Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come (Mark13:33)
30 November 2008
Advent seemed in childhood a straightforwardly good thing – a time to be eagerly awaited for heralding a period of yet more delicious anticipation. With maturity, however, this becomes a more complicated season, fraught with pressures of time, and also with disconcerting ambiguities. Those ambiguities lie at the heart of each of this morning’s readings, which introduce us to this season of waiting for the Lord’s coming not with joy, but on a note of despair. ‘Come, Lord, come’ we pray echoing St Paul, via our readings and hymnody, just as the Church has done over the centuries, here in the Responsory of Matins for the First Sunday in Advent from the Sarum Breviary:
I look from afar; and lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?
For what coming is this we wait? In our childish minds we anticipate nothing more than the birth of an infant, the miracle of the incarnation, word made flesh and come among us. We open the windows of our Advent calendars, perhaps burn an Advent candle, and exchange cards, a few of which may depict the Madonna and child. At services of Nine lessons and Carols familiar words from the bidding prayer will urge us to ‘prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels: in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and with the shepherds and the wise men adore the Child lying in his Mother’s arms.’
The Advent season prepares us for the coming of Christ, reminding us of those former times when believers still awaited the coming of the Saviour. Yet today’s readings do not concern that past coming of a child to Bethlehem. Rather, they direct our thoughts towards a different, future advent. They remind us that our present life is lived between advents, as Paul’s epistle declared: ‘because of the grace of God given you in Christ Jesus … you are not lacking any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor 1: 4, 7). The consequences of failure to anticipate His coming are central to both the other two readings, and have indeed been a continuing motif over these last weeks of the kingdom season. ‘Beware, keep alert,’ Mark warned, ‘for you do not know when the time will come’. And that time is not the annually-recollected time of a baby’s coming to a lowly stable; it is the parousia, the appearance of Christ in glory at the end of time, the second coming.
Apocalyptic expectation is not currently a fashionable topic, at least in mainline churches. Anticipation of the second coming tends to be associated in the modern mind with fanaticism; colleagues in Christ Church visibly drew away when I mentioned that this was what I was going to preach about. Yet in the first Christian centuries, and indeed during the middle ages on which I work, this was a current and active subject for debate. In part, of course, that was because the parousia, although delayed, was still then felt to be imminent. The first Christian churches, those communities to whom Paul wrote, all expected Christ’s return in the near future. Nor, despite His continued non-appearance, did apocalyptic expectation diminish in the next centuries.
Gregory the Great, pope in the late sixth century, thought he saw the signs of the coming apocalypse. Against that urgent time pressure, he stressed the importance of spreading the gospel to all unbelievers. ‘God has sent his preachers to the ends of the earth for the ministry of preaching’, he argued. We might recall Mark’s words earlier in the same chapter from which our lection came: before the end of this age ‘the gospel must first be preached to all nations.’ (Mark 13: 10). Thus Gregory sent a mission to the shores of Britain, accepting, as his earliest biographer wrote, that it would be he who would answer for these souls at the end of time. ‘When all the Apostles bring their own peoples with them and each individual teacher brings his own race to present them to the Lord in the Day of Judgement, Gregory will bring us – that is the English people – instructed by him through God’s grace.’
The eighth-century English monk and historian Bede was, early in his career, accused of heresy for daring to suggest that the end of time and the Second Coming would be further in the future than others had argued. He recalculated the age of the world, questioning the Augustinian orthodoxy about six world ages each of a thousand years which would precede the parousia. Although Bede stressed an orthodox message about the need constantly to watch and be prepared, his temporal recalibrations potentially weakened the message of a church which found it advantageous to keep the putative end of time just a little way in the future. It did not exactly argue for apocalypse tomorrow but – in order to be sure that those lamps would be kept alight – perhaps for apocalypse next week.
