Sunday 19th November 2006TRINITY XXIII

Fr David Cherry

Daniel  12  :  1 – 3 ;  Hebrews  10  :  11 – 14  &  18 ;  Mark  13  :  24 – 32

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. 

Since Christ and since Pentecost the Spirit is still leading us into all truth in the midst of tribulation.  We are living in apocalyptic times.

It’s all a bit like Lord of the Rings isn’t it?.  

Jesus says : ‘they will see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.’   It is a bit like Gandalf fulfilling his promise to Aragorn : ‘on the fourth day look to the east.’  And there he is, the resurrected, once grey, now dazzling white Gandalf with a huge army come to lift the siege of Helmsdeep, the final battle to rid the world of those who would destroy the ‘world of men’.  

This apocalyptic battle, the war to end the cycle of violence, is deeply fascinating, transfixing gripping.  We are attracted to the grand and over-arching epic story, the scale of it.  In a way we are set up for it.  We want sensational drama.

And yet we can’t believe in it anymore.   We can’t believe that terror can end terror.  We can’t believe any longer that God has ordained one nation to conquer another for its betterment. We can’t believe in the rhetoric of despotic rulers in East Asia or Africa.  We can’t believe messianic prime ministers either.  We are no longer able to believe that women are defective men (as St Thomas Aquinas believed); or that homosexuals are defective heterosexuals. We can’t believe that black people are somehow more given to corruption and less intelligent than Caucasians.  We can no longer believe that one religion is more peace-loving than another.  This undoing, this work of subversion in us, which makes us incapable of belief is the work of the Spirit in us.

At a dinner party on Friday I was asked out of the blue whether I’d always believed in God.  Have I ever doubted. Yes I’ve always believed in God and have never doubted that God exists.  I failed to add: But I haven’t always believed what people have said about God.  I have found myself incapable of certain beliefs and I am deeply grateful for this gift.

So much of what Richard Dawkins and other a-theists find intolerable in Christianity we can agree with. If how he portrays Christianity is what Jesus meant and what we are about we should rather burn St Cyprian’s to the ground.  But it is not.

Swinburne was wrong when he wrote "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath."   The opposite is true.

The world is growing grey with our fascination with violence.  We are wary of anyone wanting to lead us to war.  We can no longer endure it or justify it.  And thanks be to God for this too is the work of the Holy Spirit revealing to us in human history the terror that is nothing to do with God and everything to do with us.

The word ‘apocalyptic’ means : ‘unveiling’, the unveiling of the truth, the truth of things.  In today’s gospel Jesus is responding to the question of his disciples: ‘When will this be?’  They are held, fascinated by the hope that Jesus will be a sort of Gandalf, that Jesus will conquer all, perhaps relishing the prospect that oppressors will ‘awake to shame and everlasting contempt’ as Daniel prophesied while they would ‘shine as the brightness of the firmament’.  They are not yet be able to grasp what God is up to in Christ because it is not yet fully unveiled.

Through Mark’s gospel Jesus is saying Listen, Watch, Look, Stay Awake – notice what is happening; notice what I am doing.  Have ears to hear and eyes to see. In the Garden of Gethsemane he says to them still : Stay Awake.

But stay awake for what?  To notice the signs; awake focussing on the calamities and tribulations of the world?  Or on what God is doing in the midst of the carnage?

The kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating is not according to the apocalyptic images the disciples are expecting and hoping for.  No apocalyptic battle to the finish.  No Helmsdeep.  Only his own ordinary execution alongside common criminals.  There’s nothing sensational – despite Mel Gibson’s attempt.

The disciples’ apocalyptic expectations are being undermined, subverted, transformed.  They see Jesus going to his death, knowingly, willingly. They see him giving himself over as a Victim and flee in confusion. Their eyes are not yet opened, their ears remain unstopped. To their horror the ultimate unveiling of God is on the cross: ‘folly to those who are perishing’ - caught up in the machinations of power – ‘but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.’ (1 Cor 1: 18)

Since Christ and since Pentecost the Spirit is still leading us into all truth in the midst of tribulation.  We are living in apocalyptic times. And God’s Spirit is doing that among us – subverting the human heart, making us incapable of believing in our own scheming and drawing us towards pity and mercy; gentleness and compassion; making of us those capable of asking forgiveness.

When I despair, wrote Mahatma Ghandi. I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.  Think of it…always.

And Malcolm Muggeridge saw and felt what God was doing:
I believe with a passionate, unshakeable conviction that, in all circumstances and at all times, life is a blessed gift; that the spirit which animates it is one of love and not hate or indifference, of creativity not destruction, of order not chaos.

Jesus says at the close chapter 13, in answer to the disciples:  So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming… what I say to you I say to all:  Stay Awake.
To you and me, post resurrection, post Pentecost people, it has been unveiled.  May God’s truth come home to us, and through the sacrament we receive make of his church a communion of Persons expressing for the salvation of the world the very life of God: Father Son and Holy Spirit to whom be all glory this resurrection day and through all eternity.  Amen.