Watch and work
Readings from the Gospels of Mark and Luke
Mark 13:1-37
As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”
Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
“You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.
“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. Everyone will hate you because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.
“When you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ [Daniel 12:11] standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down or enter the house to take anything out. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that this will not take place in winter, because those will be days of distress unequaled from the beginning, when God created the world, until now—and never to be equaled again.
“If the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, whom he has chosen, he has shortened them. At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time.
“But in those days, after that distress,
‘the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’
“At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.
“Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.
“But about that [final] day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. It’s like a man going away: He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with their assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch.
“Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back—whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’”
Luke 24:17-21
"What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."
I have a friend who quietly waits for the second coming of Jesus. She is a very practical and loving Christian. Trained as a physician, she takes special care of the elderly and sick – all voluntarily. She is not at all a fundamentalist or doomsday believer who has given up on our planet and waits to escape to heaven, but the thought of Jesus’s coming comforts her in the face of the suffering she encounters. It helps her do her work of love without wavering. Sometimes, I am a bit jealous of her as I find it difficult to trust that Jesus will return and set everything right. But I do believe that in this expectation she stands closer to Jesus and his friends than I do.
"Are you the one who would come?"
The question was first asked by John the Baptist (Matthew 11:3, Luke 7:20), when Jesus seemed different from the Messiah that he had been expecting. Jesus was not one who would start a holy war against Rome, or bring Israel back to a rigid observance of the Law. He healed people, he restored relationships and he enjoyed food and wine with anyone who would have him. Again, after the crucifixion, people were disappointed: "we had hopen that he was the one to redeem Israel."
Even Jesus seemed to doubt it. In his final week, seeing that his end was near, he and his friends slept on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the city and the temple. Like many tourists today, his disciples were rapt by the panorama, but Jesus had a heavy heart. He saw the coming clash between the temple and the empire, the religious fanaticism and human suffering. It seems he was arrested in part because the authorities saw a threat in his words about the destruction of the temple. He was hoping for the Lord to come down from heaven and make things right. He cried out to God in the night before his arrest, and again when he was crucified. He gave his life, still learning what it meant to follow God's calling (Hebrews 5:8-9).
The words of Jesus, retold to the Thessalonians
And then, because they had experienced him alive after his death, they saw him as more than just a Messiah; Jesus is the Lord himself who will come down from the heavens. Just a few years later their expectations reached a peak: in the year 40 CE, Caligula had ordered his governor in Antioch to place a statue of himself as the supreme God in the temple of Jerusalem. When Caligula was murdered, the governor and the Jews were relieved, but the followers of Jesus had to rethink what it meant to them. In Antioch, the church decided that God had given them more time to reach people with the Gospel. They sent Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journeys. Also Peter and the envoys of Jesus’s brother James, started to undertake missionary journeys around the Mediterranean.
In I Thessalonians 4:15-16, Paul quotes a word from Jesus about the coming of the Lord:
According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
We also see how the experience with Caligula influenced the way that Jesus' followers thought about the period of suffering before the coming of the Lord, in II Thessalonians 2:1-4:
Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come.
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
The words of Jesus, retold in the Gospel of Mark
With Caligula's attempt, many Jews had the feeling that the prophecies from the Book of Daniel, about the times of suffering and an 'abomination' in the temple, seemed to play out before their eyes in realtime. Followers of Jesus must have recognized something about Jesus in Daniel's words about an angel coming to raise the dead and a Son of Man to appearing before God to receive an everlasting kingdom.
And now, after the death of Caligula, Mark 13 combines the two visions from I and II Thessalonians are combined into a two-stage scenario: first the destruction of Jerusalem and then the coming of Jesus as both the anointed one and the Lord. That is not to say that Mark 13 is not based on words of Jesus. I have no doubt that Jesus and his friends, followers of John the Baptist, thought and spoke about such prophecies. But they clearly retold and edited his words of Jesus in light of their interpretation of Daniel, as Mark 13:14 suggests: "let the reader understand."
The words of Jesus, retold in the Gospel of Matthew
It was in the Jewish War of the years 66-73 that Roman armies encircled Jerusalem, that the temple was polluted with human blood and the city destroyed. The contemporary Jewish historian Josephus recounts how it had led to the disastrous belief that God would never abandon his temple. Far too many people fled to Jerusalem to see God save them. But the Romans encircled the crowded city and let the hungry Jewish sects devour each other, sometimes even in a literal sense.
Was this then finally the time that Jesus would return? The words in Mark 13:24, “But in those days, after that distress,” left open the question of how long after stage 1 the Lord would come down. But the author of Matthew 25:29 comforts his audience with this edit: “Immediately after the distress of those days.” In this minor change, you can feel the excitement of those years: the Jewish rebels had driven the Romans away in the year 66 CE, but the legions returned in 67 CE, first in the Galilee and then besieging Jerusalem in 70 CE. How could this not lead to the day that they were waiting for?
The word of Jesus, retold in the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Revelation
Jerusalem did fall but the Lord did not return. Had Matthew misunderstood Jesus or the scriptures?The facts on the ground forced the followers of Jesus to reconsider, pray and search for answers. A decade or so later, the Gospel of Luke (21:24) would explain this history unfolding in the light of scripture by adding: “and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” A similar remark in Revelation 11:2 connects this to a symbolic period of ‘42 months,’ or three-and-a-half ‘years.’ And this, too, was something they could find in the Hebrew scriptures. For wasn’t it Daniel 12:7 that already spoke about the three and a half ‘times’ of the gentiles?
Words of encouragement
It is easy to misunderstand this text as a failed prophecy uttered by a doomsday Jesus. But we should remind ourselves that Jesus and his followers were dealing with an existing prophecy, a general Jewish expectancy and real historical events. Perhaps it is good not to fight over the prophetic scenario itself or the date of its fulfillment, but rather see the spirit in which Jesus deals with it in Mark 13; how he warns, comforts and encourages his friends in the light of impending conflict and suffering.
Jesus starts with a warning: don’t get too excited, don’t be deceived by religious charlatans who proclaim the end of times and pretend to be a Messiah worthy of following into battle. Just concentrate on sharing the Gospel. Don’t be naïve: there will be conflict, and both sides (your own people and the Roman authorities) will try to make you comply with their rules. But don’t be impressed too much either: you carry holy spirit within you and the words of conviction and authority will come to you when you need them. Jesus also urges his friends to seek refuge when the war erupts. As a result, we are told by ancient sources, many Jewish Christians did not stay in Jerusalem but fled to safety. We are not supposed to die in vain martyrdom, but to value our life and act prudently.
Jesus actively puts his faith in the ancient Hebrew prophecy: the Lord will intervene in our world and history, to gather and save his people. How or when is beyond our understanding and calculation, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son of Man/Son of God himself could tell you the day. But in as much as people are suffering, Jesus encourages his friends to remain hopeful even in times of suffering and despair, and to be on the look-out for God’s saving presence, either within their reality or beyond it.
The knife cuts both ways: we are not only victims of the conflict but also actors in our own sphere of influence. Jesus’s final warning addresses you as ab actor in your own right. You cannot wish for God’s intervention to right the wrongs of society and not have your own house in order. A desire for justice requires you to work for justice.
We all have our role to play as servants in this great family estate. And Jesus urges us to do our work as people who are always expecting the imminent return of their Lord: they are not postponing their work in the face of climate change, social conflict, or suffering in one’s neighborhood. For that is what the creed’s wording literally says: he ‘is to be coming,’ he is about to come, he is around the corner. His servants work their patch of this earth knowing that this is the place where they want to receive their Lord today, tonight or tomorrow morning.
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Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), once a controversial young biblical scholar, argued that the historical Jesus was very unlike the romanticized Jesus of the church and modern theology who was said to spread a timeless message of love.
According to Schweitzer, Jesus was a prophet who expected that his crucifixion would set the events in motion, leading to God's intervention and the deliverance of his people. Yet, the fact that Jesus belonged to a different age and time, did not undermine the urgency of his message for Schweitzer, to become ‘fishers of men.’ At the age of 30, he resigned his position at the university and became a medical doctor in Gabon, to answer the call of Jesus as a healer rather than an academic.
When he visited Silcoates School in the UK, on December 3rd, 1935, he told the students: “I don't know what your destiny will be. Some of you will perhaps occupy remarkable positions. Perhaps some of you will become famous by your pens, or as artists. But I know one thing: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." (The Silcoatian, No. 25, 1935, pg 785).
Suggestions for dialogue
A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:
- Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness.
- First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
- Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared.
- Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
- Leave room for silence and contemplation.
- Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.
These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com
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