Sermons

Advent Sunday
Sunday 27 November at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Isaiah 64.1-9; Mark 13.24-end

Who is this that comes in splendour,
coming from the blazing East?
This is he we had not thought of,
this is he the airy Christ.

That's the first stanza of a poem by Stevie Smith. It's her reaction to Jesus on reading St. Mark's Gospel. In her poem, The airy Christ, she captures the mysterious vitality of Mark's Jesus. She sees him as the 'sweet singer' who longs for humans to hear him:

Those who truly hear the voice,
the words, the happy song,
never shall need working laws
to keep from doing wrong.

Today, Advent Sunday, is the start of a new Church year. For the next twelve months we shall be living closely at many of our Sunday Eucharists with St. Mark's Gospel, so it's probably worth getting to grips with it sooner in the twelve months rather than later. We've heard Stevie Smith's reaction: she is struck forcibly not so much by Marks' words but by the person Mark's words are about. Jesus. The Jesus who comes in splendour; the Jesus who sings the happy song. How attentively will we listen to that song? What will we make of the Jesus whom Mark brings to us; the Jesus who calls us, as he called his first disciples, to follow him, to take up the song with him and to teach that song to others?

Marks' Gospel is short, by some distance the shortest of the four New Testament Gospels. This brevity gives the Gospel a sense of urgency and onward movement. Mark gives no description of Jesus' birth, no information about his early years. You won't hear much of Mark's Gospel at Christmas. Jesus strides out of his home town of Nazareth into history, is baptized by John, driven by the Spirit into the wilderness and tempted by Satan - all in the space of three breathless verses of chapter 1. Matthew and Luke, by contrast, take sixteen and fifteen verses respectively. Mark's Greek is a bit dodgy in places - rough and ready, colloquial, everyday. The author may have been writing in a language that he wasn't quite comfortable with. But set to one side the brevity of the Gospel and the quality of the Greek. Mark puts his Gospel together carefully, allowing themes to emerge and unfold and, most importantly, allowing Jesus to challenge us at every point. The Gospel has been described as an invitation to discipleship, an invitation to revolution and an invitation to action now in our world, our church and our local neighbourhood. With that description in mind, let's look at this morning's Gospel reading from Mark chapter 13.

Up until chapter 13 Mark has given us a fairly straightforward story. Jesus has proclaimed the Kingdom of God and has shown, especially through his many acts of healing in the early chapters of the Gospel, that one of the chief marks of this Kingdom is grace. This grace has been shown in particular by the fact that those healed are often outsiders, those regarded for various reasons as unclean by the insiders, but unconditionally accepted and made whole by Jesus. He has formed around himself a community of disciples who, despite occasional flashes of insight, prove themselves to be rather inadequate and slow on the uptake. Jesus has spoken about his coming suffering three times and yet has arrived in Jerusalem to a triumphant reception from an ecstatic crowd. Now, in chapter 13, the story becomes less straightforward. Jesus speaks of the noise of battles, of the awful horror and now, in today's passage, of stars falling out of the sky and powers in space being driven off their course; he talks about how these signs are like the green leaves of the fig tree before summer, showing that things are about to come to fruition; but he warns that no-one except the Father, not even the Son himself, knows the day or the hour of God's salvation.

What on earth is this chapter about? An approach I've found helpful is to think of this chapter as the one in which we meet Mark's readers directly, understand what they are going through. Think about a group, probably quite a small group, of Christians hearing this chapter read to them for the first time. They might well have been in Rome, possibly somewhere further east. But wherever they were, these Christians would have been subject to the unpredictable and arbitrary power of the Roman empire; at risk of arrest, torture, death. So this chapter, as someone has said, is in the present tense for them. They do not know the details of God's plan. All they know is that they feel threatened and confused. They hear Jesus' words from inside their experience of troubled, dangerous and insecure times. Into this experience Jesus speaks words of reassurance: no-one knows the day or the hour except the Father. Those who follow me, Jesus says, must be 'on watch, be alert'. Or, as a contemporary writer John Vincent has put it, '(salvation) is not by knowledge but by alertness, not by education but by discipleship.' And remember, these frightened followers of Jesus will be hearing these words of his in full knowledge of what his ultimate fate was. They will hear these words as from the lips of one who has trodden the path of suffering to the end, who has met the destructive power of death and broken that power through the resurrection.

There are brothers and sisters of ours in other parts of the world who are living through chapter 13 of St. Mark's Gospel as I speak: Theresia Murangke, Ida Lambuaga and Alfina Yarni Sambue, three teenage Christian girls, beheaded on their way to school in Indonesia two weeks ago by radical Islamists; Pakistani Christians around the same time in Sangla Hill, 50 miles west of Lahore, finding themselves under siege as the majority community burnt churches and other buildings in the Christian quarter; an underground Roman Catholic priest and twelve priests-in-training arrested by the authorities near Beijing just before President Bush visited China last week: four still in custody in an unknown location. These, and many other Christians, are living though chapter 13 of St. Mark's Gospel knowing what might lie ahead in the later chapters of their lives, yet knowing also that Jesus has gone ahead of them. We must not dismiss Mark chapter 13 as difficult, or embarrassing, or puzzling or irrelevant. We must read it through the eyes of our brothers and sisters who are braver than any of us are ever likely to be called to be.

Which brings us finally to our own Christian community - in the UK, in Leeds, in Roundhay. Where are we in the sequence of events that unfold in Mark's Gospel? We may not have reached chapter 13 - one reason, perhaps, why we find it so strange - but we are, for all that, involved in the story. We are involved in a story in which God becomes a part of his creation, announces the Good News of his Kingdom and invites us to become part of it. This is the happy song of which Stevie Smith speaks in her poem. Let us listen, respond, and take up the words ourselves as we journey into God's future together.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay