Apocalyptic Hope

Reflections on the Lectionary for the First Sunday of Advent

I’ve been writing this Substack long enough now—a little over a year—that I cannot any longer reliably remember whether I have already written about a passage or not. One of the passages that shows up in the lectionary this week, Mark 13:24-37, feels familiar, like I might have already said something about it here before. If so, I can’t recall the particulars of what I might have said. (I hope if I wrote about it already, that I contradict myself now! That would be fun). I did write something on this passage for the Visual Commentary on Scripture, which you can find here. But whether I’ve written about it before or not, this passage is jumping out at me from the page, so it feels like the right one to focus on this week.

Mark 13 is a fascinating passage for a lot of different reasons. It’s one of the most apocalyptic parts of the New Testament outside of Revelation, and it’s one of the key reasons why scholars think that all four gospels were written after (or possibly alongside) the siege of Jerusalem that was part of the Jewish War. The passage seems to be describing or predicting just the kind of siege that ended up taking place, so—whether Jesus predicted it in his own lifetime or not—it’s the kind of thing that the gospel writers thought worthy of including in the stories about his life that were written down a generation or two later. Certainly, this kind of apocalyptic vision—a call to be aware and ready for a coming change or calamity—would have been plausible during Jesus’ lifetime, which was spent under Roman occupation and under constant threat of violence and upheaval. It makes sense that Jesus might have said something like this, and it makes sense that, with the benefit of hindsight, the gospel writers would have written it down to show how prescient Jesus had been.

Why is this passage here, in the readings for the first Sunday of Advent? We tend to think of Advent as a season of light, expectation, waiting, and above all hope. But hope does not come in a sanitary sealed container. Hope is the remainder of despair, and it comes from the suffering that the world seems to have in full supply. Hope only appears as an option alongside hopelessness, as twin responses to the wretchedness of the world. So Advent begins this way, not with babies in mangers, but with prophetic screeds (see the Isaiah 64:1-9 passage that’s also in the lectionary this week) and ominous undertones. Advent is a response to suffering, and an answer to it—perhaps too tidy an answer. But it’s also an expression of suffering, and an effect of it. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,” goes the Christmas hymn. It’s as true today as it has ever been.

I saw a New Yorker cartoon this morning on Instagram. It says, “After a nice long weekend, it’s so hard to get back into the swing of fearing the collapse of society.” How true! It’s dizzying, pairing the leisurely rhythms of a long Thanksgiving weekend with horrific news stories of violence and war both home and abroad. We are all processing the epidemic of gun violence, the onslaught of climate change, burgeoning inequality, metastasizing racism and nationalism, and wars in Ukraine and central Africa and now Gaza. And we are all also getting a dozen emails an hour about Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, pleading with us to spend money we might or might not have. The New Yorker cartoon feels viscerally right to me because of the whiplash between the ways we cope with the stress of life, and the prospect that life itself is unsustainable or unstable. How can you go back to work after a long holiday weekend, when the news is full of mangled and dying children?

Mark 13 comes from a similar set of questions, I think. Apocalyptic literature, as a genre, presumes that the world as it is is unsustainable, and therefore expects the world’s transformation or else its end. The unsustainability of the world might be because of how unjust it is, how corrupted it is, or how frequently the enemies of God or the enemies of The Good are triumphing. Different apocalypses have different views of that. But what makes an apocalypse an apocalypse is the idea that some new truth or reality is about to be revealed or made clear, and that God is preparing to intervene to set things right again—or to just bring the whole thing to a satisfying close. In Mark 13, it’s the “Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” that will set the apocalypse off, with a promise that “heaven and earth will pass away.” Your perspective on those potential events—whether you would welcome the Son of Man’s intervention or welcome the erasure of heaven and earth—probably depends on your experiences of suffering. If you’re living on the powerful side of privilege and plenty, you might hear promises of destruction as a threat. If you’re living on the underside of the world, you might get your hopes up.

I think the Christian Advent story splits the difference. Advent does not promise the obliteration of the world but its gradual turning; Advent imagines injustice as a boulder that a river of prophets has finally begun to erode down to sand. Advent begins with the cries of prophetic voices, and it relies on them throughout, because those voices point to the intractability and durability of suffering and violence and wrong. But it’s also claiming Jesus as the inheritor and beneficiary of those voices—as the last rush of water that washes the last of the boulder, the last of the sand, away.

Jesus’ words in Mark 13 are more dire. Instead of clearing the riverbed of prophetic justice to make way for an uninterrupted flow, Mark 13 fantasizes that the river might just go away. “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.” Mark 13 is a dream not of the world’s transformation but of its destruction; it does not leave much of a world for the meek to inherit. I think that’s because it was written down during a time of conflict and pain. It’s easy, in times like those (and times like these), to think that the world cannot possibly go on, that we must be living in the end of days. People in Jesus’ days thought so, maybe Jesus himself thought so, and lots of people since have thought so. And it’s not just religious people. I’ve heard people claim that because of climate change we have a generation left, a dozen years left, or only moments left. Or that we are all at risk of annihilation from nuclear weapons. Or that war will spill out from a place like Gaza and consume us all. And those things might be correct! The world is a dire place, and our catastrophizing about it might someday prove to be right.

But the story of Advent takes a path that is at the same time more hopeful and less hopeful. Advent, as it takes up the protests of the prophets, assumes that the world will live to see another day. Advent asks us to turn our eyes to a pregnant woman, the great symbol of investment in a future, and to ask what difference the child she carries might make in the world. That’s a hopeful way to view the future, because it trusts that the child will matter. But you could view it as a hopeless way to view the future too, because it means that we are not getting off the hook in any world-ending apocalypse anytime soon. It can be a little hopeless, to know that the transformation of the world will keep grinding along imperceptibly slowly. It can feel more hopeful to imagine it going up in flames.

Where Advent’s message and the message of Mark 13 agree is here: the world cannot keep being the way it has been. The world might be unsustainable, or it might be too unjust to be allowed, but something must be coming that makes a world-changing difference. It might be destruction, like the unmaking envisioned in Mark 13:24-27, or it might be something just over the horizon, like Mary’s baby. But both ways of thinking agree on this one thing: the world cannot stay the way it is.