Patience. Courage. Trust.

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Mark 13:1-8

We’re now winding our way toward the end of this current church year, with the beginning of Advent just two weeks from tonight. The lectionary has been moving us progressively through the Gospel according to Mark over these many long weeks of “ordinary time,” and tonight we have our last reading in that series, with next Sunday being marked as the Feast of the Reign of Christ, which will take us into the Gospel according to John for one final reading before we shift toward Advent.

Well, I have to say that the year of reading through the Gospel according to Mark ends with something of a bang! The lectionary takes us into the opening eight verses of the thirteenth chapter of Mark, which is generally known as the “little apocalypse.” It’s only “little” when compared to the Book of Revelation, for it runs for the full thirty-six verses of Mark 13, and its content is actually pretty dire. Then again, Jesus could be rather dire in his teachings and warnings to the people, couldn’t he? Sure, there’s lots of comfort and hope in many of his parables and teachings, but there is that current that runs right through it all that says that things are going to get pretty intense before it is all done.

This teaching begins as Jesus and his disciples leave the temple, right after watching as the poor widow placed her two small coins into the temple treasury. As I said last week, Jesus clearly lauds her for her gift, yet there is this uncurrent in his teaching that is deeply critical of the temple machinery. Now as they exit that enormous place, one of the disciples is still awed by it all, saying, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” To which Jesus responds, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down,” which is hardly the answer that unnamed disciple had been expecting, though if he had been paying deeper attention to Jesus, maybe he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. Grand as this temple is, Jesus is saying to him, it ain’t going to last.

Remains of the Temple in Jerusalem

Then off they go to the Mount of Olives which was located opposite the temple, and Peter, James, John, and Andrew quietly ask him for more. “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” And in he launches:

Then Jesus began to say to them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

“This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,” and it is also just the beginning of a whole lot of material that the lectionary won’t have us read tonight. Yet you hear the tone, right? A crisis is coming, he’s saying to those disciples—and through Mark, to the whole of the early church. It is the view of N.T. Wright that the crisis Jesus has in view is first and foremost the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70AD. The consensus position is that Mark was writing in the early to mid 60s, so prior to that destruction, whereas Matthew and Luke are writing after 70; after the temple had been destroyed by the Roman Empire. There are slightly different textures to each of the gospels as they deal with this crisis, but all of three of these writers agree that this was a huge moment in the life of both Christianity and Judaism. The visible symbol centred in Jerusalem is gone, and now both Christians and Jews will need other ways to keep faith alive and vibrant.

And so Dr. Wright offers the following:

[M]any people have read Mark 13 (and its parallels in Matthew and Luke) as a chapter mainly about ‘the end of the world,’ which it certainly isn’t. [T]here are passages where Jesus draws on the cosmic language of scripture to talk about the future, giving rise to the belief that the whole chapter is about the large-scale future of the cosmos. But as the present section indicates, the main apparent subject is nothing so grandiose, certainly not on the surface. The main subject remains the fate of the Temple in Jerusalem—and of Jesus’ followers in the time leading up to the Temple’s demise.

Incidentally, N.T. Wright is not the only biblical scholar who takes that view; by no means! What he is pointing to is the fact that those early Christians faced a cataclysmic crisis when the Empire began to crush down hard; first on them under the Emperor Nero, and then on the city that had been a kind of spiritual centre, particularly for Jewish Christians in the Middle East. And even for those Gentile Christians in far flung places like Corinth, Thessaloniki, and even Rome itself, the news that Christians were being crushed in Jerusalem and then that the Temple itself had been destroyed would have been unnerving to the very core. What does it mean when the city and temple Jesus himself had known was flattened? Where now do we go? And in what ways can we believe?

And yet there would have been this reminder carried to them by Mark and then by Matthew and Luke that said, “you can’t be surprised or unnerved by this.” This has been coming for a good long time, and Jesus was so clear about that when he sat with his disciples on the Mount of Olives on that day right after they’d watched a poor widow put her last two coins into the treasury. This temple is spiritually bankrupt, and even this beloved city of Jerusalem has seen its day. The movement of the people of God is now so clearly where they are and where they live, whether in Judea, Ephesus, Galatia, Rome, or wherever.

In a sense it was the critical moment at which the church was fully and utterly unleashed into the wider world, and in spite of all the sorrow that accompanied the destruction of Jerusalem, it was a kind of birthing that was happening. There is a long story—a winding and sometimes very bumpy and troubled story—that stems from those days right up to our own. We realize how badly off track the church could sometimes get, crawling into bed with empires, allying with nation-building and a supposedly “good” society, and being more interested in wealth and success than in what Jesus actually taught. Yet remarkably, all the way through there were always those who could still hear his Word, respond to his presence, feel the depth of his call to actually be the Body of Christ, and so Christ’s church moved forward. Sometimes limping, sometimes stumbling off course, and sometimes dancing with the deepest delight in God’s grace, we moved our way along.

I wonder, are we limping again, right now, in these days? The pandemic has made for odd days for the church. Two years ago on this Sunday we would have had 150 people in this building, with another 15 or 20 participating in the 4pm family service. By the middle of March 2020, we were hearing the news of the impact of the pandemic on places like New York City, and our bishop had instructed us to stop sharing a common cup for communion wine and to avoid shaking hands with people from outside of our households. The anxiety was growing, and on the final Sunday before we were ordered to shut down, there were only 80 people here in the building. And then came those long, long months of nothing but live streaming. Long months, stretching from March 2020 to mid July 2021, and when we did reopen the doors, we kept up the streaming so that people could attend even if they weren’t able to come into the church building. We are now ranging between 50 and 60 people in the building on our average Sundays, plus those who take part in the live stream, but is still very different from having 150 folks here. So yes, there is a bit of a limp in the way we walk these days.

Yet as as N.T. Wright offers in his closing comments on this passage from tonight,

Jesus told us we would need patience to hold on and see the thing through. We should not be surprised if we are called, through whatever circumstances, to practice that virtue (of patience)—however unfashionable it may be in our hurried and anxious world.

May God grant us that virtue of patience, courage to move forward as we can, and a sense of trust as we face all of the ups and downs of life, whether they come from this pandemic or just from the realities of being human. Patience. Courage. Trust.

Amen.