Mark 13:1-8, from Proper 28(33).
Scaring people can be a pretty effective means of getting them to do what you want them to do. Want them to elect you? Vilify your opponent as a threat to safety and prosperity. Want them to despise a certain group of people? Cast the group as murderers, or job stealers, or bearers of disease, or spreaders of sedition or heresy. Want them to go to war for you? Tell them they are under attack, even if they aren’t.
This week’s passage gets used to scare people pretty often. Convert, the usual sermon goes, or toe the line, unless you want to risk enduring all this bad stuff Jesus is describing here.
But Jesus doesn’t come off in the Gospels as a guy who relied much on scare tactics. He could have, to be sure. Calling down a bolt of lightning to toast a Pharisee probably would have brouht a quick end to their sniping at him. But the closest he got to anything like that was probably his cursing of the fig tree.
So what do you figure was the purpose of all the scary end-of-times talk in this week’s passage?
Maybe Jesus was genuinely trying to answer his anxious disciples’ questions. He had said the temple would be destroyed. They wanted to know when, and how they could tell it was about to happen. He did his best to tell them, although he ended up leaving the “when” question unanswered. Nobody but the Father knows, he said.
Maybe Mark’s readers, for whom the temple’s destruction was recent history rather than distant prophecy, needed to hear that as chaotic as things seemed, it was part of the plan, and God was still in control.
Maybe we’re listening to the very human response of a man looking, in his divinity, at the whole arc of history, the cruelty inflicted by people on people throughout the two millennia between his time and ours, and beyond. Imagine seeing it all, there on the Mount of Olives: swords and arrows evolving into crossbows, then muskets and cannon, Minie balls and Gatling guns, trenches, mustard gas, armored tanks, concentration camps, firebombing, amphibious assaults, mushroom clouds, world war, cold war, race war, guerilla war, civil war, religious war – all of it, all in one, terrifying, appalling vision.
Maybe whether it’s one of these things or all three, the thing to listen for is verse 31: “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” I think hat’s what Jesus most wanted to convey. It can get bad, but stay faithful, watchful and hopeful, because God is on his way.
Next week: Proper 29(34)
