Expect the Unexpected
November 29, 2020,
the First Sunday of Advent
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I’ve written here before of my
dislike of the way the Revised Common Lectionary, that schedule of Bible readings
for every Sunday and other holy days that many preachers use, gives us New
Testament texts about a supposed second coming of Christ during Advent, the
season in which we anticipate and prepare to celebrate the first coming of
Christ in the birth of the infant Jesus of Nazareth. Those second coming texts
have nothing to do with the Jesus’ birth to Mary and Joseph as a human infant.
I won’t now go once again into my objections to the whole notion of a second
coming. I want here instead to look at Mark 13:24-37, the Revised Common
Lectionary’s Gospel text for today, the first Sunday of Advent. I want to
consider whether it gives us anything at all of value as we begin our season of
anticipation not of the second coming of Christ but the first.
Those verses from what is known as
the Little Apocalypse of Mark begin with portents of cosmic disorder. We read
that after a period of suffering
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give
its light,
and the stars will be falling
from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens
will be shaken.”[1]
Mark 13:24b-25.[2]
All of these cosmic phenomena set the stage for the second
coming of Christ: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with
great power and glory.” [3] Mark
13:26. His coming will have world-changing effects on earth: “Then he will send
out his angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the
earth to the ends of heaven.” Mark 13:27. It’s hard to imagine a second coming
of Christ less like his first coming than the one Mark depicts here. It’s all
cosmic and earthly transformation, all power and glory, with angels no less.
Of course when the Gospel of Mark
was written, probably in the early 70s of the first century CE, none of these
things had happened yet. Nothing remotely like them had happened though the
Little Apocalypse promises that they will happen soon: “Truly I tell you, this generation
will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” Mark 13:30. We
know from earlier sources like 1 Thessalonians that people were getting worried
because Christ had not returned in power and glory to bring salvation and set
the world aright. So our text says more about the timing of the things it says
will happen: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in
heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert, for you do not
know when the time will come.” Mark 13:32-33. Mark’s Jesus says here that a
second coming will happen and will happen in a particular way, but don’t worry
about when. There’s no way to know when, but be ready.
How are we to understand the
apocalyptic vision of this text? We could take it literally as a prediction of
future events that are bound to happen just as this text describes them. Lord
knows enough people have taken these words that way over the centuries, often
with tragically disappointing results. Yet nearly two thousand years have
passed since these words were written, and the events they describe haven’t
happened yet. Frankly I doubt that they ever will. Whether they do or not,
however, here is what I think is better way of understanding them. Try thinking
of them like this. They express how people wanted and even expected the Messiah
to come. The Messiah was supposed to come and change things, to clean up the
world and set things aright. He could, people thought, only do those things through
the application of great power. The Messiah was to represent God breaking into
creation, so they envisioned him coming down from heaven in a great show of the
divine power through which he would establish the kingdom of God on earth. That’s
how the Messiah will come, people thought. We may not know when, but we know
how—from above in power and glory.
So how did the Messiah come? He
didn’t come from above. He came from Bethlehem, a quite real town here on
earth.[4]
He didn’t come in power and glory. He came as a newborn human baby as weak and
helpless as any other human baby. So far from coming in the grandeur of the
divine he came born in a stable to poor parents who couldn’t even find an room
in which Mary could give birth. In one account of his birth three earthly
Gentile wise men came to worship him, but in the other account of his birth the
people who heard and came were shepherds, the poorest of the poor. The world
didn’t change when he came. At least it didn’t change suddenly and dramatically
through an application of the power of God. Instead in Matthew’s story of his
birth his parents had to take him and escape to Egypt to avoid the murderous
intent of one of those earthly kings the Messiah was supposed to judge,
condemn, and displace. People expected the Messiah to come the way Mark
describes the Son of Man coming at some unknown time in the future. Instead he
came in the very different way in which Matthew and Luke describe his birth.
In Mark 13 Mark’s Jesus tells the
disciples to keep awake because they do not know when Christ, called the Son of
Man, will come. He tells them what to expect of that second coming, just not when
to expect it. Here’s the thing though. When the Messiah came the first time his
coming was nothing like what people expected. He came in a way that was totally
unexpected, and there is a great lesson for us in that truth. We await the
birth of Christ. We know when it will happen, or at least we know when we will
celebrate it. We know how he came the first time. That time people got
something they didn’t expect. God often does things in ways people don’t expect.
So much so that we’re likely to get something unexpected too.
Do you have expectations of what
the birth of Christ will do in the world? Do you think you know what Christmas will
mean? I usually think I know what it will mean, but there is a real caution for
us in Mark’s Little Apocalypse and the two Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth. We
don’t know what it will mean. We can’t know what it will mean. We can know that
it will mean things we don’t expect. It will change the world, but not in ways
we might expect of want. So with Mark 13 I say to you and to myself “keep
awake.” Something big is going to happen, we just don’t know what it is. So
keep awake. Expect the unexpected in your life and in the life of the world. Jesus
didn’t come the way people thought the Messiah would come. He didn’t do what
people thought the Messiah would do. He was totally unexpected. That’s how it
always is with God. So: Keep awake! You never know what’s going to happen, you
just know it will come from God.
[1]
The ancient world didn’t know how big even a small star is, how far away from
us the stars are, or that they are all moving away from us at tremendous speed.
Hence the reference to the impossible phenomenon of the stars falling from
heaven. I should perhaps mention here that I don’t believe we have the words of
Jesus here. We have the words of the Gospel of Mark that reflect realities in
his time not in Jesus’ time a few decades earlier.
[2]
These lines are in Hebrew verse form because they are quotations from scripture
where they appear in that form
[3] Th
words “the Son of Man coming in clouds’ is in quotation marks within this
quotations because they echo if they don’t exactly quote Daniel 7:13-14.
[4] Or
more likely he came from Nazareth. He was known as Jesus of Nazareth not Jesus
of Bethlehem, but never mind.
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