ADVENT I 2011

Albrecht Durer --- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

“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”. Mark’s Gospel for this first Sunday in Advent is undeniably apocalyptic, a feature that makes it problematic for those main-stream Christians who have difficulty in believing in an apocalypse. They are understandably anxious to distance themselves from lurid conceptions of ‘the Rapture’, or some such religious extreme.

Yet the passage can hardly be set aside. This is not the wild prediction of some eccentric Nostradamus. It is an extract from the Christian Bible that is expressly appointed in a Lectionary that the larger part of the Christian world now acknowledges and uses. So how are we to understand it?

It is perhaps best to start with this thought. Any attempt to think about time and eternity simply has to invoke imaginative language. We cannot think about the limits of history in historical terms. So, for instance, the Genesis stories are graphic representations of the great truth that God created time and space, a cosmic event whose mysterious nature science is just dimly beginning to understand. It is not so strange, then, to think that God will also bring this great cosmic experiment to a close. If so, however, we must think about it pictures that are no less graphic.

The Bible is not science. It offers us something that science cannot -- religious and theological insights into human nature and the human condition by which we can live. We are clay, and God is the potter, Isaiah reminds us. This means that both the number of our own days, and of the whole cosmos is determined in God’s good time, not ours. No one – not even God the Son -- can predict its end. This is one half of the message of Advent.  The other half tells us that even the end of history can be regarded with hope rather than fear, because, as St Paul says, we need not lack in any spiritual gift in advance of Christ’s final revelation.