WHOOPS APOCAPLYPSE!

TODAY’S GRATUITOUS JOKE:

A couple go for a meal at a Chinese restaurant and order the "Chicken Surprise". The waiter brings the meal, served in a lidded cast iron pot.

Just as the wife is about to serve herself, the lid of the pot rises slightly and she briefly sees two beady little eyes looking around before the lid slams back down. "Good grief, did you see that?" she asks her husband.

He hasn't, so she asks him to look in the pot. He reaches for it and again the lid rises, and he sees two little eyes looking around before it slams down.

Rather perturbed, he calls the waiter over, explains what is happening, and demands an explanation.

"Please sir," says the waiter, "what you order?"

The husband replies, "Chicken Surprise."

“Ah... so sorry," says the waiter, "I bring you Peeking Duck"

Monet’s painting are beautiful, evocative, famous terribly expensive... and utterly unrealistic....!

This week in the news Bury council in Greater Manchester sold a picture by Lowry for a million and a quarter pounds. Lowry’s paintings have a very distinctive style to them and deal with a particular life experience which he seeks to communicate from a particular point of view. Of course people don’t really look like matchsticks

In our everyday speech we use all kind of sayings and linguistic devises which we never mean to take literally. I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate. I smell a rat. He laughed his head off. Well that takes the biscuit. It’s raining cars and taxis. Paying through the nose. We know what we mean, but somebody learning the language might find some of our expressions utterly bizarre if taken at face value.

And most of the jokes we tell, we know are not literally true - but that doesn’t stop us enjoying them.

If we are happy to live with the richness of these metaphors and images in our understanding of art and language and communication, maybe it should come as no surprise that the scriptures are shot through with this richness too. There are those who refuse to see this and take a literal interpretation of these images and end up running into problems.

Today is a Monet and Lowry kind of a day!

PREACHERS NIGHTMARE?

This section of Mark’s gospel is sometimes called the Little Apocalypse - it’s a passage we were advised to avoid preaching on when I was in Church Army college!! Part of the reason that Mark 13 is one of the most difficult passages in the bible to unravel is because there are at least 5 themes mixed up in the words of Jesus. Some people have tied themselves in knots trying to interpret the words literally and trying to look for the signs of the end times and coming to some unhelpful and bizarre conclusions.

The first starting point is to say that to begin to understand this chapter we need to know something about apocalyptic literature and the concept of the Day of the Lord.

Mark 13 reflects a very Jewish understanding of time history and God’s intervention. The Jews never doubted that they were God’s chosen people, that God had called them into being, had blessed them and would use them to bring about his purposes in the world. They had long since given up the idea that this would be achieved by their efforts and knew that they relied on God’s sovereign action - they were confident that God would intervene directly in history and would achieve their promised place in the world, the status they knew they should have, the kind of society they knew God wanted.

TRANSFORMATION NOT REFORMATION

That intervention would be The Day of the Lord. Before that Day finally dawned there would be all kinds of trouble and terror - the earth would be shaken to its foundations, there would be wars, tumults, earthquakes, famine, signs in the heavens... all kinds of things. Then the Day would dawn and there would be a new world order, a new age of glory where wrongs were put right, where God would reign.

So in the Jewish mindset it was not a reformation they were expecting, but a transformation - a re-creation of the entire world and its way of working.

The prophets - people like Daniel, Joel, Amos and Isaiah painted very dramatic and striking pictures of mourning and wailing, of darkness and gloom; of blood and fire, columns of smoke... The Day of the Lord would be - literally - an earth shattering experience. The build up may have been gradual and terrible, but the dawning of that Day would be sudden and terrifying. The very course of nature would be uprooted and God, the Judge, would come.

AN UNVEILING OF WHAT’S HAPPENING

After the end of the OT period of writing the Jews were invaded and ruled over by the Greeks then the Romans. They didn’t have the same kind of freedom that they had had before - they harked back to what they thought of as a Golden Age of monarchy under David & Solomon. With this increasing feeling of powerlessness an ancient kind of literature resurfaced and was developed in which the Day of the Lord featured more and more strongly. The descriptions of how God would intervene, how God would come and rescue Israel became more developed and more vivid. This literature was called Apocalyptic - which comes from a Greek word meaning “to unveil”. The bible (both OT & NT) contains several passages which are pure Apocalyptic - of which Mark 13 is but one.

DREAMS AND VISIONS

But some of the inter-testamental writings were even more vivid, and Jesus would have been well aware of them. The writings were dreams and visions of what would happen when the Day of the Lord came and the events leading up to that Day. We need to bear in mind that these were dreams and visions. They were attempts to depict the undepictable, to speak the unspeakable. They were poetry not prose; they were visions not science; they were dreams not history. They were never meant to be taken literally as detailed itineraries of future events.

So here we see Jesus using the language of Apocalypse - which people would be familiar with - to try and express something of what it would be like when God breaks in.