One could pick out numerous later points in time when millenarian sentiments have been articulated and fear of the imminence of the apocalypse gained power, including perhaps inevitably the first millennium AD, and the millennial anniversary of the crucifixion and resurrection in 1033. An Italian monk, Joachim of Fiore, predicted that the apocalypse would come in 1260, identifying the emperor Frederick II as the Antichrist; Frederick’s death 10 years too early rather weakened that case and Joachim, too, was charged with heresy. There were millenarian movements in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly associated with social and political radicalism in groups like the Diggers. And so one could go on. Nowadays the media leaps on small groups that nominate specific days and times for the coming of the end. Nor are they slow to read those signs themselves in secular events. When the bombers destroyed the twin towers of the World trade centre, one British tabloid headlined its coverage the next day, ‘Apocalypse’.
How does thinking about apocalyptic fears over past time help us to understand today’s readings? Does it prepare our minds for Advent? From Isaiah we heard a heartfelt plea from the Israelites to God, a psalm of communal lamentation written not long after the Babylonian conquest, reflecting Israel’s powerlessness and oppression, their deep sense of failure, sin and alienation. The passage mingles expectation and defeat, urgency – great need – but also self-awareness, candid recognition of failure: ‘you were angry and we sinned’. Although they had stopped calling on God, because they thought He had stopped listening to them (Isaiah 64: 7), yet they still had a claim on God their father; their deep trust in him was matched by Yahweh’s deep obligation to Israel: ‘you are our father, our redeemer from of old’. (Isaiah 63: 17) Part of our hearing and receiving the anticipatory message of Advent lies in our acknowledging our need for God, our father and redeemer from of old.
The third and final part of Isaiah was of course written for Israelites still waiting for the coming of the Messiah, whereas Paul wrote to an early Christian community at Corinth that was living, as indeed are we, between advents. Paul stressed God’s generosity in the gift of Christ to humanity, a gift of grace which equips them, and us, with the spiritual tools we need to await his second advent. ‘God is faithful: by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son.’ (v. 9). That in-betweenness seems obvious to us, but will have been rather less apparent to his original correspondents, who thought the end so much nearer. The Christ who has not yet returned is a constant theme of this letter, which ends with the prayer Marana tha: Our Lord, come (1 Cor. 16: 22). Starker is our third and final reading.
This chapter of Mark’s gospel lies at a junction in Mark’s narrative, between his account of Jesus’ teaching ministry and immediately before the beginning of his passion narrative. Sometimes called the ‘little apocalypse’, the whole chapter predicts the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and Second Coming. Filled with direct quotation from and allusion to the Old Testament prophets, it uses apocalyptic imagery to emphasise how great a crisis there will be when the Son of Man returns; signs in sun, moon and stars will prefigure the coming of the Son of Man from the clouds with great power and glory. But our lection comprised only the briefest and starkest statement: ‘Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come. Keep awake.’
Advent was in the medieval church a period of fasting and spiritual preparation; we still retain some of that penitential character: vestments are purple; we do not sing the Gloria. All today’s lections remind us of what Advent is really about. The sentimentalising of this season, witnessed by our advent calendars and so on, are nineteenth-century accretions. (It was from the German Lutheran church that we acquired the idea of advent calendars, pictorial and symbolic representations of the time to be waited before the feast of the incarnation itself.) Advent is centrally about watching and waiting. We watch and wait for the coming of the Lord and everywhere around us we hear different voices pronouncing when that coming will be. Perhaps that time is, indeed, now very near. Certainly these seem apocalyptic days: the world’s financial systems approached total meltdown; we have experienced floods and hurricanes, violence and displacement of peoples; terrorist bombs. But we must wait and watch, because only God knows when the time will come. Time is in God’s hands, and it is in Him that we must place our hope and our trust. Bede had this, in fact, just right as he explained in his tract On the Reckoning of Time:
This Age, which is now running its course, will have a duration uncertain to mortal men but known to Him alone who commanded his servants to keep watch with loins girded and lamps alight like men waiting for their lord, when he shall return from the marriage feast.
‘Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come. … What I say to you, I say to all: keep awake’.
I look from afar; and lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?
AMEN
Canon Professor Sarah Foot Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History