The End is Near November 18, 2012 Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 13.1-8

            The end of the world went O-for-two in 2011 and 2012 isn’t looking good either.

            Radio preacher Harold Camping made a considerable splash when he scheduled the rapture for May 21, 2011, to be followed five months later to the day by the destruction of the world. You may have noticed it didn’t happen. Now warming up in the apocalyptic bull pen is December 21, 2012, the sell-by date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

            I don’t blame people for their fascination with this kind of things. Jesus’ disciples shared the same itch. When their rabbi started talking about a Hurricane Sandy-sized hurt hitting the most majestic building in their world, they asked a natural question: “When will these things be?” Our Lord’s answer is a little unsatisfying. Jesus reaches deep down in his prophetic grab-bag of apocalyptic imagery and lets loose with a lot of rhetoric about natural child birth and zodiacal indigestion and stories about fig trees and CEO’s on business trips.

            What does all this mean? An earthquake hit Dallas a while back; should I be worried?

            Look for a moment at what’s happening: Jesus is a prophet, arguably The Prophet, the Messiah. He turns his back on the control panel of the ultimate piece of religious technology that his own faith and history recognize, hikes across the Kidron, enthrones himself on the Mount of Olives, takes in the view of that very structure, and predicts its destruction. (And, unlike Harold Camping, history proves Jesus right: the Romans leveled the place some three decades later.) Ezekiel saw the Shekinah cloud of God’s glory depart from a corrupt temple taking pretty much the same route. (Ezekiel 10-11) Jesus warns the disciples that God won’t honor godly architecture or activity when God ceases to be its center.

            Of course, this makes it tough on a would-be redeemer. Jesus already knows that a few days later the Romans will execute him; he plans to let the temple of his body take the heat that the temple building deserves. And he warns his followers that we have the same job: He calls us to embrace the unjust suffering that comes from living the Jesus-life in a God-rejecting world.

            When will the world end?

            Well, my world might have to end today when the gospel requires me to put self aside and bear the well-deserved sufferings of another in order to demonstrate God’s love. And personally, that Mayan thing sounds a lot easier.

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Doug