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St. Andrew's Church
An Anglican Church • Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Preached by
Stuart Pike
Rector
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Proper 33 B - Jesus is Coming - Look Busy
Mark 13: 1-8
St. Andrew's Church, Grimsby
Sunday, 19th November 2006
There is a wonderful bumper sticker which I saw ‘way back in the days when more people displayed bumper stickers. Some of the Jesus freaks in those days had stickers which said things like, "Jesus Saves" or "The end is nigh". Around here you can often see the sign of the fish on a car as a tasteful indication that the owner is a Christian. This one particular bumper sticker I really enjoyed. It said, "Jesus is coming - Look Busy!"
Today's Gospel reading from the 13th chapter of Mark has been called the Little Apocalypse. In it, Jesus speaks about the end times. It starts with Jesus and his disciples at the Temple in Jerusalem. We all know they were Galileans. The City of Jerusalem was not part of their day to day lives. The Temple in Jerusalem was an astounding building. It was massive, it was beautiful. It also represented the authority of their religious institution. The temple stood for all of the customs and rules and laws which regulated most of their lives. For many of them the Temple even represented the place where God was. The Temple was their religion.It was the supreme example of the term "pride of place."
And there is pride in that. Successfully conforming to a religion of rules can certainly make you feel you belong. Having such a beautiful and massive Temple as a focus for such a rigid faith would naturally lead to pride.
It is an easy enough thing to do. We too can feel pride of place for whatever group that we belong to and its symbols. Some of us feel that way about our faith, or even about our denomination or our beautiful Church building. There's only one problem with having this sort of pride, however. It has to do with the saying which many of us have heard all too often: Pride comes before the fall. It appears that this unknown disciple of Jesus is speaking with pride about the temple. Jesus then says something which would have been just about unthinkable for a Jew in his time. "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down."
This scene marks the bridge between Jesus' temple ministry and his own rejection trial and passion. Here Jesus leaves the Temple for the last time. He abandons it and all that it represents and leaves the city and crosses the Kidron valley to the Mount of Olives from which point they can see the City of Jerusalem and the Temple which they have left.
Four of his disciples - the usual four - ask him when these things will take place. What will be the sign?
People have been looking for the signs of the end times ever since. There are some people who have made a career out of foretelling the end of time. Some of you will remember the writer Hal Lindsay who wrote "The Late Great Planet Earth" in 1971. He believed that 1948 and the formation of the State of Israel was the beginning of the end times. He thought that the Book of Revelations was foretelling the modern world. He thought that Russia was "Gog and Magog" in Revelations and that the 10 horns in Revelation referred to the 10 Countries of the Common Market of Western Europe. He believed that there would be a final battle of Armageddon fought in the Middle East between Russia and Europe. The book was even made into a movie which was narrated by Orson Welles.
More recently the fiction of Tim LeHaye and his "Left Behind" series have been popular. It appears that his fiction is informed by his actual beliefs about a rapture that will happen at any moment. The chosen will be gathered up and the rest will be left behind.
Some writers want to scare people into the faith. What they seem to neglect are the words of Jesus later on the chapter when he says, "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Not even Jesus knows when that time will be. I am unconvinced that Hal Lindsay knows better than Jesus. I am unconvinced that Christian sects which promote Rapture theology and use scare tactics know better than Jesus.
Instead I want to listen to the words of Jesus, and to try to understand his meaning. Jesus seems to be telling his disciples to put their faith in God alone. Even the great religious institution of their time, represented by the Temple will fall.
We know that ultimately everything made with human hands will crumble and turn to dust. And also the great constructs of our minds, our philosophy and theology will fail. The only thing which will remain unchanged is God.
Although many people are afraid of the end of time, Jesus refers to the upheaval of those times as birth-pangs, not death throes. In my experience, it seems that most people who think about the apocalypse approach it with great fear. Most of the people I've met who aren't fearful about it are those who are the poor and the oppressed. Those who live in the Third world see the time of Jesus' return as a great promise: a time of blessing and abundance. Jesus looks forward to it as a time of great hope, not of great fear.
There are many Churches which try to say exactly how everything is going to happen and when. They are trying to put all of the book of revelation into a nutshell. But I think that the only thing you find in the nutshell is the nut! The truth is, we don't know how or when this physical world of ours will end. But we do have Jesus example and his words.
Jesus tells us that our time is like the time when a great king leaves his kingdom in the charge of his servants. One day he returns and says to his servants, "I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and in prison and you visited me." And his servants ask: "But when did we do this?" And the King says, "When you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me."
We don't need to ask when Jesus will come again. We need, instead to minister to Jesus today who comes to us in the guise of our brothers and sisters in need. We don't need to fear Jesus' coming. We need to have faith in his promises.
Jesus is coming: we don't need to look busy. We need to be busy doing his work in his kingdom which can be glimpsed in the midst of our lives. Stop and see that kingdom amongst us!
Let us pray:
Eternal God, who commits to us the swift and solemn trust of life; since we do not know what a day may bring forth, but only that the hour for serving you is always present, may we awake to the instant claims of your holy will, not waiting for tomorrow, but yielding today. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer)
