FINDINGS II
Proper
28-B - November 15, 2009
Mark 13: 1-8
(Daniel
12: 1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10: 11-25)
 By Harry T. Cook
11/09/09
RUBRIC
The slipping away of the liturgical year towards the
beginning of Advent works well in the Northern Hemisphere, whence the Christian
tradition. The shortening of the daylight hours and the quicker coming of
nightfall lend themselves to the theme of end-times, about which we will hear
much over the next six weeks until the Christmas-Solstice-Epiphany themes take
over with the promise of lengthening light and attenuating of darkness. I can't
imagine how that motif plays out in the climes where spring is even now tending
towards summer.
In any event, we are in for the annual Advent sturm und
drang, and it will be task of this exegete and his readers to separate myth and
symbol from history and actuality so as not to get caught up in apocalyptic
histrionics, but rather to be sober about looking at the sober side of the good
news.
WORKSHOP
VV. 1 and 2 of Ch. 13 stand separately from vv, 3-8 and have
the effect of a transition from the widow-temple narrative at the end of Ch. 12
and gives Mark an opening to deal with the destruction of the temple, which
must have occurred not so long before the gospel came together. (In a subsequent
essay, I shall offer the hypothesis that it was the destruction of the temple
that prompted the formation of the gospels.) The set-up is a juvenile-like line
given by Mark to an unnamed disciple, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and
large buildings!" -- leaving the door open for Mark's Jesus to predict what has
by the time of Mark's writing already happened:
"Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be
thrown down."
Mark moves thence into full-throated apocalyptic. He has
Jesus warn them (βλέπετε μή τις ύμας πλανήση) that they may be objects of
deceit and be led away from the truth to falsehood. The word πλανήση is related
to another Greek word which means "wandering star" or "planet." Early
astronomers did not understand why some celestial lights were constant and
others were not. "Constancy" is the point here.
The disciples are not to be easily panicked by revolts,
wars, earthquakes and famines. None of them is the end in itself, but the
beginning (v.8b). Mark must have known whereof he spoke as there were documented
earthquakes in Asia Minor ca. 61 C.E. and, of course, in Pompeii the following
year and a famine during the reign of Claudius (41-54 C.E.). Yet, as has been
said, Mark marked none of those as "the end" but as the beginning "of the birth
pangs."
The Year-B lectionary does not take us beyond the birth
pangs, but reading further on in Mark 13 we see what may be a gathering up of
the various apocalyptic themes and images that would quite naturally have
abounded during and well after the time Mark was composed and edited. After
all, the narrative is at this point nearing its completion in which the
author(s)/editor(s) will write of the destruction of Jesus, having perhaps in
the anxiety of their imaginations the possible destruction of their own fragile
Jesus Judaism communities. The promise held out at 13:27 is that it was
possible for some to be spared, no matter what was coming. But Mark and Matthew
spoke of the έκλεκτούς - the chosen. Luke in the parallel reference seems to have
addressed the promise of salvation to all.
In 13: 24ff, Mark connects the outworking of his
communities' future directly with the natural order. In antiquity what were
called "the heavens" were always a source of mystery and the phenomena of which
were widely interpreted as signs and portents of one thing and another,
depending on the interpreters' predilections or aspirations. In this text, such
imagined phenomena seem to suggest cataclysm and judgment. And how could Jews
of any stripe in the months and years after 70 C.E. not have been open to such
interpretation? The cultic center of the entire Jewish existence had been
leveled almost in the twinkling of an eye, rendering irrelevant the triumph of
the Maccabees, which was within generational memory. (See the Daniel reading
[12:1-3] appointed to accompany this gospel.)
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
The ruined temple was not the end for Mark. The end for Mark
-- and the ending of the gospel itself -- was the silence of Mary Magdalene,
Mary the mother of James and Salome after they are said to have found at the
grave not the one they came to prepare for final burial but a messenger
informing them that Jesus had been called back from death and gone home to
Galilee. The last words of Mark are: "They said nothing to anyone, because they
were afraid."
Afraid of what they had seen, or of what they had not seen?
Afraid of what people would say if they reported their findings or tried to do
something about them? Were they simply stunned by the magnitude of it all? Silence
is better if unhinged blather is the alternative.
So, speaking of death and graves, what if the homily time for
this coming Sunday were to be given over to images from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, from the back streets of American cities where abject poverty
competes with destitution for scarce resources, from the mean-spirited debates
in the U.S. Congress calculated to derail health care and environmental
legislation that would save lives and spare the planet further degradation?
What if a homilist's midrash on the presentation were the
simple question: "Now what?" The images would have spoken for themselves as
surely as that of an empty grave spoke to Mark, causing him to lay aside his
stylus having written all there was to write. The homilist could ask what every
one who ever seriously pondered Mark 16: 8 has wanted to ask the women at the
grave: "Were you afraid of what you saw . . . or of what you didn't see?"
Foregoing such a splendid teaching opportunity will surely nullify
the contemporary value of this Sunday's gospel, making the day's
church-as-usual enterprise "Familiar as an old mistake, / And futile as
regret."/*
/* Edward Arlington Robinson,
"Bewick Finzer"
| |
