apocalypse.
But that is where pop culture and bible apocalypses are different. In biblical apocalypse stories, it is the world before the apocalypse that is scary and dangerous, and the world that follows the apocalypse is a good world, a world where God is fully present, a world where all of God’s promises of peace and joy and love are fully realized.
In the apocalypse story that we read today, Jesus and his disciples are standing just outside the temple in Jerusalem. It is just days before Jesus is going to be crucified. It has been a tense couple of days, as Jesus has been arguing with the spiritual leaders in the temple. I can just picture those disciples, after the tension of those debates, taking a shaky breath and making a comment in passing, a bit like we might comment on the weather. “Look at the amazing architecture of the temple here. I never could have imagined such a huge and spectacular building!”
But Jesus isn’t done with the high-stakes teaching; and so in response to their tentative comment, he tells them that not a single stone in the temple will be left standing, there will be wars and rumours of wars, nation will rise against nation, and there will be earthquakes and famines. This is scary stuff, he’s talking about.
But the thing is, these things – the famines and wars and earthquakes – they aren’t part of the world after the apocalypse; they are part of the world before the apocalypse. They are part of the present day world – the world that Jesus was living in, and the world that we are still living in. 2000-some-odd years after Jesus was talking to his disciples, we are still living in a world where earthquakes happen, where there are famines, where nation rises up against nation.
If you look at the word “apocalypse,” it means revelation. It means that something is being revealed. It means that the mask is being taken off, and the true face is being revealed. It means that the superficial world is being peeled back so that the real world can be revealed. The only thing that should be scary about this is the unfamiliarity. We lose the familiarity of our broken world with its famines and wars, but in exchange for that, we gain the real-er world that is the world as God wants it to be.
Today’s reading ended with Jesus saying, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” I found that to be a very powerful image. I have never given birth, I have never been in labour, but I can imagine that it is a scary and painful thing to go through.
You may have heard of the TLC television show, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Each episode follows the story of a person who didn’t know that they were pregnant until they are giving birth. There is a YouTuber, Mama Doctor Jones, who is an Obstetrician Gynaecologist, who watches episodes of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and offers medical commentary on what is happening. One thing that she frequently comments is that if you didn’t know that you were pregnant and you go into labour, you would probably think that you were dying. You would think that your world was ending. Even though there is usually new life waiting for you on the other side of that labour, if you didn’t know that, then labour would be terrifying.
And Jesus says that the world as we know it is the beginning of labour, the beginning of the birth pangs. All of the scary and terrible things in our world – wars, earthquakes, pandemics, climate change – all of this isn’t the post-apocalyptic world – all of this is the brokenness of our current world – the brokenness that will be peeled back so that the real-er world, God’s world, can be fully revealed. The brokenness will be transformed into a world of love and peace and justice and joy.
And so apocalypses, in the biblical sense of things, aren’t things that we need to be scared of. They are the revelation of God’s world.
The psalm writer tells us that “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” The pain of the world we are living in, all of this pain is going to end some day. A time is coming when the labour pains will be over and new life will be here. A time is coming when the brokenness of all of creation will be transformed into healing and wholeness.
When we trust that this revelation is going to happen – when we trust that God’s goodness will have the final say over all of the pain and grief of the world – the name that we give to this is hope. Hope is the trust that better things are coming. Hope is believing that the labour pains will eventually end, no matter how long they linger on.
And if we believe that a better world is coming, what can we do in the here-and-now to live as if this world was already here? How can we live in the brokenness, knowing that peace and love and joy will have the final word?
Amen.
Image: “Beginning the Reveal”
CC BY-NC 2.0
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