Old Things Made New

Homily for November 17, 2024
The Twenty-Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
Mark 13:1-8

As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

This morning I’m going to preach on the Gospel lesson from Mark that we just heard and also the question,“Where is God when we suffer?”  But first, the book of Job.  We didn’t hear from Job today, but the care that Job’s friends initially showed Job in his suffering sheds some light on today’s Gospel lesson from Mark and on the question, “Where is God when we suffer?”

Remember how in the book of Job, Job loses everything – his flocks, his family, his health –  and his three friends come to comfort and console him.  The author writes of their arrival:  

When they saw [Job] from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him,for they saw that his suffering was very great. (2:12-13)

For seven days and seven nights, Job’s friends offered Job extraordinary care.  They were present with him in his suffering; they simply sat with him, not speaking a word. And then (if you recall the story) they opened their mouths… and became the worst friends ever.  And the more they said – and they said a lot, about twenty chapters’ worth – the worse they made the situation, again and again blaming Job for all that had happened to him.  It was not the friends’ words but their silence that would have had the greatest potential to be of help to Job in his suffering.

Getting back to Mark…  The background to this morning’s text is the First Jewish Revolt, which began in earnest in 66CE with the massacre of a Roman legion by Judean rebels in a mountain pass not far from Jerusalem, and which more or less ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70CE.  As the Romans put down the rebellion, they destroyed Judean towns, displaced populations, and hunger and disease ravaged the land.  Though Mark’s community is not thought to have been in Judea, yet – as news of war often does to us today – the news of the war and of the destruction of Jerusalem sent shock waves throughout the empire. People then might well have wondered – as many wonder today – “What is happening to our world?” and, “Where is God?” To help bring healing and comfort to his community, in his Gospel Mark writes an apocalypse in which Jesus foretells Jerusalem’s destruction:  “Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus asks...  “Not one stone will be left hereupon another; all will be thrown down.”

Mark’s manner of caring for his community is different from, say, John’s. In the “Prologue” that opens St. John’s Gospel – “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” – [in his Prologue]John gives a preview of the Gospel’s themes, such as Jesus is life, Jesus is light, Jesus is truth, so that by the end of John’s Prologue we have a sense of what is coming, and we know nearly as much about Jesus as Jesus will later say of himself.  But Mark, on the other hand…. Mark is silent about many of our questions.  “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ,” begins Mark.  But Mark never explicitly says what is the “good news…” And throughout his Gospel, Mark is silent about many things, such as:  Why do the disciples have “no faith?”  Why does Jesus sternly order people not to talk about him?  Why does Mark begin his Gospel so abruptly, with no infancy narrative? And why does he end his Gospel so abruptly, with no resurrection appearance?  Though John tends to write at-length and to spell things out, in his Gospel Mark is in many ways silent.

It could be that Mark writes in such a “silent” style because Mark, thought to be the earliest of the Gospels, didn’t have the benefit of years to more fully develop a sense of who Jesus is and what Jesus means.  Or perhaps Mark wrote in a“silent” style because his audience lived closer in time to the events of the Gospel and would have implicitly understood things such that Mark could be brief and did not need to thoroughly explain. Or perhaps Mark wrote in a “silent” style simply because he had a different, more minimalist, aesthetic than did the other evangelists.

But I wonder if Mark wrote with so much “silence” because – as Job’s friends initially gave him extraordinary care and support by their silence – Mark likewise knows that his community, deeply troubled by the recent destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, would find healing and comfort more from silence than from a multitude of words.  

Mark’s apocalypse in chapter13 immediately precedes the beginning of Jesus’ Passion in chapter 14.  Being the careful writer that he is, Mark’s placement of these two narratives side by side surely is intentional.  I wonder if Mark placed Jesus’ Passion narrative immediately after his apocalypse so that, without Mark having to explicitly say so, Mark’s community might see Jesus present with them in their suffering.  As Job’s friends did at the first (before they opened their mouths), Mark describes Jesus in his Passion as(in effect) coming to sit in silence with Mark’s community.  For at his trial, Jesus was silent – “Have you no answer?”  the high priest asked(14:60).  “But he was silent”(14:61).  And the next day, “Have you no answer?” Pilate asked (15:4).  “But Jesus made no further reply” (15:5).  And in Mark, in contrast to the other Gospels, until the very end Jesus on the cross is silent.  In Mark Jesus says nothing to those crucified with him; in Mark Jesus does not speak to his mother, “Here is your son,” nor to his disciple, “Here is your mother.”   As did Job’s friends, Jesus in Mark sees that the people’s “suffering is very great,” and Jesus “sits on the ground” with them and “speaks not a word.”

As we consider our own world in which we, too, hear of “wars and rumors of wars” and in which “nation rises against nation,” we may wonder where God is. If we can learn to live with the discomfort of God’s seeming silence and resist the urge to fill the space with too many words, perhaps we will come to see, perhaps even on the very next “page,” that Jesus has been with us all along.  Jesus sees us in our suffering, that sometimes it is very great.  And when he sees our suffering Jesus “sits on the ground” with us, often “speaking not a word.”  And in a strange way, his silence and his cross – and his body and blood – perhaps more than words, have the power to heal us and remind us that, no matter the circumstance, God is with us, this is God’s world, and – though we may not always be able to see it – (as the Prayer Book puts it): “Things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made… Jesus Christ our Lord.”