The End is Near:
Proper 28, Year B
1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10;
Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8
The Orthodox Christian year is winding to a close. Once again, as
happened in the middle of the year, Mark’s ground-breaking early
Christian work is apparently deemed superfluous (see, e.g., Losing the Way Part I; Part II; Part III). Proper 28
allows for only the first eight verses of Mark 13, and that is the end
of the road as far as the Elves are concerned.
Proper 29 finishes
the Christian liturgical year with Christ the King Sunday. In
Years A and C, proper 29 includes readings from the respective Gospels:
Matthew in Year A, and Luke in Year C. But for Year B, the Elves
have decreed that
Mark’s Gospel will be superceded by readings from the Gospel of John
and the Revelation. Perhaps the reason is that both the Gospel
and the Revelation are believed to have been written by Jesus’s
“beloved disciple.” Perhaps the reason is that there is not
enough time in a three-year cycle to get to the Gospel of John, even
though it is the favorite. Perhaps switching to a four-year cycle
and giving John his own year would require too much renegotiation among
the Catholic and Protestant factions about how to combine the various
portions of Old Testament scriptures that would have to be
cherry-picked. Or perhaps the thought is that if you’ve heard or
read one Apocalypse, you’ve heard or read them all.
For reasons that are truly obscure, this week’s list of readings
includes large portions of the story of the call of Samuel, and
Hannah’s Song, rejoicing in his dedication to the Temple.
Catholic tradition reads Hannah’s Song as part of the liturgy for the
Visitation, celebrated May 31. This feast day commemorates Mary’s
visit with Elizabeth, when both are pregnant. Mary sings the
Magnificat, which is based on Hannah’s song, and Elizabeth hails Mary:
“blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your
womb.” Perhaps the Elves want to be sure those sections of Samuel
are read at some point by recalcitrant Protestants, who are not
particularly interested in Catholic feast days. If not May 31,
the end of liturgical year B will do, as Christians anticipate Advent
and the Christmas season.
The main theme for Proper 28, however – disregarding the non-sequitur from 1 Samuel – is
the threat of a final judgment, the timing for which we hapless folk on
Planet Earth have no clue. All Mark’s Jesus says is that “wars
and rumors of wars . . . nation against nation and empire against
empire. . . earthquakes. . . famines . . . mark the beginning of the
final agonies.” Jesus’s words of course seem to be mysteriously
anticipated in Daniel 12:1-3, but Daniel’s prophesy goes beyond what
Mark’s Jesus appears to do. All Mark’s Jesus does in the Little
Apocalypse is warn the people to be on guard, stay alert (Wachet Auf). Watch for the
signs that will announce the end. Daniel speaks of the
resurrection of the dead, according to Christian reinterpretation of
the Jewish apocalypse. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of
the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and
everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the
brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like
the stars forever and ever.” Then – although the Elves don’t
consider it, perhaps because Jesus says we can’t know it – Daniel is
advised to “keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of
the end [because] many shall be running back and forth, and evil shall
increase.” Meanwhile, the writer of the letter called “Hebrews”
continues his anti-Semitic diatribe against “every priest [who] stands
day after day at his service, offering again and again the same
sacrifices that can never take away sins.” We should encourage
one another, the writer says, “and all the more as you see the Day
approaching.”
Post-modern, 21st Century, progressive exiles from the Christian
religion may well just dismiss all this as irrelevant. We are
facing our own atomic, biological, chemical, demographic, and
ecological apocalypse. Who cares about Daniel’s or John’s or
Mark’s?
If Christianity is to have any relevance to the third millennium,
several things need to change. First, in the current culture of these
United States, as well as post-colonial cultures world-wide, Biblical
literacy is essential. Exiles from Christianity cannot simply
ignore fundamentalists and literalists. Robert Jensen in his
recent book, All
My Bones Shake (Soft Skull Press, Berkeley, CA, 2009)
writes,
“For me, Christianity – or any other religion – can help in this
struggle only if we understand theology as a process of seeking that
can remain dynamic and open, rather than a declaration of beliefs that
are static and closed” (p. 180). We must counter theologies of
fear and exclusiveness with love and radical fairness.
