33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
We are approaching the end of the Church year. The first Sunday of Advent is in two weeks time and the whole liturgical cycle begins anew with the Church's preparation for the birth of Christ child. The gospel you just heard embodies a belief that was current in contemporary Jewish religion. The presence of the long-awaited Messiah was a sure sign that the Day of the Lord was imminent, the end of the world was at hand.
The early Christian communities inherited this conviction from their Jewish ancestors. A good example of this mindset is to be found in our first reading today, from the Book of Daniel: 'There shall be a time of anguish, such as never occurred since nations first came into existence.'
Of course there is truth in the vision: scientists agree that our earth will some day have run its course. The ecologists speak about the threat from global warming. Other scientists put forward the theory that the world is destined to revert to an ice block. But the broader scientific community would seem to concur with T.S. Eliot's view that the world end, 'not with a bang, but with a whimper.' And all endings are, I suppose painful and harrowing. But it is the urgent, imminent and hysterical element which has had an embarrassing impact on Christianity. (The angry brigade!)
History shows that this concern with the imminent ending of the world comes to the fore in times of suffering, persecution, plague and insecurity. For example, the black death of the fourteenth century was interpreted by many writers as the beginning of the end. It was God's judgement on the world. The religious persecutions which followed the reformation in Europe were interpreted in a similar manner. Luther himself believed that the world would end in his lifetime. In fact so convinced was he of the imminent end of the world that he didn't bother to put any definite structures in place to continue his ideas and teachings. He concluded it wasn't worth while. In the States today, many, many religious people interpret the AIDS epidemic in a similar manner. Indeed we have our own home-grown heralds of gloom and doom.
In our own day too some very flaky groups emerged predicting the end of the world - Jim Jones, the Davida sect, and so on. Coming up to the year 1000, from 980 on, Norman Davies the English historian tells us that "Europe quaked at the hysterical ranting of anxious men." Interestingly, after the year 1000, stone churches began to replace wooden churches as a preferred method of construction. The church obviously concluded that history lay with stayers rather than sprinters. We were here for the long haul.
There is no agreement among scholars as to whether Jesus shared this belief in the end of the world being imminent. If we are to believe Mark on this score, he would seem to have held this belief. He certainly lived in an age of great insecurity. Mark portrays him as addressing his listeners is classic apocalyptic terms: "In those days, after a time of distress, the sun will be darkened and the moon will lose her brightness, and the stars will come falling from heaven."
Mark was writing for a community living under persecution. In fact in 70 A.D., a relatively short time after today's gospel was written, one of the prophesies voiced there was fulfilled: the Jewish temple was destroyed when Jerusalem itself was leveled to the ground by Titus. He ordered that just one wall be left standing as a reminder to the Jewish people of their disobedience, their sins and failures. Of course it remains standing to this day and is still known as The Wailing Wall. The destruction of the temple certainly meant the end of the Jewish world.
In fact, the original intention of this text was to dampen down fears and to quell the panic. Mark was asking his community to be patient in the face of present persecution. He was saying to them, "Look, did not the Master when he was with us warn us that these things would happen. Why panic now? Why are you surprised? Did he not assure us that eventual victory would rest with the just who endure. So hang in and stay the course." Ironically that text that was originally written to forestall panic was used subsequently to spark off panic. "No one knows the day or the hour" Jesus told his followers.
This conviction that the end of the world was imminent caused all sorts of difficulties for the early church. Paul had particular difficulties with it. So convinced were some of his communities of the immediate end that they refused to work. It just wasn't worth their while. What is the point in working today and worrying about any long-term plans or goals? For example, when the people of Thessalonica heard of this group in their locality, many of them abandoned their farms and olive groves and took refuge in the Christian community which Paul had once established. Of course the only conviction they brought into the community was that work was pointless. The leader of the community had written to Paul about this problem. Paul replied to them in the following terms: "We gave you a rule when we were with you: not to let anyone have any food if he refused to do any work. Now we hear that there are some of you who are living in idleness, doing no work themselves, but interfering with everyone else's. In the Lord Jesus Christ, we order and call on people of this kind to go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat."
Here Paul expresses a way of thinking that was to gain widespread acceptance in the Christian church: The Lord Jesus is primarily encountered, not at the end of this life or at the end of this world, but within our world, but primarily through our relationships and through our work in this world. Christianity should never be seen as an escape from the world. On the contrary: it points to the world as our meeting place with our God.