A Human Being of Peace Coming From God
Every year on this Sunday I want to shout “Happy New Year.” Today, as we begin a new year in the church, it can be a new beginning for each of us. God forgives us our past failings and does not hold them against us. When God forgives, God forgets, and allows us another chance to learn and follow God’s will.
This year (B) we will be mostly concentrating on Mark’s Gospel, the earliest and shortest of our four Gospels. Today’s Gospel is a hinge between the last Sunday of the year past, Christ the King coming to judge the nations (ethne) and the New Year we begin now. We get Mark’s take on the Second Coming:
In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
When Mark (remember he was like a secretary to Peter) wrote this the early community was suffering under Roman persecution. They thought and hoped with all their might that their Lord might return soon and rescue them. The skies were darkened from the smoke of Rome’s burnt earth policy. Jesus stated the above in the apocalyptic language people understood, namely: God would come and violently destroy their enemies. This would be “Sacred violence” because it was violence (people thought) sanctioned by God (God is on our side and will wipe out our enemies). Many Christians today use the Book of Revelation in the same way: God will return and help us in our fight against evil and finally destroy all our enemies!
This is in the same apocalyptic tradition of today’s Isaiah reading
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When Jesus uses apocalyptic language that speaks of God’s return and violence over our (we always think we’re on the right side) enemies, he does so because that is the language people understood. He starts there, but leads elsewhere. Jesus does teach about the End, the last days (eschatology), but the big difference is that God will come to save and rescue us from our own human violence done to one another and it will be completely in a non-violent way. God will not add to the violence that we already do to each other that we see every day in the news. Furthermore, God will, and always has, identified with the victims of violence. The key to everything is the Cross and the Resurrection that followed almost immediately after!
When we hear “the Son of Man coming on the clouds,” we should think: A human being of peace is coming from God. Jesus came to show us how a human being should live among other human beings: taking care of the most vulnerable among us. If the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the prisoner, are cared for, this will lead to peace and harmony and more blessings for everyone (including the ones who are called upon to share more because they have more). This is what Jesus taught and the example he gave. If the least vulnerable (the ones with plenty of resources who can isolate themselves from the most vulnerable) are the focus of a society, the result is a world of escalating violence, often “sacred” violence to protect what you have from others. Jesus knew and taught this (think of the story of Lazarus longing for the scraps from the rich man’s table).
We gather here and break bread every Sunday as a school of faith. We are trying to learn Jesus’ way of living and mirror it in our daily lives in this world.
Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.
In Advent we are preparing for the First Coming of Christ who came among us as a tiny, vulnerable child. But we keep the Second Coming of Christ always in mind. We get many calls to “Wake Up.” Wake up and turn away from and have nothing to do with violence toward other human beings. One of those “Wake Up” calls is today.
Come Lord Jesus!
Amen!
John+
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| St. Alban |
Saint Alban Episcopal Mission (English, Anglican Communion) meets for mass every Sunday at 10:00 A.M. (see welcome letter at sidebar) at Casa Convento Concepcion, 4a Calle Oriente No. 41, Antigua, Guatemala.
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| The Reverend John Smith, Vicar 5235-6674 cell telephone (502 country code) |
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