FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

11/12/12 

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 the 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 the 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.

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 μήτιςύμας 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 that 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. Be calm. Stay the course.
 
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 the future of his communities directly with the natural order. In antiquity what were called "the heavens" were always a source of mystery, 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.)

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 were to be 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"