Bodies in Turmoil

Reflections on the Lectionary for December 1st

Photo by Anh Tuan T on Unsplash

Sunday December 1^st is not only the first Sunday of December, the beginning of one of the most intense months of the year in everyone’s calendar, but for churches that follow the lectionary, it is also the first Sunday of Advent, the season that inaugurates a new church year and constitutes one of the busiest parts of it. I’ve always found it fascinating—and appropriate—that the liturgical year begins with Advent. On one level it makes sense to begin with the expectation of Jesus’ birth, but I could also imagine other ways to do it. The new church year might have begun with Jesus’ birth, rather than the expectation of it, so that Advent would be the closing to one church year and Christmas would be the beginning of another. Or, I could imagine a world in which Lent or Easter marked the transition from one year to another, or Pentecost. All of those alternate church year models offer something different for thinking about time and the cycle of themes and theological frameworks that make up a liturgical year. And the fact that many churches use Advent as the starting point means that a special meaning is attached to the season. The themes of the season—longing, expectation, waiting—are a reminder that the arc of Christian time never quite returns to earth, and the movement from the present to the future is never quite completed. We begin again in suspense and hope, choosing not to know the ways that hope has been thwarted by history and circumstance.

The lectionary for the first Sunday of Advent is thin, in some ways. The passage from Jeremiah 33:14-16 speaks of a branch springing from David, and Psalm 25:1-10 reads to me like a generic psalm of trust and dependence. I can’t make much of the passage from 1 Thessalonians, at least as it relates to Advent. (It’s a section full of the kinds of pleasantries that populate Paul’s letters).

But the gospel text, Luke 21:25-36, is the kind of apocalyptic grenade that the lectionary often throws into the first Sunday of Advent. The passage as it appears in the lectionary this week kind of drops the reader into the middle of the story, but there’s more continuity than there seems. This passage from Luke is in some ways a continuation of the passage from two weeks ago, Mark 13:1-8. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have a version of this apocalyptic section, and this week picks up in Luke where two weeks ago left off in Mark. This is the scene where Jesus and his disciples pause to rest near the Jerusalem temple, and one of the disciples marvels at the building. You think that’s an impressive building, Jesus asks the disciple, well, pretty soon it won’t be standing at all.

The lectionary this week picks up there, with Jesus’ lengthy description of the signs and portents of the Son of Man’s advent, and some of the implications of the coming of the Kingdom of God. It’s not a happy scene. In reading through this passage on the first Sunday of Advent, though, I want to draw our attention to something that stands out to me in this passage: the role of the body. Sometimes religion, theology, and the Bible can feel abstract and faraway, like something that happens mostly in our heads. But in this section where Jesus is foretelling and describing an apocalyptic moment, a moment of disaster and revelation, the action is all happening in the body, and the senses are called to full attention. I don’t know whether the author of Luke intended it this way or not, but when it’s time to describe upheaval and turmoil, the text asks the reader to feel it all, either demanding that the reader undertake some embodied response, or taking note of the ways bodies are affected by the coming turmoil.

• In verse 25, the reader is asked to turn their head to the sky and witness the “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,” evoking a feeling of smallness amidst a chaos that seems almost cosmic. If you’ve ever tilted your head back to look at the heavens, you might have felt that dizzy feeling that comes from that posture, and the disorientation that soon take hold from looking straight up without a horizon to cling to. There’s a reason why we often stargaze lying down. If we tried to act out verse 25, we might get dizzy ourselves, getting lost in the heavens and their “signs” of impending change.

• Also in verse 25, Jesus predicts confusion brought on by “the roaring of the sea and the waves,” sound that overtakes us and forebodes trouble. There is a deep history in the Hebrew Bible of a motif that’s often called, in German, kaoskampf—chaos-struggle. This is an ancient pattern that shows up in religions across the region, in which the most basic struggle of the universe is the struggle of the god or gods to create order out of primeval chaos, often embodied in water or the sea. In Ugaritic mythology a deity named Yammu was a persistent opponent of the god Baal, and Yammu (or Yam) also shows up in Egyptian stories. Yam became the Hebrew word for sea, linking the Israelite God’s struggle against chaos to the struggle against the inchoate waters. Notice that Genesis starts this way, with God encountering chaos (“the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters,” in 1:2), and the Exodus story of the passage through the Red Sea (the Yam Suph) is probably another rendering of this same story. Here in Luke 21:25, the roaring of the sea and the waves once again appears as a harbinger of chaos and danger, and they cause confusion among the nations.

