Proper 28, Year B

Sunday, November 15, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N. J.

Mark 13:1-8

We’ve just heard the passage known as the Little Apocalypse, in Chapter 13 of Saint Mark’s Gospel. In the very precincts of the Jerusalem Temple, Our Lord makes the shocking prediction that the Temple itself will soon be destroyed. Then, having gone out across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives, he sits down, assuming the posture of a teacher. Speaking to his innermost circle of disciples—Peter, James, and John—he describes the times of trial and tribulation that will precede his Second Coming. 

As we approach Advent, with its focus on the Last Things, the lectionary’s compilers chose this Gospel to get us thinking about the world’s end. These apocalyptic passages can be difficult for contemporary readers. Despite the very real threats to our collective existence posed by weapons of mass destruction, environmental degradation, and other potential sources of global catastrophe, many people find it hard to take seriously these biblical predictions of a literal end of the world brought about by God himself in response to a rising tide of human disobedience and rebellion. Nonetheless, it’s all there, in the Scriptures.

From the earliest days, however, the Church has understood these passages to have a double meaning and application. On one hand, they speak of a sequence of global and even cosmic future events culminating in the end of the present world, the return of Christ to judge the living and the dead, and the inauguration of God’s Kingdom in a new heaven and a new earth. We cannot know ahead of time what exactly all this will involve or what it will be like for those who are then alive. The biblical prophecies are couched in highly symbolic imagery pointing to mysterious realities otherwise impossible to describe in words.

On the other hand, “the end of the world” becomes an individual and personal reality for each of us as we face death. The world will go on without us, but at the moment of dying our world comes to an end. In the hour of death, we begin to experience for ourselves – immediately and directly – the events traditionally associated with the end of the world: the coming of the Lord, the last judgment, and the life of the world to come.

Our Lord’s message in today’s Gospel is twofold. When the disciples admire the magnificent buildings of the Jerusalem Temple built by King Herod the Great – “Look, teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” – Jesus warns them that the time is coming when “there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” 

Beyond the historical fulfillment of this prophecy by the Roman legions several decades later, these words admonish the disciples, and us, that nothing in this life is permanent. If we put our trust in earthly goods, no matter how strong and sturdy they seem, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. We live in the midst of a world that is passing away.

To the disciples, however, this prediction may have seemed shocking and blasphemous. The Temple of Jerusalem was God’s dwelling place on earth. What Peter, James, and John say next can be paraphrased: “Okay, Lord, now you’ve got our attention! When is all this going to happen, and what will be the sign that the time has come?” Here, however, they manifest the misguided tendency of some Christians in every generation to try to work out the timetable, so they can predict with certainty when the end is at hand.

But Jesus responds with a contrary warning. He says, in effect, “Even when things get so bad that you think that it must be the end of the world, don’t panic, the time is not yet. Many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he,’ and they will lead many astray.” In other words, the Church must settle in for the long haul. Those too ready to believe rash predictions are likely to be led astray by false prophets. So, the two counterbalancing parts of the message are, on one hand, that the end of the world is indeed coming; but, on the other hand, we need to avoid jumping the gun and prematurely concluding that the time is here. Those who get caught up in doomsday cults are apt to make bad decisions that they live to regret.

Finally, Jesus deploys a totally unexpected and surprising image. Wars and rumors of war, nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes, and famines: all these are “but the beginning of the birth pangs.” That image requires a bit of unpacking. “Birth pangs” is biblical language for labor pains – the rhythmic contractions that signal the onset of labor and the sequence of events culminating in the delivery of a child.

This image of childbirth occurs in several places in the New Testament. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, Saint Paul writes that the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night: “When people say, ‘There is peace and security’, then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape.” Later, in his Letter to the Romans, Chapter 8, Paul varies the image slightly and writes of the whole creation groaning in travail, undergoing its present sufferings, which nonetheless cannot be compared with the glory to be revealed. And in John’s Gospel, Jesus says alludes to his own coming death and resurrection with this amazing image: “Truly, truly, I say to you … you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour is come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child has been born into the world.”

This image of “the beginning of the birth pangs” thus carries a promise of reassurance and hope. Labor pains are exceedingly unpleasant, but in the vast majority of cases they’re the prelude to the overwhelming and unparalleled joy of new life. 

Even in the midst of violence and destruction, catastrophe and disaster, whether in the world at large or in our own personal worlds, God is always at work, bringing new realities to birth. The promise of the Lord’s resurrection is that death never has the last word, for in Christ it becomes birth into eternal life. And for Christians, the agonies of death are but the birth pangs of a new creation, a world without end.