November 19, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Daniel 12:1-4a (5-13) A time of anguish such as has never happened.
Psalm 16 Conserva me, Domine
Hebrews 10:31-39 - A fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living
God. The righteous one shall live by faith.
Mark 13:14-23 The desolating sacrilege/the stars are falling.
(My Lord! what a moanin'!)
The readings today all come from people writing in times of persecution, calamity, disaster. We who sit here, so few and so comfortable, are a long way from these texts, and a long way from the calamities of the Palestinian or Iraqi or African or most Latin American peoples. Most clergy in the U.S., except for the Berrigans, Blaise Bonpane, and a dozen others, have not much more to worry about politically than whether the IRS will disallow some of their deductions. Clergy conferences deal with the subject of how to get the most retirement benefits possible, and comically, no one goes away hungry from a "hunger luncheon." The Internet lets us sign all manner of petitions to express our opinions without having to stop traffic or go to jail. Some courageous witnesses have their travel restricted if they make nuisances of themselves and upset the State Department, but if you play your cards right you can even go to Cuba without a hassle. I know. I did dit. You might have problems with Hebron in Palestine, or visiting Iraq to visit the oldest Christian church in the world, and pray in aramaic with our Jewish Lord. But a U.S. passport is imperial protection.
If we want to see the church which can hear and decode the messages from the writers of the various centuries that come to us in the pericopes today, we must listen to them as read by Latin American, African, or Middle Eastern experience.
In north America, we don't have the right reading glasses, the right experience, the Captain Midnight decoder, to read these lessons from the perspective of today's persecuted and murdered witnesses and martyrs. Fundamentalist churches build monstrous science fiction scenarios from the Book of Daniel, in the comfort of their upwardly mobile praise assemblies, to give themselves a sense of superiority over those who don't shout at church, but in our proper parishes we ceremoniously save these texts for a warning at Hallowe'en, as the old world draws on towards night, and the church skips happily towards its liturgical judgment day, a shivery shift before Advent.
"There will be a time of anguish such as has never occurred
since nations first came into existence"
"Many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."
This was written about a hunded and sixty five years before Christ, when the Syrians had invaded Israel, and Antiochus IV had desecrated the Temple. Jews were hanged for keeping Sabbath, or forced to eat pork in public, or executed for saying their prayers. Renegades--those who went along with the program--got jobs, safety, political power. The Maccabean brothers began the revolt, and the book of Daniel was circulated as an underground illegal tract, to inspire resistance. It purported to have been written much earlier, in another century, so that the police would not recognize that it was talking about the present--just as John's apocalypse would function in a later time. They were contraband documents.
Few of us will have had the experience of reading a book which it is illegal to own. I did so a few years ago in Guatemala, where two books were illegal in the late 80's -- police would arrest you if you had a copy of the Latin American Bible or the Popol Vuh. The Latin American Bible is illustrated with photos and art from contemporary life in Latin America, and commentary to point out the significance of Scripture in that life. The Popol Vuh are the ancient scriptures of the indigenous Mayan people, considered anti-government and anti-dictatorship, and so they are indeed, as is the Bible when read as it was intended. It is full of secret messages, some of them in code, for oppressed peoples. The Book of Revelation could not be read in the Russian church under the Tsars, for the same reason.
The gospel comes also from a time of persecutions, and sounds like a piece of the Revelation of St John the Divine, written when the church was under fire from the Roman Empire: "When you see the abomination of desolation usurping a place which is not his ('psst--let the reader understand')", Mark writes. Mark's readers would understand very well what was meant. The "abomination of desolation" is code, a reference to the Roman imperial standard--the "Stars and Stripes" standing in the Temple in Jerusalem, "usurping a place which is not his." The Christian church was forced to flee Jerusalem around 70 A.D. when the Jewish revolt provoked the Romans into desecrating the Temple and finally setting fire to it and demolishing it.
All that remains today is the western wall, and the Dome of the Rock, built since, which the Israelis may indeed destroy as well, for it is symbolic of Palestinian faith, as the old Temple of Herod was symbolic of Jewish national aspirations.
The apocalyptic language of Daniel and Revelation, and of this chapter of Mark, and other places in the Bible written in this code of resistance, is language constantly mis-read and mis-interpreted by preachers and congregations who want to avoid the message: Judgment is certain in all centuries, and God's vindication of the persecuted cannot ultimately be thwarted by tyranny. Not Antiochus Epiphanies, not Caesar, not Anastasio Somoza, not Bull Connor, not Agosto Pinochet, not Ronald Reagan, not Bill Clinton. No lie can live forever. The lie of U.S. hegemony, its racism, capitalism, sexism, militarism, imperialism--cannot live for ever. And if anyone says to you, "Look, here is the Christ!" or "Look, he's there" -- Do not believe it.
Ordinarily the Church, taught by the apostles and the early church, prays for the heads of government and all in authority, not because they are friends of the church--they usually turn out not to be--but because they are in a position of responsibility towards the preservation of human life, and--we believe--have a duty towards God to execute social justice and maintain peace in the world. I am always irked when I hear the chief of State prayed for in the inercessions as "William our President," or "George, our president", in the same language we use to pray for "Frank, our Presiding Bishop". So far as I can see, the apostles bid us to pray for "THE EMPEROR", not "OUR" emperor, which he is NOT! In Kingdom politics, to which we owe our allegiance, and to which Kingdom we pledge our allegiance in the Creed, it is JESUS who is our Ruler, our King, our Pantokrator. In the evangelium today we hear another term used for an arrogant and presumptuous head of state, who in the year 40 A.D. tried to set up his own statue in the Temple in Jerusalem, to be revered as "Our Emperor". That term is "ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION. It was, Mark tell us, the way Jesus would have referred to Caligula. His real name was Gaius, but we know him by his nickname, "Caligula", which means "Little Boots," just as we know George Bush as "Dubya," a nickname, or William Clinton as "Bill." Gaius pretended to be divine, and historians for a while went all out in ridiculing him. About 40 A.D., in an attempt to wipe out Jewish resistance to the Roman occupation, Little Boots ordered his statue set up in the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most holy place of Judaism, and it was only his assassination that prevented it. Thirty years later in 70 A.D. the Romans under Titus, the son of Vespasian, completely destroyed Jerusalem in a great slaugher, and in 73 A.D. the last flames of Jewish revolt were extinguished at Masada, the mountain fortress, where the last of the revolutionaries commited suicide rather than fall into the hands of he Romans.
