The End Of The World

 

Mark 13.1-8 and Hebrews 10.11-25

TL:DR The world as we know it ends catastrophically all the time. Therefore, it is all the more important that Christians should focus on Jesus, embrace the discomfort of different views held with conviction, and seek to draw out the best rather than the worst in fellow human co-creators of the world to come.

The biographer Mark records Jesus making several visits to the temple in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his arrest and execution. Of all four Gospel writers, Mark is the least invested in the temple; he neither records Jesus visiting nor even mentioning the temple prior to this late point. This temple, expanded by the Roman client king Herod in ways that introduced segregation for women, the disabled, and foreigners, no longer exercises the role of Holy Place where heaven touches earth: this has now been taken on by Jesus himself.

Nonetheless, Mark records that one of rabbi Jesus’ apprentices draw his attention to the grandeur of the building, only for Jesus to respond that not one of the impressive stones would be left standing on another. The world, as they knew it, would come to a dramatic and violent end.

This would come to pass during the First Jewish-Roman War, 66-74 CE, at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Roman legionaries tore the temple down. But if not then, it would have happened eventually.

Mark recounts this exchange between the rabbi and his apprentice for an audience who are living through that very war. Most scholars believe he wrote from Rome, where a small number of Jews who followed rabbi Jesus watched events unfold from a distance, subject to reports and rumours and a lack of news of family back home. A minority report suggests Mark might have written from Galilee, closer to the frontline. Either way, he writes for those living through the End of the World that Jesus foretold and traumatised by it.

At the same time Mark was writing his Gospel, an unknown writer wrote what is now known as the Letter to the Hebrews to scattered followers of Jesus living through the war. Many scholars attribute the letter to the travelling church-planter Paul. Three of his fellow church planters, Luke, Apollos, and Prisca/Priscilla also have their champions. The fact that this community worked and wrote in overlapping combinations both strengthens the case for the letter coming out of that community and makes it harder to identify any given individuals with certainty.

This writer, too, is writing to a community whose world, as they have known it, is ending in flames. But they explicitly point out what Mark implies, that the world as they knew it had already come to an end. That the temple had already been replaced by Jesus as the means of achieving the ritual purity that was necessary for human beings to come into the presence of a holy God. Rather than being secured by priests going about their business day after day in the temple—a business about to be cut short—this has now been done, for them, once and for all, by Jesus, in his body.

In the light of this, the writer argues, the community of faith made up of apprentices to Jesus can have confidence even as everything they have known is lost. Specifically, they have freedom to speak openly and without fear before God, to bring their uncertainty and provisionality, their failures, shame, grief, anger, and the fear that is yet to be cast out by love.

And in such a time as this, when the world around us is burning, is being dismantled stone by stone thrown down until there is only a valley filled with rocks, the writer to the Hebrews offers three suggestions as to how to conduct ourselves, how to go about our daily lives.

Firstly, ‘let us approach.’ We can come before God, in whatever state we find ourselves, for ‘our hearts [are] sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.’ The loss of familiar structures and practices does not equate to loss of access to the presence of divine mercy. The temporal loss of the Church, as we have known it, is not the end of the life of faith.

Secondly, ‘let us hold fast.’ Be steadfast, not lightly surrendering our faith, not allowing the apocalypse around us to cause us to give up. The writer makes use of a principle from philosophical debate, not intransigent dogmatism but a willingness to wrestle with questions, to grapple with contrasting ideas and understandings, without abandoning the ring. Co-creating our response to the present crisis, and so, perhaps, in time fashioning a new world. The deconstruction and reconstruction of faith is necessary, again and again, but impossible alone.

Thirdly, ‘let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.’ Careful observation and contemplation, seeking to discern—in and for any given co-creator—how to stir up love, practical acts of justice and mercy, commitment to others, courage in the face of evil: in the active face of despair, self-interest, stone cold injustice, hatred.

You cannot stop the world from ending. The world, as we know it, ends over and over again. For individuals, families, communities, nations. The question is, how ought we to live in such a world?

This is a question the Church has been wrestling with from the outset and will be wrestling with [for we spring from the family of Israel, the Wrestler, the wrestling people] until the end.