Proper 28 :: Daniel
12: 1–3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10: 11-25; Mark 13: 1-8
This is a homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given
at St. John’s Church, in Huntingdon,
Pennsylvania on Sunday, November 15, 2015.
“IN
TIMES LIKE THESE”
(Homily texts:
Daniel 12: 1-3 & Mark 13: 1-8)
Let’s do some imagining this
morning….
Imagine that we’ve come home, only
to find that the family dog has, somehow, managed to get up onto the kitchen
counter, where said dog has pulled down the three layer chocolate cake. We come home to find chocolate all over the
place, a royal mess.
Imagine that we’ve come home to find
that a water pipe has burst somewhere in the house. There’s water everywhere,
lots of it.
Imagine that we’ve come home to
discover that the house has caught fire while we were gone. The place is a total mess.
Now, let me insert - at this point -
the thought that I hope that no one listening to this homily, or is reading it
online, ever has to face any of these sorts of scenarios.
In the three situations we’ve just
considered, the response we might feel to each situation would be shock, an
inability to begin to think of what to do to fix the situation and fear.
Let’s insert ourselves into the
situation that the early Christians living in Rome in the latter half of the
first century were facing: Imagine that
some in our church have been hauled off to jail by the army. We don’t know where they have been taken, nor
do we know what their fate will be. (In
truth, during the Emperor Nero’s reign, for many Christians, that fate would
have been a terrible one.)
That was the situation that the
Christians to whom Mark was writing were facing. For them, their lives were
marked by uncertainty, persecution and terror.
They were living with constant crisis.
It was to these beleaguered
Christians that the Lord’s message, the one we hear in today’s gospel,
came. Speaking to His disciples as they
made their way through the magnificent precincts of the temple in Jerusalem, He
tells them that there will come a time when all of those enormous and
awe-inspiring structures will cease to be.
Before we unpack the importance of
the Lord’s prediction, we ought to pause for a moment and talk about the sort
of message it is that we hear in today’s gospel passage, and in our Old
Testament reading from the twelfth chapter of the Book of Daniel: What we are hearing this morning is known as apocalyptic literature.
In the Bible, apocalyptic writing
tends to arise during times of persecution, hardship and crisis.
The second half of the Book of
Daniel[1] is
apocalyptic writing. So is the Book of
Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. The thirteenth chapter of
Mark’s gospel account is also apocalyptic writing….in fact, biblical scholars
call this chapter of Mark’s account the “Little Apocalypse”.
The very word apocalypse comes to us
from the Greek, where it means (literally) an “unveiling”. Put another way, it means “revelation”, as in
the formal name for the last book of the Bible, the “Revelation to St. John”.
Such an unveiling, a revelation, is
a glimpse given to God’s people of God’s great, big plan. It provides to the believer reassurance that
– despite the hardships and the trials that they are facing, day by day – God
is still in control, and that, as Julian of Norwich[2]
once said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall
be well.”
Armed with this understanding of the
purposes of apocalyptic writing, let’s look at the Book of Daniel, and then at
our gospel for today. Both are meant to
give comfort and hope to God’s people.
The Book of Daniel is set in the
Babylonian captivity, which took place from 586 – 538 BC. In this period, the Jewish people, most of
them anyway, had been carried off into captivity in Babylon following the
destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. God’s people had lost their homeland, the
temple in Jerusalem which was the place where God had chosen for His dwelling
place, and many of them had suffered the deaths of members of their families
and friends. All seemed lost.
And yet, in the midst of all of this
calamity, Daniel records God’s great, big plan.
Part of that plan involves the collapse of the Babylonian Empire. Consider the words which were spoken to the
king of Babylon, Belshazzar, as the fingers of a man’s hand writes on the wall Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin:[3] God has numbered the days of your reign, and
has brought it to an end; you are weighed in the balance, and found
wanting. Daniel goes on to tell us that
Belshazzar, will, that very night, be killed, and his kingdom will cease to be.
Such a message of hope is intended
to lift the spirits of God’s people.
Some scholars think that the Book of
Daniel was actually written during the Maccabean period, in the second century
before Jesus’ birth. If so, it would
have been written during another very trying time of persecution for God’s
people.
The bottom line in Daniel’s account
might simply be this: The Babylonians
who made life so miserable for us are gone, completely gone; and perhaps the
readers of Daniel would also remember that the Persians, who conquered the
Babylonians, are also gone. And if
Daniel was written during the Maccabean period, the message would be that
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the oppressor of the Jews in the second century before
Christ, will also, someday, be gone. And
yet, God is still abiding with His people.
Now, let’s fast-forward to the
passage before us from Mark’s gospel account.
Mark’s readers, many of them, must
have been encouraged to know that Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the
Temple had come true, for the temple was destroyed during the Jewish-Roman War,
which lasted from 66 – 70 AD. Perhaps Mark
wrote his account in the years immediately preceding that war. If so, then when events confirmed the Lord’s
prediction, the Christians living in Rome (and elsewhere) might have been
encouraged to know that what the Lord had said had come to pass. The message is that the Lord’s word is
trustworthy and true. It is meant to
show that God is still in charge. It is
meant to show that there will come a time when the Romans will no longer be in
charge
Of course, the Lord’s resurrection
on Easter Sunday is the greatest affirmation of the truth of God’s word. Christians, then and now, rely on this
demonstration of the power of God to overcome all opposition. Just as God had overcome our greatest enemy,
death, in raising the Lord to life again, so God will overcome every obstacle
that could possibly lie in our pathway, for, as St. Paul said, “Nothing in all
creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our
Lord.”[4]
One final word seems
appropriate: We live in an uncertain and
dangerous world. Indeed, in many ways,
the uncertainties and the dangers that might confront us seem worse now that
they were just a few years ago. Two days
before this homily was written, a horrible terror attack took place in Paris,
France, where at least 127 people were killed and where hundreds more were
injured. The possibility that such an
event might take place on our own shores is real. Of course, we pray that such an event will
not take place in our beloved country, and that the hand of evil will be
stayed. But the effects of terrorism are
that fear will spread along with word of the terroristic acts. So we all are affected in some way or
another.
So perhaps we can take some
encouragement from the truth of God’s word.
Though the way ahead of us might involve hardship and challenge, yet we
can be sure that we have not been abandoned by God. We can be sure that the truth of God’s word
will endure. We can be sure that all
those who cause harm will, someday, cease to be.
For these things, for God’s abiding
presence and His overwhelming power, we can offer thanks and praise.
AMEN.
