First Sunday of Advent; 3 December 2023; Advent 1B (RCL); Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37.
Always on the First Sunday of Advent, we have readings suggestive of ‘last days’ or the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ. In the Corinthians passage, Paul expresses his confidence that God will hold the Corinthians blameless until “the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the passage from Mark, Jesus begins with the phrase “in those days, and after that suffering,” and then refers to the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds with great power and glory. And the author if Isaiah prays passionately and eloquently that God would tear open the heavens and come down. What, exactly, are we expecting?
Growing up in the Church of the Nazarene, it was clear we were expecting some kind of dramatic end of the world preceded by the “Rapture,” when the faithful would simply disappear from earth, and be caught up into heaven (a doctrine based on two verses in the New Testament, one in 1 Thessalonians, and one in the Book of Revelation). I remember as a young teenager living with that constant, low-level anxiety that I might be left behind. Hal Lindsey, who wrote the book The Late, Great Planet Earth was predicting 1984 as the year of the end. He sold a lot of books, but 1984 came and went.
The passage from Isaiah comes in the middle of a section that scholars have called the Book of Consolation (it includes the passage, “Comfort, o comfort my people,” and “All you who are thirsty, come to the water!”). This passage seems oddly out of place. All who believe in God’s compassion and hope for God’s providence can become discouraged at the state of the world, and I suspect the prophet, as the people were returning to Jerusalem, became disappointed that the world’s state of affairs did not improve. His cri de coeur could be ours as well.
The passage ends with the phrase, “now consider, we are all your people.” Coming, as this does, in the heart of the Book of Consolation, which imagines all humanity coming to worship God freely in Jerusalem, I don’t think this is intended to limit God’s providence only to God’s elect. The “all” here means all.
The passage in Mark comes after Jesus has predicted the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (Mark, of course, is writing after the events Jesus ‘predicts’ and could easily have put these words on Jesus’ lips to show the rightness of his own view of things). That is the suffering after which the things in this passage are due to happen. Mark appears to be making reference to the Book of Daniel, in which Daniel sees “the Ancient of Days” enthrone “one like a son of man (human being).” Daniel is probably thinking of a restored Davidic monarchy (and maybe even Judas Maccabeus), but it is not clear who Mark has in mind. We assume Jesus is talking about himself, but it could be Daniel’s figure.
But Mark ends by admonishing us to “keep awake” lest we miss the event, which suggests that not all will see it, though the earlier prediction seems to imply that it will be visible to all. I suspect on any day, we need to keep awake to the possibility of God’s providence, not just last days, whatever they might be.