And all his listeners would know that nobody could really explain or understand exactly what would actually happen on the Day of the Lord. Just as people today understand that cars and taxis are not really falling out of the sky when it rains heavily...

Previously as we’ve looked at the scriptures we’ve noted a similar kind of thing going on when the scriptures talk about what heaven will be like... the images, visions and ideas rely heavily on metaphor and evoke an ethos rather than a detailed description. So we’ve mentioned that heaven becomes celebration to those who are oppressed, water to the thirsty, rest to the weary, shelter to the persecuted; rather than saying anything about the architecture or soft furnishings!

AT LEAST FIVE SUB THEMES!

So, back to the Little Apocalypse and Mark 13. One of the things which makes this a complex passage is that there are at least 5 separate themes running as strands through this chapter:

1. There are prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem - an event which took place in 70AD, after Mark’s gospel was written, and which was a cataclysmic event in the life of the Jewish nation.

2. There are warnings of persecution to come for those who follow Jesus.

3. There are warnings of the dangers of the last days - the Last Days being the time between the first coming of Jesus at Bethlehem and the Second coming in glory at the end of the age. In particular the warnings are about people who will mislead God’s people with heresy and lies. (“Many will come in my name...”)

4. There are warnings of the Second Coming - and Jesus uses the language of Apocalypse when he talks about what it will be like. (“There will be wars and rumours of wars.. famines.. earthquakes...”) And these are supposed to be impressionistic pictures - the visions of seers - painted on a lurid background to impress on people the greatness of that event when it comes. Water lilies don’t really look like green blobs on a purple pond, but they are elegant and beautifully formed and give much pleasure to the eye.

5. There are warnings of the necessity to be watchful. Disciples are supposed to live in the shadow of eternity - to live as strangers and pilgrims on earth, as citizens of the commonwealth of heaven; to build up treasure in heaven rather than trusting in earthly wealth. We are to live as those ready to meet God.
So these are 5 of the ideas percolating this passage. It is not just a straight forward account of the end of the age. It is not meant to be a detailed literal time table of what to expect - we are to take an over view of the passage and ask what God is saying to our generation today.

We started by saying that this was a very tricky passage to understand; we’ve looked at some of the background and context to how Jesus spoke; now we ask the “so what?” question - “so what does it mean for us?”

SO WHAT?

The passage tells us something about the King and the Kingdom - it gives us some pointers and reminders about how we should live as citizens of the King. Difficult as this passage might be, that is the reason it’s been set for us in the Kingdom Season. So what can we take from this passage?

1. The assurance of persecution! Not perhaps what we’d like to hear, but if we are following Jesus there will come times when it is not easy. Times when we are misunderstood, left out, ridiculed, thought to be naive or unsophisticated. There will be tensions and conflict within our family and friends because of our faith - because of our priorities in time or money commitments; because of things which which we won’t collude; because of our different ways of looking at the world. Disciples can expect that it won’t always be a smooth path we follow!

2. The assurance of the Second Coming. Jesus said that he would return - but the imagery he used was very much of his age and time. He used terms and ideas which the Jews had been using for centuries before him to flag up the greatness of that event, not to provide a detailed timetable. History is linear, not cyclical - with a beginning (Creation) and middle (the Incarnation) and an end (The Second Coming). We are not to lose sight of this pattern, not to forget that God is in charge. We look for the signs of God at work in our lives and all around us - because we expect to meet God each and every day in the world around us, in other human beings and in the scriptures.

3. The call to sound doctrine. There are many who claim the name of Christ and teach and believe some very strange things which have gone far beyond the remit of scripture. This has always been the case and probably always will be - our job is to be discerning enough to measure these ideas and people against the scriptures, church tradition and reason, and to stay faithful to the God who wooed us in Jesus and meets us in bread and wine - cling tight to Christ, hang lose about the rest!

4. The reminder to be vigilant. The Second Coming might not come before we die, but it is inevitable that we will stand before God sooner or later; whether Christ comes to us, or whether we die and go to Christ. So as disciples we look for the signs of the times: we look to see where God is working and we roll up our sleeves and work alongside God - that’s the best definition of mission I’ve come across!

So if you’re feeling brave, read the rest of Mark 13, and bear these things in mind, but we do well to read the signs in these words; not to panic and go off on a tangent trying to pin down particular wars or earthquakes and waste time and energy working out detailed time tables of how we think God ought to act.

GOD IS IN CHARGE

It is a difficult passage, but it speaks of a sovereign God who has intervened in history in the person of Jesus - and who will come again at the end of time in the great and awesome Day of the Lord. We don’t know when that Day will be - but we do know that we will stand before God, so we are those who are watchful, not being lead astray, but watching and looking for the signs of God’s activity around and within us, living in joyful anticipation of God’s triumph over all that is destructive and sinful as the Kingdom - the place of God’s Royal Rule - is built and expands.

Fr Andrew Perry
Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea