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Advent
Exploring the text
The season of Advent is about waiting, both for the Jesus who came to earth as a baby and for the victorious, risen and ascended Christ who will return to earth as King. One of the challenges of Advent is to keep our vision fixed not only on the more tangible and comprehensible birth of Jesus but also on Jesus’ second coming. Mark’s Gospel naturally focuses our vision on the second coming because, unlike the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, it has no stories of Jesus’ birth. Mark simply begins with the adult Jesus starting his ministry with his baptism in the Jordan. The Gospel does, however, contain a passage – Mark 13 – which has been one of the most significant in discussions about Jesus’ second coming.
Mark 13: Waiting for the Son of Man
Mark 13 begins with an apparently specific conversation about the fate of the temple, but from there moves outwards into a description of general chaos and lawlessness. This builds to a climax in verse 24 where the natural world begins to reflect the chaos of the human world, when the sun is darkened and stars begin falling from heaven. At this point we are told that the Son of Man will come ‘in clouds with great power and glory’ (13.26). The whole chapter ends with a warning about the importance of keeping alert, and of being able to read the signs of the times and understand what is happening. This is one of the most complex passages of Mark’s Gospel, and one of the most difficult to understand. Indeed it is so difficult that there is very little agreement among scholars about what it refers to or what it means.
Interpreting Mark 13 in terms of the past or the future?
One of the hardest things to work out about Mark 13 is what events are being referred to. The traditional interpretation of the passage is that the events described by Jesus in Mark 13 all refer to the glorious second coming of Jesus, when the Son of Man (i.e. Jesus) will come back to earth on the clouds in glory. This event is often called by scholars the Parousia, which is simply the Greek word for ‘arrival’ or ‘coming’. Mark 13 has, for much of Christian history, been considered to be Jesus’ own prophecy of the end of the world and of the events that will signal his return, and this is a view that remains popular among many contemporary interpreters. Some interpreters try to make connections between this chapter (along with other key passages from the New Testament like Revelation) and events in the modern world, in order to predict when Jesus’ return might take place.
Other scholars view the passage as either primarily or entirely referring to the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Thus the events described in the passage are not to be seen as signals of the ‘end of the world’, but of the end of the world as the Jews knew it in AD 70, when their temple was destroyed and many Jews were driven out of Jerusalem. In this interpretation the events prophesied by Jesus are tied up with specific historical events from the first century and are understood in the light of what happened during this traumatic period of Jewish history. Still other scholars take a halfway position, and consider some of the chapter (particularly the first part) to be about the destruction of Jerusalem and the rest to be looking further into the future.
It is almost impossible to adjudicate between these positions: they all have their passionate advocates and they all use the text to interpret events in history. The difference is that some use the text to interpret the first century, others to interpret the twenty-first century, and yet others to look far into the future.
Mark 13 and Jewish apocalyptic literature
Many people find the complexity of the passage and the disagreements between interpreters so off-putting that they prefer to skip the chapter and all it represents. To do this, however, is to lose something of worth.
One of the reasons why Mark 13 sounds so odd to our twenty-first-century ears is because it is steeped in Jewish apocalyptic literature. Indeed for many years this chapter was called ‘the Little Apocalypse’, because many scholars thought that the whole chapter began life as a Jewish Christian piece of apocalyptic writing. This is now no longer so widely accepted, but it does remind us of how important it is to recognize that this chapter – like so much of the New Testament – can only be really understood in the light of all the other Jewish apocalyptic writings that exist both inside the Bible (here the significant writings are Daniel and Revelation) and outside (with books like 1 Enoch or parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls).
One of the key features of Jewish apocalyptic literature is a strong belief in the connection that exists between earth and heaven. What this means is that the writers of this kind of material believed passionately that God intervenes in the course of history and that it was important to understand the events of earth in the light of this belief. Odd as it may seem to us, the fantastical language and the grim prophecies of doom and disaster were intended to offer a ray of hope to the readers of the texts. This kind of passage was intended to offer comfort in the midst of terror and despair. When Mark’s readers found themselves with the world, as they knew it, falling apart, they were to remember the words of Jesus and to lift their eyes beyond the immediate events of this world to the one – the Son of Man – who had come once to this world and had promised to return.
Mark 13 and Advent
However we interpret the words of Mark 13, the season of Advent reminds us of the chapter’s major point, that whatever it might feel like now, we are not abandoned. In many ways our world today feels more ordered and controlled than the ancient world, but not always. In our lives, just as the ancients did, we encounter things we cannot control – natural disasters, terrorism, illness, fear – and the message of Mark 13 is as relevant to us as it was to Mark’s original readers. Disaster may come but we should not allow our panic to drive us to accept as Messiah someone who cannot save us (v. 21). In the face of things falling apart – even if this involves something as dramatic as stars falling from heaven – we should remember that Jesus’ words are sure and reliable (v. 31). No matter how bleak things get, we should remember that beyond our sight God has not forgotten us. Mark 13 ends with a reminder that we do not know when the master of the house will come (v. 35). This is certainly true, nor indeed are we very clear precisely what events Mark 13 is talking about. But what is sure is that the God who nurtured this world into existence has not abandoned us, nor ever will.
Imagining the text
John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance … And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people from Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
(Mark 1.4–5)
In reflecting on the ministry of John the Baptist as he is portrayed in Mark’s Gospel – see 1.2–8 (Advent 2), and also 6.14–29 (Proper 10) – this poem imagines what the people of Jerusalem might have made of him. In many ways John is a typical prophetic figure, calling individuals and society to renewal – confrontational, disturbing, challenging, unconventional. But he also points beyond himself to another figure who is yet to come, who will bring in a new way of being and a different kind of encounter with God – a figure who is longed for, yet also feared.
The citizens of Jerusalem wonder about John the Baptist
Coming out of nowhere
With his crazy hair, freakish clothes,
He has the appearance of a deviant.
He is a kind of divine acrobat,
An enthusiast, agonized,
Well fed on the special diet of whatever circumstances allow –
Crunching the acrid shells of national disaster,
Tonguing the rare sweetnesses of consolation hidden from the rest of us –
Wild,
He is made strong,
And with his sacred vigour
He performs the searing arts of a prophet.
His technique is to startle and confront.
All carefully positioned plans he throws in the air
To bring down a new order,
Plotting out in the debris
A path we had not designed for ourselves,
Laid in a different direction from our own choosing.
Kings are enthralled and repelled by him.
With him it will end in tears.
He is a disrupter, a distraction,
Luring us out from our city, out from security
To find ourselves suddenly off-schedule,
Called back, back by him to an ancient track
Via water and the wilderness,
Into an uncharted land of promise, of encounter
Which is not yet ours,
Drawn to a meeting with the stranger
We have longed for.
But none of this is quite as we predicted.
It is not him, though we have found him compelling.
He has mangled our certainties,
Twisted everything into a future we cannot control.
After him
We must wait for another, even more dangerous.
He leaves us
Watching for the fire that sets all things ablaze.
Reflecting on the text
In these reflections we look at two of the themes of Advent, waiting and hoping, and offer a reflection on each. The final section picks up the focus of the poem and these exciting opening paragraphs of Mark’s Gos...