A Hopeful Apocalypse
A Sermon by Seminarian Paddy Cavanaugh on the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, November 14, 2021.
Mark 13:1-8
Today I want to talk about the apocalypse. That’s the topic of my sermon; the apocalypse. Don’t be nervous.
How many of you have been to the National Cathedral, or any cathedral, you can raise your hands. Good, thank you. Now I want you to think about being there right now, as much as you can remember. You can close your eyes if you’d like. Think about where you’re sitting, where you’re standing. Imagine the towering high altar filled with glorious statues of saints and angels. Imagine the massive stone pulpit where Martin Luther King once preached. See the blue and red light of stained glass spilling down onto the pews and onto walls around you. Smell the faint hints of old wood, lit candles, and incense lingering in the air. Just sit there for a moment in your mind. Take it all in.
Now I want you to imagine that you are standing outside of the cathedral some distance away. As your neck stretches upward to behold its magnificent spires, you hear the foundation suddenly begin to groan. Cracks begin to snake up the façade and the bell tower and buttresses start to lean further and further inward until gravity takes hold and the entire structure collapses with a tremendous, body-shaking sound. Once the dust settles, all that lies before you is a massive pile of stones. You can open your eyes if they were closed.
Now I didn’t just blow up our National Cathedral for fun. Or because I think it should be torn town. In fact, I love our National Cathedral, all cathedrals really, all beautiful buildings really. If the Cathedral or St. George’s or the Capitol building were to come down like Notre Dame, I would be as devastated and heartbroken as any of you would be. I promise there is hope here.
I blew up our National Cathedral because it’s what Jesus asks his disciples to imagine in today’s Gospel reading, which comes from a section known as the ‘little apocalypse of Mark.’ Don’t worry, it’s just a little one. While gathered outside of the temple in Jerusalem the disciples remark at the temple’s magnificent grandeur, only to hear Jesus reply with the haunting words “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” He warns them that before this happens there will be natural disasters, global political conflicts, and false messiahs leading people astray with mistruth.
Why does Jesus speak of this disquieting image? Surely some of it is critique of empire; the way we smuggle it into God’s holy dwelling place. Earlier in Mark’s Gospel Jesus stormed into the temple courtyard and literally overthrew the relations of production by overturning the tables of the money changers whose financial practices exploited the most poor and vulnerable. And to be fair, the same critique could be made of the Church today, which has long benefitted from unjust economic relations – stolen labor, stolen wages, stolen land.
But Jesus words are not just heavy handed political commentary that could ring true in practically any century, any decade, any year, as much as they certainly do to us now. To fully understand the profundity of Jesus’ iconoclastic proclamation, we need to go back in time. In the first century Jewish imagination, the Temple represented far more than the center of religious life – imagine if the national cathedral, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, and congress were combined into one. That’s what the temple represented. It was the crux of Jewish society and the fault lines Jesus describes running through it are fault lines in civic, economic, and religious life. For Jesus to speak of the temple’s destruction was to speak of the destruction of the institutional foundations of society itself, which had become uncertain, no longer trustworthy to many living in a time of questionable civic leadership and seemingly irreconcilable dividedness on what to do about it.. It’s a hauntingly familiar apocalyptic vision. It’s a little too close to home.
So what about this apocalypse Jesus speaks of makes any of this better? Despite the place it occupies in popular imagination, apocalypse is not merely about the cataclysmic end of the world we see playing out obsessively over and over on movie and TV screens or some farfetched rapture event, it is a specific genre of literature in the ancient world that is concerned hopefully with God’s cosmic action in the spiritually disordered material world. Apocalypse, from the Greek word apokálypsis, literally means “revelation,” as in the unveiling of things previously unknown or unseen. Apocalypse is about revealing; revealing that which our current judgment impairs us from seeing and understanding. Revealing the ways in which our social, personal, and political realities are undergirded by a divine, spiritual action of God. It’s a perspectival realignment from earthly existential anxiety to cosmic hope in God’s providence. It’s about heaven being made real on earth even as we speak, even when it is obscured from our eyes and our better judgment rightly tells us that for many there is hell on earth.
In this way, apocalypse can and should be rightly regarded as literature of the dispossessed. The apocalyptic book of Daniel, which was written during a time in which the temple, the law, and the land of the Jewish people were threatened by empire, speaks hauntingly of “a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence” until a great prince, a protector, shall come to deliver God’s people. Apocalypse in Jewish tradition is good news for the poor and dispossessed, it is the cry of an oppressed people, “the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Standing firmly in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition Jesus speaks of a promise that even amongst the endless litany of bad news, which he warns will keep coming, that the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven is being proclaimed and made real. The Kingdom of God is now.
Let me put it to you this way, think of the things that are most troubling your heart right now. Maybe you’re sick and no one knows it. Maybe a loved one is sick. Maybe you’re struggling to find purpose in life. Maybe you feel totally alone. Maybe you feel alienated from family members or neighbors whose worldview seems irreconcilable with your own. Maybe you’re concerned about the kind of world your children will inherit.
These valid worries about the fault lines in our personal and communal lives are not death throes, Jesus says, but birth pangs – contractions of the spirit which point towards the birth of a new reality in which the disordered spiritual and material conditions which oppress body and soul will be rectified under the final salvation of the Christ. Paradoxically this salvation has already happened and is happening yet.
Salvation from an apocalyptic perspective is not about a one-time personal salvation from some fiery vision of hell, it is about the ongoing communal salvation of all humankind from the political, economic, and spiritual forces which hellishly alienate us from the love of God. When the cosmic scales are balanced, it’s the conditions of love that conquer the conditions sin and death. All will be put right under the subjection of Christ, all is being made new under the subjection of love. And death itself will be made a footstool under God’s feet.
If this seems hard for you to believe right now, then it should be. But let me tell you this. Faith is not just about giving intellectual assent to things that are logically implausible. Faith is about ordering our lives according to Christ’s promise and ethic of love, even as the walls of our personal and communal temples appear to be cracking. Faith involves believing and acting as if we have a critically important role in God’s plan for the redemption of the world. Your life and the life of this community is so deeply beloved as to be entrusted by God with the mission of restoring all people with God and each other as the body of Christ on earth; a mirror image of heaven itself.
Our God is a God who deals in the material. Earthly matter of bread and wine is transformed into divine matter. Jesus body, human flesh and blood, becomes the blueprint of divine revelation in the world. Our bodies, human flesh and blood, become the construction tools of divine renewal in the world. Through Christ and through us the divine reality becomes the world’s reality. That is what is revealed to us in the incarnation and in the Eucharist. When we partake of it we become one with Christ and are made tools of God’s working. That is the apocalypse of the dispossessed. You, me, and all those around us are the working hands who will build the Kingdom of God’s holy design.
Now I want you to imagine you are back in front of the fallen cathedral. The collapsed walls are glowing with light. Every fissure, every crack in the stone reveals a glimpse into eternity. If you were to peer through the cracks you might catch sight of heaven breaking into the broken up world. What does heaven look like? What does God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven look like? Does it look the same as before? Or is something new being birthed on the cornerstones of faith, hope, and love. Imagine the apocalypse, imagine what new heaven and new earth is being revealed right now. Can you see it? Can we imagine it? Come and taste it, Christian workers, come and take this bread. Then once your soul has been fed by it, take up your hammer, there is rebuilding to be done.