This isn’t meant to be a sermon. My aim is more an exegesis of the lectionary texts.
Isaiah 64:1-9
64:1 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence--
64:2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil-- to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
64:3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
64:4 From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
64:5 You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
64:6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
64:7 There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
64:8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
64:9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
80:1 Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth
80:2 before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!
80:3 Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.
80:4 O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?
80:5 You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.
80:6 You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.
80:7 Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.
80:17 But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.
80:18 Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.
80:19 Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
1:3
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
1:4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus,
1:5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind--
1:6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you--
1:7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1:8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1:9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Mark 13:24-37
13:24 "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,
13:25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
13:26 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory.
13:27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
13:28 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
13:29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
13:30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.
13:31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
13:32 "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
13:33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.
13:34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.
13:35 Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,
13:36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.
13:37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."
Trito-Isaiah speaks, or maybe more properly cries out, in the worst crisis in Israel’s history prior to the Holocaust (it’s not a contest; I’m just trying to shorthand the disaster of losing their homeland, the “Promised Land.” in the first place). It makes the perfect text for the First Sunday of Advent.
But not if you snatch it out of context and think it does refer to the Christian season of Advent. I don’t mean that at all. I mean the sentiment fits the Christian season, because the prophet is simultaneously looking forward and backward, and speaking to God for the people. And he’s angry and anxious and out of patience and making demands of God.
Always a good place to begin Advent.
Isaiah is recalling the story of Ezekiel, when the prophets of Baal called on their god to set a wooden pyre ablaze. When that didn’t happen, Ezekiel had the wood doused in water, and then called on God to burn it. The pyre erupted into a (pardon the term, I mean no historical allusion), a holocaust.
Isaiah is recalling this toward the end of the Exile. Israel has been so long away from Jerusalem they are beginning to lose their connection to the covenant; and the presence of God seems long ago and very far away. Even the great prophet of God needs a sign. In spirit, this is the ideal passage for the beginning of Advent. Because what Trito-Isaiah is calling for is apocalypse. No, not Armageddon; not the end of the world. “Apocalypse” means “revelation.” Isaiah wants something to be revealed, as God did in days of old. “Days of old,” looking back from the 6th century BCE. Let that sink in. This is a cry of frustration, of anguish, of anger. This is a demand for justice; or at least justification. “Tear open the heavens .” As if there were a barrier between God and Israel, and it needed to be torn apart. Oh, that God would come down, and save us from all this waiting and longing and suffering!
Isaiah wants God to prove God’s faithfulness, God’s fidelity to the covenant with Abraham. You may think “prove” too strong a term. It’s not a test of faith, as when the prophets of Baal meant to prove their god real and the God of Abraham false. Isaiah wants a sign to Israel, that their suffering has not been for nothing, that their trust and faith would be rewarded. The Exile was said by the prophets to have been due to Israel’s faithlessness. At what would be the end of that exile the people needed a reason to believe the covenant with Abraham still held.
“O, that you would come down, as in days of old!”
Israel was restored to Jerusalem, under Cyrus. But the fortunes of the nation under David, and Solomon, and the two kingdoms, was never restored. Israel’s scripture stop recording history sometime after that restoration, And Christian scripture starts long after Jerusalem and Judea, as the Romans called it, were under the rule of Rome. So we jump from the end of the Exile, to the rule of Rome. And actually, by the time Matthew writes his gospel, the oldest of the canonical four, Rome has already sacked Jerusalem; an assault so barbaric Josephus will record the blood in the streets reached the knees of the horses. Probably not to be taken as fact, so much as the Jewish historian reaching for metaphor to convey the horror of the destruction. I mention this because Matthew’s audience could well be asking Isaiah’s question, shouting Isaiah’s plea.
The other connection is looking to God in history to be the savior. Speaking for the people of Israel, Isaiah asks for delivery, for salvation; and recalls God’s wrath, which led to the Exile. “Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.”
I would say the expectation of the Messiah, of the deliverance of Israel once and for all, began with the Exile. It’s not a coincidence that Christians connected the prophets of Exile to Jesus, and turned their declarations of God’s coming justice and faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham into predictions of the future that pointed to Jesus of Nazareth.
So we go to the classic first Sunday of Advent text: Mark 13:24-37.
It’s debatable whether, and how much, the prophets of Israel were understood as predicting the future, and how much they were simply understood as speaking for God. Milton’s phrase “explaining the ways of God to man,” is appropriate here (if dated). Christianity taught us all to read the prophets as seers of the future. Before that, they were understood as simply telling the truth. Nobody looks to Ezekiel for the anticipation of the Messiah in Advent; and yet Ezekiel is understood to be a prophet because Ezekiel spoke for God.
The most often repeated phrase in the books of the prophets is “The Word of the Lord.” In the prophets, this phrase distinguishes the prophets’s words from declarations by God. In the Christian liturgy that is a phrase used for the gospel reading, both by Catholics and Protestants. How many in the congregation think it transforms the sayings if Jesus, or a parable, or the nativity stories, into pronouncements about far-future events? Well, I suppose for Mark 13:24-37, they might.
Which is ironic, because Jesus is mocking the expectation of knowing the future. If anything, he’s saying that’s precisely what the Hebrew prophets are not. They are not soothsayers and divinationists and fortune tellers. 🔮
And this is one of those passages where I always want to ask the biblical literalists: is Jesus telling us to never fall asleep? 😴
More likely, of course, Jesus is telling us to be “woke.”
So: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” One can be a good Trinitarian and still understand that as saying some things are simply beyond human knowledge; but not beyond God. Because God is omniscient? Or because God is in history, but beyond time? One answer is true to Greek metaphysics; the other is true to the Hebrew revelation. But about the future there is no revelation, except: be awake, or you’ll sleep through it. 🛌
Think about that. The future comes, and you miss it. How does that work? Are we talking Rip Van Winkle here, who slept through the American Revolution and missed the whole thing? Well, something like that. But how do you sleep through the future and miss it when it comes? RipVan Winkle, after all, is a fantasy, not a parable. He literally falls asleep, for decades. Which takes us back to my question: does Jesus mean we should never fall asleep? 💤
Pretty sure he doesn’t. But what does sleep mean, here? For that matter, what future are we expecting? What future is Jesus being asked about?
Jesus has just darkly hinted at calamity in the future, and Peter, James, John, and Andrew have just asked him what to expect. His answer is used by Biblical scholars to date the Gospel of Mark as coming shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., because Jesus describes the destruction of the Temple (which Mark’s audience could see first-hand), and the “abomination in the place of desecration “: the statue of Caesar raised in the holy if holies after the pig was slaughtered on the altar there. Mark’s audience knows this as history; placed in Jesus’s mouth some 35 years earlier, it becomes prophecy. And then Jesus insists on undoing the idea of prophecy.
The idea of prophecies as describing the future, anyway. What Jesus was doing was telling the truth; the truth about Roman rule and its incompatibility with Jewish life and Temple worship. Pilate, after all, killed Jesus because he cleansed the Temple at Passover and raised political tensions beyond what Pilate thought was politic. Jesus was telling the truth; but truth is often inconvenient.
So Jesus tells the truth about the future (Mark’s past), and goes on to tell the truth about expecting the future: you can only do it if you stay awake.
Consider where he starts;
But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,
13:25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
13:26 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory.
13:27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
Good, cosmic, Cecil B. DeMille, wide-screen spectacle stuff! But then he turns to metaphor:
28 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
13:29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
So, wait, we’re going to know all that is coming the way a fig tree…knows to put out leaves?🍃 What?
I knew an old farmer’s daughter (no jokes, please; she was a kindly, saintly person) who said he father always said the last chance for frost wasn’t over until the pecan trees began to bud out again. Pecans are native to Texas; they were one of the trees Europeans found in profusion when they first came here. And, she said, her father was right. And so, from my observations, has he proved to be. But if it hadn’t been pointed out to me, would I have ever thought to notice? To look, to see, to be aware? Or awake?
Does changing one letter change anything?
But the pecans budding out don’t presage a cosmic event; just a very ordinary one. But is the changing of the seasons cosmic? Or quotidian? Or is it both?
Certainly it’s as expected as sunrise; but it’s cosmic, isn’t it? Caused by the earth’s tilt and elliptical solar orbit? And the plants respond to that, season after season, year after year, millennium in millennium. What revelation is this? I mean really; how is a fig tree a harbinger of apocalyptic times?
Jesus loves to do this; talk in every day terms about perfectly extraordinary ideas. He does it with parables when he says the kingdom of heaven is like, well, a fig tree. But how is the kingdom of heaven like that? Or how is the budding fig like the sun and moon going dark and the stars falling out of the sky?🌌
Or maybe it isn’t meant to be. Maybe that’s the point of the metaphor. Which doesn’t mean Jesus is lying; it just means he may not be telling you what you think he’s telling you. You’ve got to keep that option open. Because it may be this is paradox, and these two simply don’t fit together.
Because whatever is coming, however it’s coming, it’s coming in history, in time. And be awake, or you’ll miss it.
13:34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.
13:35 Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,
13:36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.
Or at least you certainly won’t be doing what you should be doing. And what you shouldn’t be doing is sleeping, when you should be awake. Don’t be sleeping on the job!
Paul says:
...for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind-- 1:6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you-- 1:7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1:8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1:9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Spiritual gifts and strength and called into fellowship… Isn’t there something you should be doing with that? Is that what you should use in your job?
Wait! What job? The job of watching fig trees? Pretty sure Jesus wasn’t using that metaphor as an analogy. You aren’t called into the fellowship Paul is talking about to be as passive as that. It’s more likely he was using it as a warning. After all, Jesus asks why we worry about what we will eat and drink and wear, because the birds are given what they need and will we not be? If we don’t need to worry about our daily needs, why do we need to worry about the future? Four apostles have asked Jesus what to expect, and he has told them: more of the same, until it changes. And when it will changes, no one knows. So do your jobs, because the Master is coming home, but you don’t know when. And what is your job? Why, looking out for everyone else, obviously. The first of all will be last of all and servant of all. Which is job enough for everyone.
I came across a headline as I was finishing this. It read: “No one is coming to save us.” You might think that sentiment too dour, too pessimistic. But I think that’s what Jesus is getting at. Why do you worry about what you will eat or what you will drink or what the far future holds? It doesn’t hold salvation from the present! It only holds the assurance that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. Any salvation won’t come in spite of you, it will only come through you. So keep awake! Wake up! Be woke to the injustice you benefit from, live by, live with. Pay attention to what is needed, here and now! The signs of the times point to what is coming It’s up to you to shape them to good or bad; to see that the fig tree is fruitful, and not fruitless.
Okay, so it turned into a sermon. What’d you expect? 🤷🏻♂️