• Verse 26 brings fainting. If you have ever fainted or seen someone faint, it’s a strange thing—a kind of abandonment of the body by the mind. I fainted once, in the fifth grade, when I locked my knees while playing drums in the band. I can still remember the helplessness of slumping toward the ground. It would be even scarier to “faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,” thinking about the ways things have gone sideways as your vision narrows.

• Verse 27, though, opens the eyes again. “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory,” it reads—a striking vision indeed, even if it leaves us short on specifics. This vision of the Son of Man (presumably Jesus, though Jesus himself is not terribly specific about it in this passage from Luke 21) is similar to the one in 1 Thessalonians 4:16. It’s interesting that Jesus’ return is linked to sight in particular in both of these passages, and linked to seeing the heavens. Just like in verse 25, there might be a dizziness to the experience of tilting one’s head back to see the Son of Man descending in a cloud.

• Verse 28 offers a command: “Stand up and raise your heads.” This is interesting to me, because it implies something about both the past and the future. First, it implies that in the past, the reader was sitting with their head slumped. This reminds me of the iconography of the Judaea Capta coins that were minted by Roman emperors after the defeat of Judea in the first Jewish War. If you click this link and look at the coins, you’ll see a seated and slumped woman—this is the personification of the defeated Judea—towered over by a Roman soldier. I’m not suggesting that there is any direct connection between these coins and the command in Luke 21:28 to stand and raise your head, but I do think it speaks to the kind of past of dejected defeat that the reader is being called out of. And for the future, the command suggests that despite all the fear and foreboding that the passage has already described, the coming of the Son of Man is going to be a time to be on your feet and attentive, “because your redemption is drawing near.” While we might read “redemption” as primarily a spiritual category today, ancient hearers and readers would have understood this as a wide-ranging category having to do with personal freedom and bodily autonomy. Imagine the woman from the Judaea Capta coin standing up and raising her head; it would be an act of defiance and a claim to dignity. That, I think, is the kind of posture that this text is calling for.

• In verses 29-30, Jesus tells the people listening to look at the fig tree, and all the trees, and “see for yourselves” the signs of the changing of the seasons. Those of us who live in seasonal climates know this pattern well; often it’s the trees that can tell us when the seasons are changing, even if the weather hasn’t caught up yet. This is probably a direct instruction to the people listening to Jesus that day to look at a particular fig tree, but it’s also a generalized command to everyone hearing and listening to pay attention, to watch for signs in the world that things are changing. I think it’s especially remarkable that in a time of intense political and military change, Jesus doesn’t instruct his followers to watch the movements of armies or the decrees of rulers. Instead, he tells them to watch the natural world for signs. Again in verse 31, seeing and knowing are connected: “see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”

• Verse 34 guards against weighed-down hearts. While some of the earlier references to bodies have had to do with posture or sensory experiences, a weighed-down heart is really about a holistic sense of well-being (or not). We’ve all had experiences of having hearts that are weighed down, and we know what it’s like to try to move through the world with that feeling. “The worries of this life” are a real struggle for many people—most people—and this verse is acknowledging that, while also admonishing us to not let that get in the way of hope for the future.

• The passage ends in verse 36 with a run of embodied descriptions: alertness, strength, and standing. Alertness is really the key idea of the whole passage, so it’s natural for it to be repeated here. Strength is important, the passage says, because of the turmoil that’s coming. And in the end, this verse imagines the reader standing—again, perhaps a reference to the posture of dejection that can accompany defeat—before the Son of Man.

All of these embodied descriptions and command add up to a passage that pays a lot of attention to the body. Jesus was living in a time of increased geopolitical tensions, on the eve of a cataclysmic war. The Gospel of Luke was likely being written in the aftermath of that war and its destruction, and so Luke’s descriptions of Jesus’ words are probably tempered by the knowledge of what a terrible conflict could bring to people’s bodies. Those of us who are living in the United States right now probably have a sense of the embodied stakes of living in uncertain times. We might not be facing annihilation at the hands of an occupying empire, but we do face new uncertainties about political violence, control of our bodies, protection of vulnerable people and their bodies, and even our place as embodied people in a changing natural world. This passage from Luke might seem like it’s far away and long ago, but in many ways we are encountering some of the same threats and feelings in our own bodies that Jesus was describing long ago.

As Advent begins, then, in the aftermath of a contentious and consequential election and as a busy season and a new church year get underway, pay attention to your body. Notice what it’s telling you and how it’s guiding you. Pay attention to how your body is being guided and commanded, and pay attention to what it needs. And pay attention too to the natural world, as Jesus suggests, noticing how the patterns of the seasons can show us things before our minds can know them. If Advent is about the seasons changing and time turning, and if it is about something new entering the world, then it makes sense to pay attention.