Second Sunday Before Advent 17 November
Readings: Dan. 12.1-3; Heb. 10.11-14 (15-18), 19-25; Mk. 13. 1-8
Theme: Things to Come
Today we see Jesus prophesying that the Temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed. We know that this actually happened in the year 70, during the First Roman-Jewish War, and so what the disciples elicit from Jesus here is a discourse about the end times. This is also a similar genre of writing as in the first reading from Daniel which is considered part of the apocalyptic literature of the Old Testament that reveals things that are to come. The word revealed to Daniel, we are told, is revealed under the rule of the Persian King Cyrus. He is an interesting figure because it will be this foreign king, in other words a non-Jew, who will allow the Jews to return to their homeland following their period of Babylonian exile. It is during the time of King Cyrus that the foundations of the second temple will be laid and the temple was completed in around 515 BC in Jerusalem.
The rise and fall of empires and the jostling of the Jewish people for their own homeland has thus been a theme throughout history, both biblical history and as we know from the tragic events of today, right up until contemporary times. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans have all taken possession of Palestine. So, whether Jesus was prophesying about the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in AD 70 or whether the gospel writer was commenting on recent events and putting them in the mouth of Jesus in his narrative, what is certain is that for God, time and history matter. History is the theatre within which God’s revelation, literally ‘apocalypse’ in Greek, happens.
This idea has been most powerfully articulated by the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers, St Augustine of Hippo in his magisterial work of the early fifth century, The City of God. In this work, St Augustine reflects on this rise and fall of the powers and dominations, and especially of the Romans, who in his time will be overcome by Visigothic forces in the western half of the Roman Empire, as Alaric sacks Rome in AD 410. Alaric himself was an Arian Christian, as were many of the Visigoths, and so had been tolerated in the later Roman Empire, but the question which this raises for the Romans was whether the Roman Empire had been undermined by Christianity.
This is the question that St Augustine tackles in his magisterial work The City of God. He argues in this that it was not Christianity which undermined the Roman Empire but it was the immorality and lack of true religious devotion which had undermined it. His narrative of the relationship between Christianity and the rise and fall of empires is instructive for us because it provides us with a way of interpreting Jesus’s words that all sorts of cataclysmic events will precede his return at the end of history. In effect, Augustine reflects on what Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God means for our understanding of Christian and secular history. Rather than either separate one from another or indeed conflate them, they are to be held together with their own distinctiveness. The kingdom is growing in and through history and all its events, but it is not to be identified with it completely or indeed with any particular place, such as the city of Rome. There is always a dimension of Christian history which is not reducible to its secular counterpart. This is the dimension of God’s eternity which envelops and opens out our time into the infinity of God.
This is not an easy idea to grasp, but there are two approaches which it is helpful for us to avoid. The first is seeing in every calamity and incident the sign of the end times. Just as in reading our gospel for today, if we did not know the actual history of the text then it would be easy to fail to understand that it is about the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70. Each age in history has a tendency to collapse sacred into secular history when the going gets tough. However, there is also the other danger that we should try and avoid. That is to so separate sacred history from secular history that the kingdom seems only to be a limit concept that is never in any way actually realized here and now on earth in any place. Neither approach is helpful, though they are each often more superficially attractive than holding the both/and approach which is that the gospel message of the kingdom of God.
What we should aim to do is to discern, in all the events of human history, the guiding hand of God at work in bringing about the realization of the kingdom of God. We know this when peace, justice and integrity breaks out between peoples. This is the sign of the presence of the kingdom of God emerging amongst us. It has already been inaugurated by the coming of the messiah, Jesus, whose birth we will be celebrating at Christmas. So, the end times are always present and still yet to come. They are both here and now in the advent of the messiah and to be fulfilled at the end of time. Only God the Father knows that time, and so we should not attempt to call it. It is not ours to worry about. But we should be aware that at that time the judgment of this world and the resurrection of the dead will occur, until that time, we should realize that all these other events are ‘but the beginnings of the birth pangs’.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.