Sermon at Parish Mass Advent 1 2017

Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1. 3-8

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:33-37

It is a new year, and so we start reading through a new Gospel; this year we are reading Mark.

But we don’t begin at the beginning. As happens on every Advent Sunday, we take a big breath and jump right in at the deep end, plunging into apocalypse, startled by great portents and cosmic signs. Apocalypse, as we’ve been reflecting over the past weeks, is about unveiling, seeing what is going on behind the scenes of world events.

As with the other gospels, this teaching is set in the last week of Jesus’ life. He has entered Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday, but the authorities are bent on his destruction. It is in this context of threat and impending crisis that Jesus speaks of the revealing, the unveiling, of the Son of Man.

We can read this on different levels. Yes, Christ will come again at the end of time, his glory manifest to the whole creation. But Jesus speaks of his coming here as something more immediate that that. Those present as he speaks will see it, though they may not recognise it. The Son of Man is coming, but in a way that they do not expect.

For centuries, the people of Israel had held on to the hope of the Prophets, that God would come to save his people. The great longing expressed in our reading from Isaiah this morning forms part of the background to the gospels, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”.

But how was God going to do this? In what way would he show himself? Most people seem to have been expecting something quite violent, the Messiah, God’s anointed leader, appearing in power to drive out the Romans and restore Israel once again to being a pure and righteous kingdom on earth.

But Jesus tells a parable of a man who goes on a journey, whose slaves do not know when he will return: in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn. But those are exactly the hours when no-one would have expected anyone to arrive. In a world with no street lighting and few safe roads, people travelled only by day. The master is coming, but in an unexpected way.

Mark is the most immediate and urgent of the gospels. If you’ve been reading it for Bible Book Club you’ll be familiar with the almost breathless pace, and how often he uses the word “immediately”; events follow on without a pause; everything is happening right there and then.

So it is too with Mark’s apocalypse. God was acting in Jesus in a way that no-one was expecting or looking for. And he was doing it right there and then. In the evening, at midnight, at cockcrow, at dawn. Those times mark the hours of the passion of Jesus. The last supper and his betrayal; the midnight prayer in Gethsemane when the disciples could not keep awake; cockcrow when Peter denied knowing him; dawn, when he was led out to die. The sun was darkened at noon as he hung on the cross.

At his trial Jesus will repeat to the authorities what he has said to the disciples, that they “will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven”. That is a quotation from the Book of Daniel, referring to the coming of the Messiah. Jesus is saying that it is precisely through his death and resurrection that the Son of Man will come with power, it is in this way that God is tearing open the heavens and coming down to save his people.

And at the death of Jesus, Mark tells us, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. In Hebrew, the name of this curtain was “the heaven”. Just as the starry vault of heaven concealed the presence of God the creator, so too the symbolic curtain in the temple concealed his symbolic presence in the Holy of Holies. The death of Jesus was the tearing open of heaven, the unveiling of God.

This is the key to understanding apocalypse in the Bible. In the first place, it is an unveiling of the spiritual stuff going on behind the scenes of the world. It shows us the violent spiritual imagination of the world, a world that orders itself by violence and death and expects even God to act violently. Victims are cast out, and the violent imagination of the world thinks only that they had it coming to them. If victims die, it must be because God wants them to; therefore, they are guilty.

But then apocalypse is even more the unveiling of God. Everyone thought that Jesus was a blasphemer and troublemaker who deserved to die. They couldn’t imagine anything else. But suddenly, in his death, heaven is torn open. Suddenly it is seen that God is not the force of condemnation aligned against the victim. Suddenly it is seen that God is the victim, and the victim is innocent. The violent imagination that the world has projected onto heaven is false. God meets us in the one we have cast out and killed, to forgive us and reconcile us to himself. The true imagination of God, in whom there is no violence or death at all, breaks through the veil, and changes everything.

Sometimes I think we can have too small an idea of sin, and of redemption. Sin is more than just individual acts of wrongdoing. It is the whole disordered state of the world, the violent spiritual imagination that casts out and destroys its victims. And redemption is more than just plucking individuals out of the ruin of the world to transfer them to a better place somewhere else. Redemption is nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth, everything made new. A new heaven as well, a new spiritual imagination of the God who reveals himself in the innocent victim, and raises that victim from the dead to give new life to all.

Mark’s Gospel, as we shall see over the coming year, is a challenge to the whole way the world is. There is nothing individualistic about its call to repentance and salvation.

And it is as immediate as ever. We might not these days attribute the suffering of victims to the idea that God is against them. But we have different myths instead. The violent spiritual imagination of the world has been reinterpreted for the 21^st century. If most of the world is poor, while a few are very rich, that’s market forces, it’s just how the world is. The irresistible forces are aligned against the poor. If we sell arms to murderous torturing regimes around the world, well, that’s trade with our key allies, it’s just how the world is, and how the world is means that people must suffer violence. The supposed force of inevitability cloaks our failure to see that God is on the side of the victims, instead of against them.

It’s just how the world is? No. Right from the start, Mark’s Gospel insists that there is an alternative to the way the world is, made known in Jesus. Through his death and resurrection heaven is torn open, the powers of this world are shaken and cast down, the outcast are gathered in, the victims raised up, and all things made new. This is what God is doing in Jesus, and we must stay alert and attentive to him as we follow in his way. “What I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”