"Keep Awake!"

Mark 13:24-37

December 3, 2017

I.

“Keep awake,” says Jesus.  That is the spiritual attitude that Jesus’ followers have to maintain.  In the little parable he tells here, the slaves placed in charge of the household are his disciples.  He’s talking about and to us.  When he says to keep awake, he means that we have to remain in touch with God’s reality, the truth he is and shows us.  We have to stay conscious of what is really going on around us.  We have to remain in him, even when everything around us seems to be falling apart.  

On the one hand, this means we continue to engage with what is true and good in our life, as revealed in him.  On the other hand, it also means becoming aware of how far short we fall, and how far the world has to go to be like him.  Perhaps we should use the old railroad warning — Stop, Look, and Listen!  We are to watch, wait, and anticipate the coming of God into our lives… yet at the same time we also have to recognize how messed up the world is.  Because becoming joyfully aware of God’s goodness and truth means also becoming bitterly aware of our evil and falsehood.  

Most of us are conscious of neither God’s truth nor our own falsehood.  We sleepwalk through existence protected by a thick foam of ego-centric rationalizations, self-serving narratives, long, distracting to-do lists, and just plain denial.  I am in that category myself, most of the time.  Staying awake is hard.  It is often positively painful.  We don’t want to do it.  It is way easier and more comfortable to stay blissfully asleep.

St. Columba used to advise his monks on Iona to pray “until tears come.”   His point I think is that if you’re not weeping, if you’re not overcome with the kind of grief and sorrow that Jesus blesses in the Beatitudes, if you’re not heartbroken about the way the world is and your complicity in it, you’re just not paying attention.  You’re not awake.  You’re still anesthetized against the pain of others, which is to say, the pain of Jesus, the Son of Man, on the cross.  You’re still snoozing in the self-serving delusion that everything is just fine.  It is the complacent, somnolent disease of the privileged.

“Stay awake” means don’t lose sight of the coming Kingdom of God.  But that also means recognizing and admitting the injustices and atrocities, iniquities and inequities, violence and depravity that characterizes our existence.  

Jesus’ call to us to stay awake looks ahead to the Garden of Gethsemane in the next chapter of Marks’ gospel, when Jesus is praying, grieved even to death.  He begs his closest disciples to stay awake and pray with him… but they can’t.  He is just about to be arrested.  He’s just about to be hauled before the court and  condemned.  He will be dead in like 12 hours!  And Peter, James, and John are snoozing.  “Whatever, man, I’m wiped.”  They don’t get it.

Staying awake is painful because it challenges our comfort and convenience; it undercuts our self-image. It assaults our hopes and dreams for ourselves.  It questions our habitual scapegoating of other people, blaming them for our problems letting them be the focus of our anger or fear.  If we stay awake we realize that everything we have depended on, everything we have been giving our allegiance to, everything we admire and desire, is wrong.  It is all godless nonsense.  None of it has done anything but evil and violence in the world.  It is all corrupt and false.  

II.

Jesus talks about how, at his coming, the “sun, moon, and stars” will be darkened and fall.  The sun, moon, and stars in this case are not the heavenly bodies created by God for our benefit and declared very good in the beginning.  I don’t think we’ve ever even seen those in their reality.  

No, Jesus is talking about the projected false gods upon whom the religious, political, and economic elite depend for legitimacy.  They represent the principalities and powers that organize and control this benighted and illusory world.  They are the self-serving, self-aggrandizing ideas that we hold in our minds about how great we are, and how much better we are than those other people.  

Today they are similarly the leaders, ideologies, institutions, media, and other dominant forces that generate the gravity that holds society-as-we-know-it together.  We still talk about famous and powerful people as “stars.”  We are subject to a superstructure of lies designed so that the very few at the top maintain and increase their wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else.

Jesus says that at the appearance of the truth, which is “the Son of Man coming in clouds,” these counterfeit lights are darkened, shaken, and brought down as the illusion they are.  These stars always fall, as we have even seen in the past few weeks with the revelations about sexual misconduct on the part of several powerful men.  In the real power of Christ’s light, the artificial sun, moon, and stars, the heroes around whom our history moves, always shrivel, darken, and weaken.  For he, Jesus Christ, is the true light that enlightens everyone, coming into the world.  And he outshines everything else.

Jesus is the One who is crucified and risen.  He is the One who comes.  As Son of Man he identifies with us in our mortality and our suffering, emptying himself to the point of a humiliating death on a cross.  At the same time he identifies with our true humanity, our immense potential as beings made in God’s Image.  

The Lord says he comes “with clouds.”  In Scripture, clouds do not block the light so much as reflect, and radiate, and shine with it.  In coming with clouds we understand that the Lord represents and manifests the all-inclusive height of heaven and the manifestation of the eternal and true Light from God.  The Son of Man gathers and attracts from the whole expanse of creation those who are awake and conscious enough to see him.  He calls together a community of wakefulness and perception.

This community sees him and lives in the power of his heavenly light.  We see him as the One who is lifted up; the One who is identified by his wounds; the One who pours out his life-blood for the life of the whole world.  As opposed to the abstractions of the invented gods of sun, moon, and stars, Jesus is real.  Jesus is flesh and blood, in which we participate in this Sacrament today.  We are the ones he gathers from the four winds and the ends of the creation.  We are the ones in whom people see the descent of the Son of Man, as by his power we establish communities of peace and justice, forgiveness and love.  We are the bright cloud of witnesses reflecting his light into the world.

III.

The centerpiece of Jesus’ teaching here has to do with the example of the fig tree.  “As soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves,” he says, “you know that summer is near.  So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.”  The things he sees taking place are told in this whole chapter of apocalyptic preaching in which Jesus identifies the dissolution, breakdown, collapse, and shattering of the reign of evil in the world.

Back in chapter 11 he curses a fig tree, which stood for the outwardly and apparently prosperous, but actually barren and fruitless, religion of the establishment tradition.  Then he continues up the hill where he forcibly throws the commercial interests out of the Temple, prefiguring its total demolition 40 years later.

If that fig tree means the end of the old religion, now the same image of a fig tree points to the emergence of something new.  It means the time of the revealing of the Son of Man has come.  The gospel turns immediately to the story of Jesus’ last couple of days.  The leafy fig tree means the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is near, and will shortly be revealed on the cross where the alienation between God and humanity, between God and creation itself, is resolved and reconciled.    

Being awake means being able to see what is going on.  It means being able to read the signs of the times that we may be oblivious to otherwise.  To some, certain events only mean that evil is settling in permanently.  It looks like an inexorable downward spiral of destruction to which the only rational response is to stockpile food and weapons.  The Messiah is murdered.  It appears to be the victory of death, oppression, injustice, and wrong.

But in reality this means just the opposite.  “Truly I tell you,” says Jesus, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”  That which the world thinks is the end, is really the beginning.  The apparent triumph of death is actually the uprising of new life.  Jesus’ ignominious, humiliating defeat, is in truth the ultimate and comprehensive victory.

Jesus himself is nothing if not a change-agent.  He is not a reformer in the sense of working within the system to make things a little better through compromise and negotiation.  He says the whole system is doomed.  “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down,” he declares.  

In the end, we can’t live both in this world and in the Kingdom of God any more than we can have both God and wealth.  It’s an either/or proposition.  We have to choose.  Each one of us has to choose.  And the choice is sometimes very stark.  Do we want to be successful?  Or do we want to be faithful and true?  Do we want to look good?  Or do we want to be good?  Do we want to go back to the way things were?  Or do we want to move into the way things will be?

IV.

Can we stay awake for this?  Can we take up the cross of identification with Jesus, and therefore with the suffering losers of the world, and therefore with the God who self-empties to become flesh to dwell among us?

What if the situation of the church today, characterized by losses across the board, is really God clearing a space for something new and amazing to happen?  What it all means that Jesus himself is at the very gates?

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