It is in the conext of these events that Mark writes his gospel and he places this preaching of Jesus about the Supreme Tributilaton as the last of Jesus'preaching, just before his own arrest and execution. It's hard to imagine Jesus bidding his disciples to pray for "Little Boots our Emperor" or the Evangelist Mark bidding us to pray for "Little Titus, our Emperor Vespasian's boy," as if they were the church's protectors and heroes. When we pray for the president of the U.S., we should pray for them as Jesus prayed for Herod:
"Go and tell that Fox that the Son of Humankind intends to go his own way." We pray for them indeed as Jesus bid us to pray for our enemies, we pray for them as Paul suggests, so that the church may be free of their interference or persecution, that the gospel may be preached without hindrance. "When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be"(Mark here adds: "note well"--we say in Spanish "Fijate!"-- Get this!)
Mark's readers at the end of the first century knew without being told that it was the Emperor Caligula's statue he was talking about. We didn't know that from the Bible alone, did we? We had to read commentaries to find that out, information from history, from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, from scholars like Gerard Sloyan and Reginald H. Fuller, the Proclamation Commentaries, to find out about that. So when Jesus' preaching on the Last Things is interrupted by the evangelist Mark to say "Let the reader take note" we are being told that we need to educate ourselves about the world around us, and its events which are important to the understnding of the gospel and of Jesus' teaching and of what stance we must take toward governments, and what action we must take to preserve human life and mainain options for the people of God. We are being told to read the Bible with it in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We cannot even under-stand the Bible if we take it out of the life of the world it was written in and is a response to. The people of God live in hope and expectation of a revolutionary new way of governing humankind in justice and peace in the context of the things Jesus talked about. For instance, the destruction of our Temple--the institutions we have constructed for our established religion. "Look, teacher, what wonderful stones and wonderful buildings," said his disciples to Jesus. Who at once responded, "You see all these institutions? Not one stone will be left upon another. All will be torn down." Jeus preached judgment, identified fake messiahs, false prachers. Did Jesus have our current TV evangelists and fundamentalist yahoos in mind? Of course not. But we had better! (Let the reader understand!). He spoke of "wars and rumors of wars, nation against nation." Did he have Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, or Palestine in mind? Of course not. He wasn't a fortune teller or a prognosticator. But we had better have these things in mind when we har Scripture, when we do hermeneutic, when we pray, when we talk about God. Was Jesus talking about earthquakes in Managua, or floods in Bangladesh, or Hurricanes in Honduras? Of course not. The Church's teaching is that Jesus was and is fully human, with all of our human limitations, that he didn't have Xray vision into the future. But he had what he expects of us--the good sense to be "on our guard" and be alert and aware, so that nothing on the front page of the Chicago Tribune or Managua's La Prensa will blow our minds or destroy our hopes. "Be constantly on your guard," Jesus says, "You'll be taken to court, you'll be beaten in religious meetings". Fact is that today it's not us Christians of north America who are likely to be beaten in any kind of church. Jesus was alking to his contemporaries, and the homily about trinbulation was addressed to those who were at that time, when Mark wrote his gospel, being excommunicated from synagogues, driven out of town, indicted before imperial government --that's the context in which the gospels were written. The circumstances that Jesus describes are real ones--a man is forced to flee without time to pack his luggage, or go home to say goodbye. A woman is pregnant, another nursing a baby. Pray this won't happen in winter, it would make it all the harder on people. These are real people, fleeing political persecution. If you want to know where inour time things like this are happening, pick up the newspaper, tune into CNN. Let the viewer understand.
You'll find it all there--the genocide commited with U.S. and Israeli guns, across the decades, from Guatemala to Lebanon, from El Salvador to Hebron. The flight of thousands from their homes, the setting up of the abomination of desolation--the U.S. flag--all over the world--the Caligulas like Oliver North, the blasphemies standing where they ought not. The way in which the world's religions are prostituted in the service of the market, and of capitalism.
How important it is that we read the Bible under the rubric, "Let the reader understand!" -- that we hear the voice of Jesus speaking in Mark's gosepl, and the voice of the eternal Christ will soon be speaking to us again in letters from Witness for Peace workers in Colombia, and of Mennonite peacemakers in Hebron. There is a message of hope in Jesus' preaching about the Supreme Tribulation: he says, "I assure you, the heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." "As to exact circumstances, exact days or hours, only God knows. But be constantly on watch."
There is a future which God has prepared for the people of God. And it is not Little Boots or Second Growth Bush or Patriotic Gore who are in charge of that future. It is the one we know as our Friend, who is our King-Emperor, our President-Elect, whom we can pray for, and pray to, as our Lord and our Liberator, and our President, and our God, Nuesro Seņor Jesu Cristo, who is blessed for ever. AMEN.
Please sign my guestbook and
view it.
Statistics courtesy of WebCounter.