Sermon Ideas For Mark 13:14-23 Part 1

There is no doubt about the power of apocalyptic literature in the centuries immediately preceding and including the writing of the New Testament. Given the chaos of the Middle East, the cruel irrationality of the Roman oppression of Judea and Samaria, and the rapid social change during the period, it is not surprising that many faithful Christians and Jews expected the world to end momentarily, and an agent of God to appear to rescue the faithful from their misery.

In our own time, it would at first seem difficult to plug in to this passage on any level of meaning beyond the poetic. After a delay of 2000 years, the immanence of the parousia does not register, at least in the Markan imagery, with much immediacy. We do not feel the full revolting horror of a "desolating sacrilege" set up in the Jerusalem temple, nor are we entirely convinced by the agricultural images of this passage. We do not easily affirm that God has "shortened the days" between the promise and its consummation in order to save "the elect." To most thinking Christians, our days do not seem to be short, nor more importantly do we necessarily understand God as tinkering in the temporal order in this manner. If this were the case, how then should we explain the long delay of the parousia, and the intervening repeated tragedies of human history? If God is in charge of human history, how shall we explain the catastrophic suffering of the innocent implied in this story?

Yet behind the imagery, we hear the profound human emotions and emptiness which result when we face that we have less control over God's creation than we would like to pretend. The overarching emotion appears to be fear. Leadership in the community of the faithful seems to be in disarray, with competing truth claims and prophecies. The center of religious life is despoiled. The air smells of imminent catastrophe. The interdependence of creation suddenly carries a negative value: Whatever has happened in the city is so horrible in its far-reaching consequences that those far away in the countryside are forced to flee in panic. With innocent people, including pregnant women and nursing mothers, driven from their homes, this End of Days as described by Mark is no event to be anticipated eagerly. The result of the parousia is that even the faithful will no longer be comfortable in their homes, or indeed, comfortable in Creation.

The End of Days is signalled in the city, initiating an indeterminate period of social chaos. During this period, the voices of false messiahs and false prophets are heard throughout the society. A false messiah is someone anointed for public authority, but who then uses signs and wonders to attempt misleading the faithful. False prophets, as the term indicates by comparison to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, are those whose prophecies are lies, in that they never come true. Now, as then, signs, wonders, and seductive words can be lies just as often as they are true.

In this interim time of broad societal chaos, the faithful and the unfaithful together live in constant fear, overwhelmed by their own powerlessness. The tone of fear and powerlessness is something that we can understand today, through our recent memories of the horrors and brutality of the Gulf War. On the eve of the outbreak of the war, speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington, Henri Nouwen emphasized the relationship between powerlessness and prayer: "Prayer is the power of the powerless. In fact, powerlessness is a condition for true prayer. The heart that is repentant, that sees its own evil and brokenness, is the heart that can pray. To pray truly is to pray from where you don't have control, and yet can trust, because you are a beloved child of God's household." The defense, the strength of the faithful, in the midst of chaos, is prayer, for it is through prayer that we understand the reality of God's concern for the beloved faithful. In the face of the panic of powerlessness, prayer is our ultimate refuge. As Jesuit theologian John H. Wright has observed: "Prayer is neither informing nor persuading God, much less is it a kind of magical spell compelling the divinity to satisfy my needs. God knows our needs before we ask, and if God is unwilling for some reason to do what we ask, it is absurd to think that we can persuade him to do otherwise. But prayer always expresses symbolically a personal relationship through trust, confidence, praise, appreciation or repentance."

The recognition of powerlessness was a motivating factor in the rapid growth of the early church among women, the elderly, slaves, and the poor. Those who could not control their own destiny in terms of the socio-economic structures of Roman society found refuge in the liberating message of the gospel, that in the Christian faith God offers power to the powerless. Prayer was one significant vehicle of that power, as Luke 18:1-8 suggests. There in the parable called variously "The Unjust Judge" or "The Importunate Widow," the message is clear, that the entreaties of the powerless

effect deliverance.¹ Commenting on this passage, Gustav Stählin observes that the widow in Luke 18 is a personification of the church in its time of struggle. As a widow, the church in Luke's time is experiencing its forty years in the desert. Prayer is its only weapon in this struggle, and God will surely hear its prayers.²

Prayer ultimately proves our trust in God's loving providence. At the same time, prayer often highlights the truth of conflicting realities: The Christian places trust in Divine constancy, even when contrary evidence from the natural and social orders argue that we have been abandoned. In the midst of fear, and the destruction of all worldly security including our very homes, the Christian faithful affirm their reliance on God's providence as the true source of what Psalm 46 calls "our refuge and our strength."

Philip Culbertson The School of Theology The University of the South

1. See Bonnie Bowman Thurston, The Widows: A Women's Ministry in the Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), esp. p. 26ff. 2. Gustav Stählin, "Das Bild der Witwe," in Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 17 (1974) 5-20, as summarized by Thurston.