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Sermon - The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (B) - 15th November 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping
“Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.”
That cry, uttered by the disciples, may well have become the theme for the trip that Ruth Shatford and I recently took to Provence and Italy. In those places we were surrounded by evidence of Roman, late Antique and medieval culture. Walking down a street to do some shopping, we’d discover that we were actually treading on a Roman pavement. Looking for somewhere to have a leisurely lunch, we’d pass a former Roman temple, now transformed into a Christian church. Sitting down for a much needed coffee, we’d find ourselves gazing at the exquisitely sculpted facade of a magnificent Romanesque church. We walked, ate and slept surrounded by the grandeurs of past centuries. We repeatedly gasped at the large stones of the amazing Roman theatres, aqueducts and arenas that still stand. We stood in awe in the interiors of early churches, dazzled by the brilliance of the mosaics glowing from every surface. We marvelled at the inlaid marble facades of the churches and baptisteries of Pisa, Florence and Siena. Like the disciples, we found ourselves exclaiming, “Look... what large stones and what large buildings.” Like them too, we’d find ourselves making an unwitting assumption about the permanence of those magnificent structures, “Surely these great buildings which have withstood the ravages of time are evidence of continuity in the midst of transience and change. Surely they are signs for us of continuing hope in all the uncertainties of the present.”
For the disciples, however, that hope was quickly dispelled by Jesus’ reply. “Do you see these great buildings?”’ he said. “Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” And that reply may equally well have been the theme for our trip. All too often it wasn’t great buildings we saw but only the site where they had once been, the large stones lying where they had fallen, the splendid buildings crumbled into ruin. What we witnessed in those areas could also be construed as evidence of the impermanence of all human achievement, the futility of any attempt at creating structures that will endure. A visit to the glories of the past can equally lead to an attitude of nihilistic despair. What is the point of human achievement if it is only to be destroyed? All one can do is to place one’s hope in a future beyond the grave, an order of existence totally separate from our present world.
Our trip, however, also gave us a glimpse of a third approach to life. Our last few days were spent in the north-eastern corner of Italy, the region between Venice and Trieste. There we visited the basilica of Aquileia, with its intricate mosaic floor dating back to the C4. The church that stands today was built several centuries later, the original having been sacked in the sixth century by successive invasions of Huns and Lombards. It is, however, the site of extensive archeological excavations which attest to the majestic grandeur of the original church complex and its significance as a Christian centre in that period. What I found particularly interesting was the way in which many of the inhabitants of Aquileia had responded to the repeated threats from the north. They retreated south, to the island of Grado in the Adriatic. Our journey therefore took us from Aquileia to Grado, now linked to the mainland by a causeway. When the Aquileians took refuge there, however, it was still an island, completely cut off by the sea, and therefore considered to be more protected from hostile invasion. In their new location, the community who had moved from Aquileia wanted to recreate the glories of the past, and to rebuild the church that they had left behind. And so we find on Grado the great church of Sant’Eufemia, modelled on the C6 basilica of Aquileia, a copy but really only a pale reflection of the splendour of the original.
Large stones, great buildings stand, then, as pointers to three approaches to life, three forms of hope- there’s the hope that things will remain constant even in the midst of change; or there’s hope arising out of despair at the impermanence of earthly achievement and which therefore looks for security in the life to come; or finally there’s hope based on a determination to confront change by taking the things that mattered from the past and transforming them for present use, as happened at Grado. In our everyday lives most of us probably adopt one of these approaches. In today’s gospel, however, Jesus suggests a fourth way, the true way for his followers to approach the future. That way, that form of hope, is the subject of the thirteenth chapter of Mark’s gospel from which today’s gospel passage is drawn.
If you read the whole of that chapter you will find references to the end time and the coming of the Son of Man and examples of Jewish apocalyptic imagery. For this reason it is often called the “Little Apocalypse” because, on first reading, it seems to belong to the genre of apocalyptic writings which had become so popular in the centuries immediately preceding Christ’s birth. They were popular because those years were, for the Jewish people, a time of immense upheaval, suffering and persecution. Apocalyptic writings, such as we find in the book of Daniel, offered a vision of God supreme over all the forces of evil. They foretold a time, the End Time, when, in a display of mighty power, God would bring destruction on the earth and restitution to the just in God’s true kingdom. In a time of fear and uncertainty, such a vision of the future created confidence and hope. What is interesting, however, is that, in reporting the incident of Jesus leaving the temple and his subsequent words to his disciples, Mark doesn’t uncritically adopt the mindframe of the apocalyptic writers. Using their language and imagery, he offers a different slant from the one they adopted in their predictions of final catastrophe. Gathering together Jesus’ words to his disciples in the days before his death, Mark uses them to convey the truth that is at the heart of his gospel, the truth that it is Jesus who is the real key to the future.