Second, exiles from Christianity must reclaim Jesus from the
romanticized, other-worldly god the church has made him into. As A.J. Levine puts it, for most
Christians, Jesus is too clean. The historical Jesus preached the
radical abandonment of self-interest, radical fairness, and a
share-world, not a greed-world. For those who are committed to
distributive justice-compassion, such as the Christian
Peacemaker Team that put
their lives on the line (and lost one of them) in Iraq, that Jesus is
dirty, bone-tired, deeply afraid, and blood-drenched. Liberal
Christians need to start invoking that Jesus in all of our arguments
for universal health care, against rapacious mining and oil drilling;
recovering water resources, including wetlands, bays, lakes, and
fishing grounds; civil rights including marriage for GLBT people; fair
immigration policies; universal education.
We cannot change Christianity without knowing what the Gospels have to
say, and understanding the context in which they say it.
So, to start with, notice that the legend of Daniel was actually
created approximately 160 bce. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, ruler of the
Greco-Syrian portion of Alexander the Great’s former empire, had begun
a religious persecution of Jews in order to solidify his power against
the Egyptians. Some Jews reacted violently in a Hasmonean/
Maccabean revolt. But the Book of Daniel is actually a
non-violent vision of
hope that the Fifth Kingdom – not some earthly empire, but the Kingdom
of God – would be established forever and ever. During that same
second-century time, Rome declared that it was the long-awaited and
final Fifth Kingdom. As John Dominic Crossan suggests, according to
Daniel, the Kingdom of God begins with a judgment-tribunal in
heaven. The great kings on trial there are all like this or that
beast; but the personified embodiment of heavenly rule is a “Son of
Man” (Adam – a human person). “God’s Kingdom descends from its
personified embodiment, probably the archangel Michael (Dan. 7:14),
through those angelic 'holy ones' (7:18, 22), until it is finally given
to ‘the people’ of God here below upon this earth. . . . That vision
imagines that imperialism has been condemned long ago by God and that
its replacement has already been created in heaven where it is held in
angelic protection until it can appear here below. . . . It is a
transcendental dispute between a beast-like rule from earth and a
human-like rule from heaven.”
Mark believed that Jesus was that “personified embodiment of heavenly
rule.” As argued in last week’s blog, Mark’s Jesus
repudiates the idea that the “son of David” is the Messiah. The
reason is – as seen above – the Son of Adam is not the warlike emperor
(the beasts from Daniel). The Son of Adam is a human being.
If not for the perceived necessity to counter the agrarian/Pagan
concept of a god who dies in the winter and rises in the spring,
Christianity might not have rearranged the sequence of Mark’s
story, and might not have been able to so thoroughly obscure Mark's
point. Immediately after his “Little Apocalypse,” which advises
believers to watch for the sign of the coming of the Fifth Kingdom,
Mark
relates the story of Jesus’s arrest, execution, and death. The
surprise at the end is the empty tomb. This is not a
contradiction to Mark’s proclamation in 1:15. Jesus – the
embodiment of the Kingdom of God – has been raised to the heavenly
realms. From there, as 1st Century Jews understood the story of
Daniel, he shall come again to establish the Kingdom on earth forever.
These stories have been used for two millennia to bully or frighten
people into believing that this life does not matter, and that anyone
who does not believe that Jesus came back from the dead to save us from
hell in the next life will spend eternity there. However, 21st
Century post-modern exiles should realize that biblical scholars are
fairly certain of two things: 1) Jesus is seriously dead, and has been
for some time; and 2) Jesus’s message was far more radical than “be
nice to your neighbor, and give money to church social action
projects.” Mark’s gospel illustrates his 1st Century
understanding of both those points. But we miss that if we allow
the Elves to put together the readings in order to prove orthodox
dogma. As these Commentaries have argued for three years, the
embodiment of God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion – the
incarnation, the personification of God’s Kingdom – is anyone who
participates in the struggle to actualize it here and now. The
sustainability of life on Planet Earth is what is at stake.
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