Axis Mundi

Propers: The First Sunday of Advent, AD 2023 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Don’t look now, but I think we might’ve missed the end of the world.

One needn’t wander far afield to find the scholarly consensus that Christianity began as a failed apocalyptic cult: a ragtag band of desert zealots who expected an imminent end of the age, only to have the globe keep on rolling unperturbed. In this reading of our history, the early Church expected Christ to come back tomorrow—and here we are some 20 centuries later, still waiting for Him. Or at least pretending to.

It’s true there’s been no shortage of breakaway Christian sects, from Montanists in the second century to Jehovah’s Witnesses in the twentieth, who set specific dates to Jesus’ Second Coming, and were sorely disappointed when He simply did not show. Yet our understanding of apocalypse, at the end of this age of the world, is more complex, more nuanced, dare I say more spiritual, than what we typically tend to assume.

Let us allow Scripture to interpret Scripture. The Hebrew Prophets often speak of the glorious Day of the Lord, when God shall rend the heavens and come down, to visit justice upon the wicked, vindication for the righteous, and liberation to the oppressed. They speak allegorically, using fantastic images of chaos in the natural world to represent the toppling of worldly powers. Mountains quake, stars fall from the sky, vast conflagrations envelop the land—all of which stand in for political, economic, and military upheaval.

The Prophets do not speak of literal monsters, literal disasters. Rather, they describe empires as beasts that should and shall be slain. The rectitude of God will not spare an evil king, regardless of his horses or his spears. Might does not make right in the Scriptures. Or to paraphrase a latter-day prophet of our own: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is what prophets do. They don’t so much predict the future—that’s for sibyls and soothsayers—as they speak truth to power in their own day.

When Ezekiel prophesies resurrection, preaching to the valley of dry bones, he is first and foremost prophesying the resurrection of Israel as a nation, as a lost kingdom that God will raise up from the dead. They’ve managed that several times now. When Daniel prophesies the Messiah, the coming cosmic priestly King, he seems to speak in riddles, about statues with feet of clay and rocks hurtling from heaven. We know how Jesus interpreted that: the Rock was Simon Peter. The feet of clay were Rome.

All of which is to say that we have no indication in the Hebrew Prophets that there would be only one Day of the Lord. The Day of the Lord occurs whenever beauty, truth, and goodness win out, against cruelty, oppression, and violence. There are many Days of the Lord in the Scriptures. Whenever the nation is saved, whenever the slaves are set free, whenever the cruel are defied, there has God come down.

This tradition continues for centuries, with Prophets proclaiming the Days of the Lord. Though admittedly, by the time of Jesus, it all seems to have come to a head. By Jesus’ day, everyone was expecting the Messiah. Not a messiah, mind you, like the anointed ones of old, but the Messiah, the Son of Man, sent from heaven to set all things right.

Yet note that even then, while searching for the Star of a supernatural Savior, people still expected a political salvation. That’s what the Zealots wanted. That’s what the Apostles wanted! All of us expected Jesus to unsheathe the sword, kick out the Romans, and rebuild the nation once and for all. The Kingdom of God would be a worldly kingdom, of course! Just, y’know, better.

Naturally, the Messiah would bring about the Day of the Lord. But just as this Messiah wasn’t like His predecessors, was in fact what all of them had been building toward, so His Day of the Lord wouldn’t be like other Days of the Lord, which came and went. He was supposed to set things right for good, permanently. He was to inaugurate the end of this age, and to usher in the Kingdom of our God. Jesus promised us this. He said that we would see Him again, that He would fulfill His mission within that generation.

So—did Jesus fail? Did He break His promise? Are we waiting for a day that never came? The Apostles didn’t think so. Neither did the authors of the New Testament. They’re actually pretty clear on this, even if their viewpoints somewhat vary. For John, the end of the world was the Cross. That alone was Judgment Day. The old order passed away and the reign of Christ on earth began. For the author of Hebrews, the end of the age is complete with Jesus’ Ascension, hallowing heaven as our High Priest.

For Luke, it was Pentecost, the 50th day following the Resurrection, when the Holy Spirit of Jesus poured forth from the heavens upon the Apostles, and they became the bold and boisterous Body of Christ. St Peter, in Luke’s telling, goes out to proclaim that this day, Pentecost, inaugurates the prophesied final days, when the sun would turn to darkness and the moon to blood, with fire and smoky mist—“That’s this day!” Peter cries. The flames are the fire of the Spirit.

For Matthew, the end of the age appears to have been the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in AD 70, within one biblical generation of Jesus’ Crucifixion. For Jews and Christians alike, the world that they knew died with the Temple at Jerusalem. It was such a traumatic event that the Book of Revelation was written to make sense of it. The old order and age had passed away. Matthew took this loss to be the rebirth of our world.

As for Paul in his epistles, well, honestly, it’s hard to tell just what he expected to happen. I don’t think that he himself quite knew. Paul’s letters are perhaps the earliest parts of the New Testament, written before the destruction of Jerusalem. He doesn’t know what’s coming. On the one hand, he seems convinced that something big will happen soon, that Christ will come again at any moment now. On the other hand, wheresoever he goes, he is laying a long-term foundation, a Church that will span generations.

That first century proved to be a time of wild upheaval, when kingdoms toppled like stars from the sky. It would take decades, indeed centuries, for Christians to try to make sense of it all. It must’ve been terrifying and exhilarating and confusing and wondrous. But one thing they knew: come what may, Christ was with them in the Holy Spirit, in Word and in Sacrament, in the chaotic community of the Church, in the beggar at the door, and in our neighbor in his need. The world as they knew it had ended; a new one was being born.

But what of Mark? Mark is the eldest of the Gospels, considered the most basic, the most primitive, and so the most authentic. What saith Mark of the end of the world? Let us return to our reading for this morning. 

“In those days,” Jesus says, “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.” This we immediately recognize as the same prophecy that Peter holds to have been fulfilled at Pentecost. “They will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds,” sounds rather like Jesus’ Ascension. “He will send out His angels,” may also be rendered as sending out His messengers, His Apostles.

Then comes the kicker. “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.” This, I think, is the line that gives the game away, because each of those four times corresponds to part of Jesus’ Passion as recorded in Mark’s Gospel, this Gospel. Indeed, at His Passion in Gethsemane, Jesus finds His Apostles asleep, unable to keep awake.

Jesus here speaks of the end of the age, the end of the world as we know it, while clearly  describing to us His Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Mark is spelling it out for us that the end of the world has come—and we all missed it, slept through it, because it came as a Man on a Cross, a King with a Crown wound of thorns. What must that mean for our world, that we murdered our God with our hands? What exactly have we ended, and what has He begun? Such are the questions that make of us Christians.

I think we must consider seriously the wisdom of the early Fathers of the Church, many of whom understood the Second Coming of Christ as an eternal event, beyond all space and time. It is forever before us, behind us, and with us even now, the eschatological horizon toward which all of history bends. Whenever eternity breaks into time, there is the end of the age. The many Days of the Lord are one and the same. Thus is the Cross the axis of the world, the axis of every world.

This much I know for certain: that Christ is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Behold, He makes all things new.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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