Jesus’ words to his disciples in this passage were addressed to them at a time when his arrest and death were imminent. He knew that they were about to face the destruction of all their hopes and everything that they had believed in. Aware of the crisis to come, Jesus, it seems wanted to equip them with a way of facing the frightening future that lay ahead of them. Now we don’t know the exact form of what Jesus said to the disciples, as his words have probably been recast by Mark. Nevertheless, the substance of his message must certainly have been, “Don’t be surprised when disaster comes, and don’t look for signs as guidance for the future. Simply remain faithful to me and to what you have been taught. When your security is shattered, don’t turn to leaders who claim to know the way forward, and don’t worry about how you will cope in the face of threat. Trust God to provide what is needed without seeking to know in advance how that will be accomplished.” What Jesus is advocating is an attitude of watchful expectancy. It’s an attitude that, in the face of adversity, involves both alertness in remaining steadfast in their faith and also hope-filled trust in the God whose ways are beyond human prediction, the God who, in Karl Rahner’s words, acts in ways that are “incalculable and uncontrollable”.
“Incalculable and uncontrollable” indeed! No adjectives could better describe the event of resurrection. As they watched the death of all their hopes as Jesus hung on the cross, the disciples could never have predicted the event of the third day. Resurrection is totally outside the natural order of things. It is a completely unpredictable God-event, uncontrollable by human power, incalculable by the human mind. And yet the future of resurrection was already contained within the horrific present reality of crucifixion.
That’s the message that Mark’s hearers needed to receive. They too lived in a time of crisis, as Mark was probably writing during the decade following the Roman invasion of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. For those early Christians, the events spoken of in Mark 13, wars, violence, the defilement of the temple and the end of their whole way of life had already become a reality. They would have personally experienced the sorts of calamities described in this chapter. Their future would have been extremely uncertain. They especially needed to hear words of reassurance, words that would offer a way forward into the future.
That is why Mark turns to apocalyptic writing to convey the message of Jesus. He does so, not to reaffirm the traditional apocalyptic vision of the future but to offer an alternative, the alternative which is the gospel approach to the future, the gospel form of hope. “In times of terror and devastation, listen to the warnings of Jesus”, he tells us. “Listen to Jesus’ warning not to be carried away by speculation about the end time and when it will take place. Don’t look for signs that will reveal the future to you. Don’t be swayed by teachers who claim to have special access to the truth. Don’t spend your time trying to grasp what is humanly unknowable. Focus instead on remaining faithful. Continue to witness steadfastly to what you have experienced of Christ, relying on the Spirit to provide the words, the strength, the resources that are needed for each situation. Trust the future to God, to God alone, and God will bring it about in ways which are totally unpredictable.”
The message of Jesus conveyed in Mark’s gospel applies to every period of history. In every age, uncertainty, fear and terror recur. War and rumours of war are the norm not the exception. Liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, has calculated that “of the 3,400 years of recorded human history, 3,166 were years of war, and the remaining 234 were years of preparing for war.” While here in Australia we may currently be sheltered from the immediate reality of devastating violence, we know all too well that that is the experience of countless people across the world. The warnings issued by Jesus to his disciples, the warnings taken up by Mark for the Christians of his time, are also warnings that continue to apply to us today. Confronted by disaster and by situations beyond our control, we can all too easily resort to one of the approaches to the future that were current in Jesus’ day and in the early church. Like the disciples, we can function according to what I would call a stones-based confidence, an assumption that the present order of things will outlast current disturbances and everything will remain basically the same. Alternatively we can adopt an apocalyptic view of the future, believing that only the total overthrow of the present world will herald the triumph of God and a future outside the current world order. Or, like the Christians of Grado, we can confront the inevitability of change with a determination to re-form the past so as to move forward into the future.
Jesus’ call to the disciples, the call taken up by Mark, is to pursue none of these. Instead the approach to the future found in Mark’s gospel, the form of hope that he affirms, is Christ-shaped hope. Living hopefully toward a Christ-shaped future is to live in watchful, expectant trust that what lies ahead is held within the death and resurrected life of Christ. It is to live in trust that crucifixion contains the seeds of resurrection which will blossom in ways “incalculable and uncontrollable”, ways known only to God. Trials, pain and suffering will occur but, in all their horror, they are nevertheless the locus of God’s future, unpredictable, unimaginable. Christ’s church is to trust not to the stones of past security nor to apocalyptic visions of future glory nor to our own ability to reform the past. Instead we are to live in what theologian Mary Grey has called, “outrageous hope”, not knowing the form that the future will take but trusting that that form is Christ-shaped.