Hilton Head Island, SC – April 7, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 13:1-13; Mark 13:14-23, 32-37
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text –“But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” – Mark 13:32 (RSV)
Jesus believed the world would come to a cataclysmic end shortly after his death. He seemed to have no doubt of that. There are hints of the Apocalypse here and there in the Galilean ministry, but it was in Holy Week where his concepts of the Apocalypse are most apparent.
The word “apocalypse” is derived from Greek. It means “unveiling.” Something huge was going to happen in the near future, but it would be fully unveiled only when it happened. Jesus said, “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Sopn, but only the Father.” Therefore there inevitably was a mystery to it, with many unanswered and unanswerable questions.
Apocalyptic ideas are found in the Bible from nine centuries before the time of Jesus onward. Several of the Hebrew prophets make reference to “the day of the Lord,” which is an alternative term for the Apocalypse. The notion became particularly widespread in the Intertestamental Period, the 250-year span after the last Old Testament book was written and before the first New Testament books were written by the apostle Paul around 50 AD.
This morning you heard most of Mark’s account about how Jesus explained to the disciples his understanding about the end of the world and the coming triumph of God. Before the end, they would be tested in many ways, he said, and they would be arrested and mistreated. In fact that did happen. Nevertheless, if they endured, they would be witnesses to God’s ultimate victory.
Throughout history, there have been highly stressful periods when people of faith came to believe that the end of the world was about to be unveiled. Because of the millennial views expressed in the Book of Revelation, many people at the end of the first Christian millennium thought the world would end. In the late Medieval Period, when Europe seemed to be falling apart before the Renaissance, several apocalyptic groups sprang up in various European locations. In our own time, Charles Manson and his small coterie of radicals illustrated a kind of secular apocalypticism. Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana was an apocalyptic outburst. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, are another illustration. There were some people who thought 9/11 represented the beginning of the end.
Why does such thinking become prevalent in such extreme situations? Apparently it occurs because many people believe that things are so helter-skelter that no one can set things right, unless it is God. Some, like Jim Jones, take matters into their own hands, without any resort to imploring God’s intervention. But for many people of faith, they conclude that God alone can sort out the chaos, and they look to Him for a solution to the world’s uncertainties.
Jesus also apparently thought that the world was on the brink of destruction. Because he experienced increasing opposition to his teachings as time went on, he may have become personally enveloped by a mounting sense of dread. It is very understandable how that could happen. Jesus was so courageous in what he taught, so forthright in what he said, that his theological adversaries were thrown into near-apoplexy by him. And if his theological enemies became overly alarmed, it would not take much for them to get the authorities of the Roman occupation of Judea also to become alarmed.
From the standpoint of the Roman Empire, the mid-first-century of the Christian era represented an epoch of vast Roman political and military influence throughout the Mediterranean region. Economically, the empire was flourishing. Trading ships sailed from Gibraltar to Constantinople. Peace prevailed everywhere --- except for one small rebellious Roman province at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. Rome could and did get along relatively well with all its occupied peoples. But the Jews of Judea constantly rubbed Rome the wrong way. From the Jewish standpoint, that was because Rome constantly rubbed them the wrong way.
For most of their history as a separate ethnic and religious group, the Jews had always believed in only one god. They called Him El Shaddai, God of the Mountains or the Highest God, or simply El, “God.” They also called Him Adonoy, the Lord. In the text of the Bible, they wrote his actual name as Yahweh, but they believed that name was so sacred that they never pronounced it aloud. When they came to the word Yahweh in the verses of scripture, they always substituted Adonoy, the Lord.
The Jews were convinced they were God’s most favored people, and God was their most favored, and indeed their only, god. In their unyielding monotheism, they were like no other people in the ancient world.
Because of the unique way in which the Jews perceived this human-divine relationship, the Jews had no doubt that God would save them from their enemies if ever an inescapable crunch came upon them. Because Roman values and culture were so foreign to Judeans, and because the Roman religion was so distant from the religion of the prophets and priests of Judea, many Jews felt it was impossible to accommodate themselves to the authority of Caesar. And so, from before the time Jesus was born until forty years after he was crucified, Jewish insurrectionists staged a colossally unequal resistance to Rome. Jewish terrorists, called zealots, carried out furtive missions against the Roman legionnaires whenever and wherever they could.
This was not David vs. Goliath, however. It was not the United States and the NATO allies vs. the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. It was Liechtenstein vs. the Soviet Union, or Grenada vs. the United States. There was no way the Jews could defeat the Romans. But because they were so committed to the God of Israel, they refused to relent. And so it seemed to many first-century Jews, Jesus among them, that God would have to step in to rescue the people of Israel from the most powerful adversary they had ever encountered in what they trusted was their two thousand years of separately identifiable ethnic history.
Another Greek word was coined to describe their belief in the obliteration of history. It was called eschatology. That word means “the last things.” When the Apocalypse came, eschatology would usher in God’s victory over the powers of ignorance and darkness, and the righteous would be swept into heaven. This is what Jesus was talking about during Holy Week. All four Gospels declare that, the Synoptics clearly, and the Gospel of John more cryptically.
In many nations of the world today, populist authoritarian leaders have taken over the reins of government or are attempting to do so. The European Union seems to be weakening every year. The Brexit vote is tearing the United Kingdom apart. The American people believe themselves to be polarized is a fashion we have never before witnessed.
I am amazed at the number of people who ask me what I think is going to happen in the world. Perhaps they ask because they think I think about that a great deal, which I do, and that therefore I must have some answers. But I cannot predict with any confidence at all what shall surely transpire in the next few months or years or decades. Politically, militarily, economically, and environmentally, our country and the world is in an enormous state of flux, and that is not likely to change quickly or permanently. We all have thoughts about that, but no one knows beyond doubt what is coming.
It appears to us that the world is more unstable now than it has ever been before. But that is because we are living in the world now, and “now” is the only time anyone has ever lived in the world. To the Judean Jews of the first century, it was inconceivable the world could ever become more chaotic than the dilemmas which faced them in their confrontation with Rome.
Because of his own confrontations with the leaders of Judaism, perhaps Jesus felt that his personal world was collapsing, and that God alone could set things right. Knowing how fiercely some of his fellow Jews resisted Rome, Jesus’ own convictions regarding the Apocalypse may simply have overtaken him in the last week of his life. Looking at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with all its magnificent structures, Jesus said, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2).
A generation later, in 70 AD, the Roman army came and burned Jerusalem, leveling the temple into a heap of huge hewn stones. Was that the Apocalypse, the unveiling of the Last Things? Obviously not, because it did not represent The End of the World. I think Jesus correctly foresaw the result of the Jewish Revolt, because he sensed, as did many others, that it was folly to try to drive the Romans out of Judea.
Concurrently with the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations in sixteenth-century Europe, there was a different kind of Reformation going on in isolated parts of Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, and France. It was called the Anabaptist Reformation. The ancestors of today’s Church of the Brethren and the Amish and Mennonite Churches withdrew from the larger society into their own small communities of faith. They chose not to become involved in the larger Reformation, and instead engaged in their own small counter-reformation. It was not the seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, but the “Peace Churches” reformation. Supposing that they could not transform the ethos around them, they created their own deliberately limited ecclesiastical compounds. In the eighteenth century, many of them emigrated to America, settling in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and North Carolina.
It is a fearful thing to imagine that the end is near, or that, if it isn’t near chronologically, what is going on out there in the world is so unpredictable that many people want to withdraw from the storm and stress into their own little safe havens. This was what was going on in Judea at the end of the third decade of the first century, and this was what seemed to be coursing through the mind of Jesus of Nazareth in the last few days of his life.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian who came to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the early 1930s. He was encouraged to stay in America and teach here, but he insisted on going back to his homeland. There he joined the resistance movement to Hitler and Nazism, a kind of righteous Gotterdamerung. For that he paid the ultimate price. He was hanged a couple of weeks short of the end of the war in Europe.
In one of his last books, perhaps sensing his own imminent demise, Bonhoeffer said that “Jesus was forced out of the world, and onto a cross.” The Apocalypse is unveiled, the Eschaton occurs, when it appears as though evil triumphs over good, and darkness blots out the light.
So often throughout history it has looked as though that is what will happen. In the end, however, God always triumphs. The world cannot end badly, because God is the creator and sustainer and redeemer of the entire universe and the world. Times do get very dicey, and events do become very dark. But God is God, God is good, the world is ultimately good, and in the end all shall be well. It cannot be otherwise, even though it often feels as though that is impossible.
Jesus did what he could to prepare the twelve disciples and his other followers for what was coming. Then, on the first night of Passover, he gathered with the twelve in an upper room on Mt. Zion. At the Last Supper, symbolically he showed them what he knew was coming. They could not grasp what he was doing then. But later, afterward, on Easter and in the days and years and centuries beyond, it dawned on them what he meant.
Holy Week and Easter represent realized eschatology. The Apocalypse has already come and gone. No one is ultimately lost. All are finally found. Every lost sheep is gathered in.
Throughout history, there have been many examples of apocalypses as realized eschatology. The fall of the Roman Empire, the collapse of the values which had supported medieval Europe, the destruction of an absolute British monarchy because of the American Revolution, the end of the Enlightenment in the French Revolution, the overthrow of slavery and institutional racism in the American Civil War: all of those epochs metaphorically illustrated the apocalyptic end of the world which preceded them and the beginning of a new world which followed after them. There is no “THE Apocalypse.” Instead, there are series of apocalypses which thrust themselves into human history whenever a new world becomes a divine necessity.
In the meantime, all of us wait, and wonder, and worry. And then, in God’s own time, “O, what their joy and their glory must be; those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see!”