The End is Nigh (but not as nigh as all that)
Proper 28/26th after Pentecost; Mark 13:1-8
This last reading from Mark on the Sundays of the year (the Sunday before Advent or “Christ the King,” will find us moving across to John again) is set during Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, but has him addressing the end not so much of this immediate story as the end of all things.
The passage begins with the Jerusalem Temple, which has been prominent in Jesus’ visit, including as the setting for last week’s Gospel with the story of the defiant widow. Now the disciples admire its glory, but Jesus predicts its end. The Temple as Jesus knew it was one of the greatest of ancient monuments, and the awe it inspired is depicted here. It had been hugely expanded and beautified by Herod the Great in the years immediately prior to this. Josephus the contemporary Jewish historian wrote in terms that echo the disciples’ admiration of the stones:
Now the temple was built of stones that were white and strong, and each of their length was 25 cubits, their height was 8, and their breadth about 12;1 and the whole structure [was] visible to those that dwelt in the country for a great many stadia…the largeness and fine workmanship of which was a surprising sight to the spectators, to see what vast materials there were, and with what great skill the workmanship was done (Antiquities 15.11.392-5)
The stones that can still be seen at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (the Western or “Wailing” Wall) were not part of the actual shrine, but the retaining walls of the platform Herod had created to expand the precincts. The existing space above (now often referred to as the Haram al-Sharif or al-Aqsa) retains the dimensions of Herod’s complex, but has none of its structures.
The subsequent events of the year 70, when the shrine was razed during the Roman response to Jewish rebellion, have resonated through history. Even before those events Christians had already been thinking about Jesus’s person and ministry, and their own community, as a different sort of priest, sacrifice, and temple respectively (see 1 Cor 5:7, Rom 3:25, 12:1 and Hebrews, passim). The destruction of the Temple gave impetus to such creative reuse of cultic ideas. Something similar took place in Judaism, where existing ideas that prayer (see Ps 141:1-2) or Torah study were a kind of sacrifice became more popular.
While Mark’s Gospel may have been written after the events of the Jewish War, Jesus’ prediction of the Temple’s end was well-remembered and is clearly attested across the Gospels—even to the point of embarrassment, when it becomes a false accusation (see Mark 14:57-9). Yet Jesus was in good company; Jeremiah and Micah had predicted the same thing for their versions of the Temple (see Jer 7:14; Micah 3:12), because of the injustice of Israelite society and not just because of the Temple itself.
Here as in those cases there is an implication that the corruption of the Judean leadership and injustice throughout society as a whole would lead to disaster. Temple and sacrifices were not the primary source of that failure but were implicated, and the prophets were firm in stating that sacrifice would not be the answer if the poor were exploited and lies had become the norm in public life.
Many Christian commentators however, even from very early times, have missed the connection. They went far beyond the prophets (who make the Temple the symbol of the nation’s justice and fidelity to God) or Paul (who affirms but expands and rethinks Temple and sacrifice) to make those events a sign of rejection not of corrupt national leadership but of Judaism itself—or even a critique of material, physical religion in general over against purely spiritual things. This trope has often been wielded in antisemitic hands, as well as by Protestants attacking Catholicism, and takes on a new guise even in secular settings, when whiteness patronizes or attacks the religious rituals of traditional cultures.
For Micah and Jeremiah however, the Temple was not just the center of religious ritual, but a symbol of the nation and its integrity, as well as of its fate. For Jesus, the Temple now points beyond itself too, and just as for the prophets to a much wider reality than what we now call “religion.” The predicted destruction of the Temple is also about something more Judea or the failings of Near Eastern politics and empires, but points to the state of the whole world and to cosmic judgement. The conflict that was coming was in fact the same one Jesus had been engaging in from the beginning, with the forces of evil.
It is one great irony of Christian history that the people who have often paid most attention to this and similar passages about end times do not actually read them. On the one hand, Jesus does interpret the events of his own time and those to come as signs of a divinely-appointed end, broadly speaking. On the other—and this is much more the point here—he points out that these are “birth pangs,” events which speak to the state of the world but not to the actual end. As Morna Hooker puts it, the message is something like “Do not get too excited: the End is near—but not as near as all that.”2 When things really do end, there will be no need for clarification.
As well as warning against assuming things are further along than they really are, Jesus cautions about claims that specific events and people have a significance they do not. So the primary answer to the question posed by the disciples here is not something like “here is what to watch out for” but “Beware that no-one leads you astray.” The emphasis is on the danger of thinking that events or persons we encounter are directly revelatory of divine will.
The warning that “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray” lands with particular force at present, given the bizarre messianism invoked by some during the recent US poll, claiming divine election (in the other sense!) for a candidate. This is a textbook example of that problem; such characters and their misuses of faith have occurred before and in other places too.
Mark’s Jesus tells his disciples that signs, even of such dramatic force as the Temple’s end, are general indications of the state of a world waiting for God’s definitive intervention, rather than points on a timeline we can track. Christians will understand they now live in some sense “between” times; the chaotic state of the world is not something to which we can be indifferent, but neither can we claim to see what God is “up to” (despite some recent claims along those lines). What God is doing in the world remains mysterious, except where love and justice are found, for these are unmistakable. For them we may indeed look forward and hope, and name them when we see them. While we do not read this far in Mark, the end of this apocalyptic discourse provides our focus and call: “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” (13:37).
11m x 5m x 3m; Josephus however gives other dimensions in other versions of his descriptions.
The Gospel According to Saint Mark. London: A. & C. Black, 1991, p. 301.