Day of the Church Year: 25th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Passage: Mark 13:1-8
As a Washington Post subscriber, on any given day, I can open my Washington Post app, read the headlines, and click on any article that interests me. But to tell you the truth, compared to the number of headlines I scan on a daily basis, I don’t very often read full articles. On a typical day, I read only two, maybe four full articles. At times, I have clicked on an article ready to be shocked and appalled—because of the shocking and appalling headline--only to read to the end of the article, understand the fuller story, and then be shocked and appalled by the misleading headline. I’ve learned that headlines can’t tell the whole story, can’t share multiple perspectives, and fairly routinely reveal the bias of their authors, reveal what the author wants its readers to feel about a particular event or situation, instead of just sharing the facts of the event or situation. A headline can’t give me context, can’t share nuance, can’t capture more than one small piece of a larger story. Yet so often, I and probably many of us read only the headlines.
I suspect this headline-only reading happens not just as we scroll through social media posts or our news outlet of choice. Certainly in our culture at large and even within the church, we approach some aspects of our religious tradition with the same limited reading, glancing at the headline, never clicking on the full article to learn in greater depth. There is perhaps no other topic within Christianity that gets Jesus-followers to read only headlines and no articles as what we call the quote unquote end times.
Today, Jesus sits outside the temple in Jerusalem with the disciples, and they are awed by the majesty, the beauty, the grandeur of the stonework. A building and an institution so immense and so important in the lives of first-century Jews, the temple in Jerusalem would have been considered unshakeable, but Jesus tells the disciples, to their astonishment, that not one stone will be left upon another. All will be thrown down. The temple will be destroyed. When they ask for more details, Jesus speaks of wars and rumors of wars, of earthquakes and famines, of nation against nation, of kingdom against kingdom. But Jesus says, the end is still to come. In other words, all these devastating events are not the end. In fact, today’s passage ends with Jesus’ words: This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
If we were to click on the full article here, I think we’d first read that Jesus shares about the destruction of the temple with the disciples in around 30 of the common era but that the temple really was destroyed in the Roman-Jewish war—and right around the time the gospel of Mark was written in 70 of the common era. All the devastating events he lists are events the people of his day experienced—and that humanity in every age has endured in some fashion. Not only that. When Jesus continues to teach them in the rest of Mark 13, he describes how the disciples are going to be persecuted because they follow him, persecution that really did happen. If the headline of today’s passage reads “Jesus describes the end times,” towards the bottom of the article, the reporter might say: “Given the historical accuracy of Jesus’ words, his predictions may not indicate end time conditions, but instead reveal first-century historical conditions.”
There’s no doubt that the early Christians were not apocalyptic bunch. They expected the end of the world, God’s kingdom come, Jesus’ return at every moment. The Apostle Paul fully expected to meet Jesus face to face in his lifetime. Needless to say, at least whatever they expected to happen didn’t and hasn’t yet. Christians for the past two thousand years have taken wild stabs at predicting Jesus’ return. I say “wild stabs” because there is no clearer message about the end times in scripture than the fact that we will know neither the day nor the hour of Jesus’ return and God’s kingdom come. Some Christians believe that deliberately creating devastating conditions will bring about Jesus’ return and the coming of God’s kingdom, but I am honestly not sure what scripture passages cause people to come to that belief.
The photo that would sit beneath this headline: “Jesus describes the end times” is filled with fire, wounded people, fragmented earth. It’s not a pretty sight. The photo would catch anyone’s eye—and scare them. Perhaps the caption would quote the book of Revelation about a beast and destruction.
But, again, if we click on the full article of Mark 13 in the larger context of scripture, we read about events common to the human experience, events that had happened in biblical times many times—famines, earthquakes, wars. We read about persecution, the context for all of the New Testament writings. Each one of the New Testament writers knew the uncertainty and risk of being a Jesus-follower in the Roman Empire. Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire. If that’s who you’re following, it does not bode well for you. In Mark 13, Jesus is not describing the end times so much as the times to come for the disciples, the latter half of the first century. He specifically says: The end is still to come for these are just the beginning of the birth pangs. Or in other words, when devastating events happen, the end has not come, but when the end does come, it is not a death but a birth.
That’s why reading the full article is important today. We hear scary stories of the end times, and we forget that when God’s kingdom comes and Jesus returns, we enter into God’s new heaven and new earth, where mourning and crying and pain will be no more. Or as the great theologian John Lennon once said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.” So fear not; the unrest of our days, the injustices, the suffering are just the beginning of the birth pangs, the passage to new life. Thanks be to God! Amen.