I am much puzzled by Time in the New Testament. The Gospel announces the arrival of a new world order and a new Creation, both in the ministry of Jesus, healing and heralding the Kingdom of God and in the Resurrection. And yet there are also passages such as that just we heard from St Mark’s Gospel which suggest the kingdom and the Resurrected world are not the last word, but that perfection, along with final judgement, are yet to come and come soon.
In our Gospel Jesus is clearly talking about a future event. He is talking about the warnings and dangers which will be experienced before a critical moment, a judgement and a turning point. The world will not be the same place or indeed a place at all, after the Second Coming, the Last Judgement and perhaps the End of Time.
What then can a Second Coming mean? Or how is it compatible with the new order which Jesus promises, indeed ushers in, that is the Kingdom of God or Heaven? Why would the perfection of earthly life to such an extent that it can be called the Kingdom of Heaven, need to end?
It’s plain, of course, to us that the New Creation or the Kingdom of Heaven as we experience them are very far from perfect. The terrible events which Jesus predicts are all too obvious now and, depressing although the state of the world seems right now, there has scarcely ever been a time when man’s greed or fear has not generated the hatred needed for war and oppression. I believe the gift of the Kingdom is essentially that love can overcome human wickedness; it is the promise that the work we undertake to bring about justice and generosity is worthwhile; it is the promise that righteous living is a possibility. How well we have achieved that potential is something on which we shall be or are judged, but it seems unnecessary and inappropriate that the judgment should andbe delayedbring with it the end of that heavenly world.
Perhaps Jesus’ meaning in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel is a literal prediction of the destruction of the Temple and the crushing of the Jewish revolt some 40 years after Jesus spoke these words. That disaster had almost certainly happened when St Mark’s Gospel was written. Jesus’ words are not however unremittingly threatening ; terrible although they are, they include some glimmer of hope; a woman’s birth pangs should result in a baby and new life and joy. Later in the chapter Jesus will compare the portents to a fig tree putting forth new shoots with the promise of Summer and fruitfulness.
The disaster that was the destruction of the Temple could, however, be seen by both Jew and Christian as having a positive consequence; the old ritualistic and sacrificial religion based in the Temple was finished for good to be replaced by the Rabbinical emphasis on righteous living , a shift very similar to Jesus’s teaching which coalesces service of God as service, and love, of our fellow men.
John’s Gospel makes it clear early on that Jesus saw the place of the Temple in religious observance as similar to his own body; it would be destroyed but raised again transfomed in three days. The words spoken in Mark’s chapter 13 immediately precede the final narrative leading to the crucifixion and there is sense, perceptible only with our hindsight, that the portents predicted allude in a symbolic way to the crucifixion the outcome of which, after all the pain, will be the joyous new birth of resurrection, the opposite of death.
But interpreting Jesus words as referring however obliquely to the crucifixion and resurrection, rather slides over the distinctly temporal and cosmic imagery used. I suggest there is little avoiding the puzzling fact that Jesus is apparently predicting an event in the near future and appears to have miscalculated by something over two thousand years, so far. There have been countless famines, genocides and savage wars but we are still waiting for a second coming. Either, it seems, we are misunderstanding the nature of the Second Coming or the nature of Time- or, of course both.
It is perhaps itself the idea of a Second Coming that has helped to give western thought the fixation with time as a continuum; one thing – one damn thing- after another. The writers of the Hebrew Bible and perhaps Jesus himself, did not see time in this way; for them events were continually repeating themselves in a cycle- most notably of exile, transition and return. On this basis the second coming was not in the future in our two-dimensional sense, but could be seen as ever present, or at least ever approaching on the cycle of existence. In a similar way our liturgical year returns again and again to the story of our redemption, the events of which we experience through remembrance with joy and sorrow.
It helps to see the implications of this way of looking at history, and life, in the Second Coming as the Last Judgement. The Greek for judgment is Krisis, from which derive both critical and crisis. The Second Coming is an ever-present turning point; an evaluation and judgement of individual’s and society’s behaviour, final in the sense that it will be about the things which ultimately matter. That judgement is now and takes account of the wars and famines and other disasters listed by Mark but which resonate so terribly today. They are disasters for which man is ultimately responsible and the consequences of which he faces now.
Chapter 13 ends with the famous passage in which Jesus urges us to be ever vigilant like the servants of an absent proprietor “because we do not know when the master of the house is coming” The fear of judgement can be judgement itself; waiting for punishment can be as bad as thing itself. But equally the promise of the kingdom of Heaven should make us as joyous- and as industrious for it -as the delight in its achievement. A delight we may see only fleetingly and occasionally but which is nevertheless as comforting and reassuring as the shoots of the fig tree presaging spring.
Amen