33d Sunday
in Ordinary Time
Nov. 18, 2012
Mark 13: 24-32
Ursulines,
Willow Dr., New Rochelle
“They will see the Son of Man coming in
the clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13: 26).
We come in this week’s liturgy to the end
times, as we do every year in the final 2 Sundays of the church year and the
1st Sunday of the new year. We read and
reflect upon the closure of human history from the biblical perspective; upon
the Last Judgment and the completion of God’s plan for our salvation.
Even last week there was an allusion to
all that in the reading from Hebrews, altho it wasn’t the main focus of the
reading. We were told that Christ “has
appeared at the end of the ages” and judgment is coming, and he “will appear a
2d time … to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him” (9:26-28).
Today we read from Mark 13, the so-called
“Marcan apocalypse,” in which Jesus speaks of those same matters, in part
quoting from a prophetic hodge-podge (snippets from Isaiah, Joel, and Amos)
about the impending shaking up of the universe (Mark 13:24-25). If, from the Christian perspective, Christ is
the center of history—we mark our chronology “before Christ” and “in the year
of our Lord”—then his coming into history has begun the final age of that
history, the age of mankind’s reconciliation with our Creator and of the
universe’s renewal or restoration or redemption according to what God intended
for it from the beginning.
The 1st part of ch. 13, which we didn’t
read today, refers to “the great tribulation” that will come upon
humanity—wars, earthquakes, famines, and the persecution of Jesus’ followers
are mentioned (13:8-13). All of this is
associated with the destruction of Jerusalem, an unspeakable catastrophe for
Jesus’ people (13:14-22).
Our passage today starts the 2d part of
the chapter. Jesus—who is answering
questions posed to him by Peter, Andrew, James, and John (13:3)—moves from the
disaster of the Holy City’s destruction to the disaster of “those days,” a
prophetic phrase referring to the last days of human history, to the days when
God will manifest his justice, destroy evildoers, and vindicate his people.
Jesus quotes the symbolic language of the
prophets about the sun, the moon, the stars, and “the powers of heaven.” Earth and sky as we know them will be
overturned. Insofar as the heavenly
bodies represent the false gods of the pagans, they will be darkened, their
meaninglessness made evident.
Then, with a quotation from Daniel (7:13),
he invokes the coming of the Son of Man, who is a divine figure, as indicated
by his “coming in the clouds with great power and glory” (13:26); and this of
course refers to Jesus himself. In all
his godly glory, Jesus will return when the course of our universe is
complete. His angels will “gather his
elect, his chosen ones, “from the four winds, from the end of the earth”
(13:27). The prophets had spoken of
God’s gathering his scattered people and returning them to Jerusalem. Jesus broadens the ingathering to reflect his
commission to his apostles to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth (Mark
16:15,20), but he doesn’t say where they shall be gathered. The implication is that they are being saved,
even as “heaven and earth pass away” (13:31)—heaven here meaning, evidently,
the material heavens: the sky, the sun,
the moon, the planets, the stars, all of which have, metaphorically, been
darkened and fallen from the sky.
All material things shall pass. History shall come to a dead stop. But Jesus’ words shall stand: his word that God is faithful, that God has
elected or chosen his people for salvation and not for destruction, but that
all persons shall be accountable for their words and actions, and that his
people must stand fast thru persecution and thru any other tribulation. And the Son of Man will surely complete the
redemption he has begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment