Proper 28, Year B: Mark 10:46-52
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 14, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” – Mark 13:8c[1]
“…the end is still to come.” – Mark 13:7b
A few ladybugs have recently found their way into our house, and Neela, our bigger dog, has been quite curious about them. Unfortunately, she hasn’t yet figured out that those are what taste so terrible and keep making her sick, so after playing with and drooling on them for a short while, she starts to gag and soon demands to go outside. Back in Seattle, if she weren’t feeling well, I would wander the neighborhood with her so she could eat the broader-bladed grass that soothed her tummy. But the grass at our new place is different and doesn’t seem to work the same way.
Friday morning Neela had another run in with a ladybug, so while our older dog, Titan, snuggled into his warm blankets on the sofa, I let our gray girl loose in the frosty backyard to find what she could to calm her stomach. After scrambling around the lawn unsatisfied with the available grass, she finally turned her attention to the host of pecans that had fallen from our tree. The nuts turned out to be a decent substitute, settling her nausea and slowly diminishing the disgusting taste in her mouth.
While Neela was grazing, a ray of sunshine drew my attention to some of the lower pods still hanging on the tree. The green husks had begun to split and peel away, and the golden shells peeking bashfully from inside were too tempting not to pick. As I collected them, I started wondering what the tree might think about what I was doing. Is it aware of all this fruit it’s spent so much energy producing? Is it glad someone plans to use the nuts, relieved that its long year of work won’t go to waste? Or maybe it feels a sense of regret or futility about its constant annual cycles of production and loss resulting in few—if any—surviving offspring.
And how about the nuts themselves? They’ve spent their entire existence sheltered inside their pods, nourished, protected, and cared for in relative security and isolation. Do they dream while they grow, imagining what they might someday become? Does a thrill rush through them as their husks crack open and they experience the warmth of direct sunlight on their shells for the first time? Are they excited to explore what’s waiting beyond their branch, or is the harvest, for some, the end of the world?
There’s something about people that feeds on both anticipation and fear. Dystopian literature and movies have been a mainstay of American culture for generations. Even before the discovery of the New World, Western history frequently revolved around attempts to either cause or prevent the apocalyptic coming of Christ. Depending on who you ask, either we’re right on the edge of the end times or they’ve already been testing us for thousands of years. Our obsession reminds me of Neela and her ladybugs. A tiny idea twitches just enough to catch our attention, and we start to toy with our wonderings about the future. Even once we uncover distasteful aspects of our imaginings, we keep pawing and sniffing and licking, exacerbating the source of our discomfort and spreading its worrying effects until, in a full blown panic, we can only save ourselves by gorging on an overabundance of other distractions we hope can remove the terrible flavor and reduce the anxiety that continues to haunt us, all the while forgetting—and then going right back to—what it was that caused the problem.
Though far from the emphasis and purpose of the whole book, the Bible includes several end-of-the-world explorations, too. They pop up occasionally in the Hebrew Scriptures—especially among the prophets like Daniel. In the New Testament, we mostly find them in Revelation and a few of the epistles. Jesus himself references “the end of the age” on occasion. But today’s Gospel launches his longest discussion of it: the entire 13th chapter of Mark, which scholars title “the little apocalypse.”
What provokes this entire episode is nothing more than curiosity. Jesus makes a side comment at the temple, and the apostles begin to question him about it. As individuals continue to hound him about the remark, Jesus appears unconcerned, basically responding, “It’ll happen when it happens, so don’t worry about it.”
But that isn’t a great answer for most of us. We want to worry about it. It’s that anticipation/fear dynamic that drives so much of our lives. We want to be prepared for what comes next. We hope to find some sort of secret, an advantage that will provide us at least a little security in the face of the unknowable. So we dig and explore and read into whatever details we can find about what’s to come. Self-proclaimed prophets continue to announce the definitive answer only for it to turn out wrong time and time again. Why is it so hard to read the signs, to predict the coming of Christ and the end of the world?
The reason is simple. However, it won’t do much to assuage our anxiety, so we suppress its reality time and time again. The truth is, there is no secret to discover about the last days, no enigmatic code hidden in the Bible. The apocalypse is impossible to predict, not because of some veiled conspiracy or intentional mystery but because:
the world is always ending.
The world is always ending. It always has been, and it always will be.
“In the beginning,” Adam and Eve’s idyllic world came crashing down as they were exiled from the Garden of Eden. Later, Noah faces the terror and isolation of his family being the only survivors of the greatest natural disaster human society had ever known. The promise of Israel’s preservation and safety in Egypt under Joseph turns to ash a few generations later, only for that world of slavery to end in the miracles and trials of the Exodus. Who knows how much longer after that, Daniel delivers an apocalyptic vision of the fall of an empire and yet another end of days. Mark itself was likely written down as the Romans were razing Jerusalem to the ground. But even then, the End of All Things just kept happening—and still keeps happening. From the dawn of history to the present day, the world has always been ending.
But though the Bible bears witness to our multiplicity of endings from the earliest chapters of Genesis to the final words of Revelation, the same stories and passages reveal a parallel truth:
the world is always beginning.
Maybe one of the best ways to sum up the story of the Bible is with the question, “What do we do now?” Exiled from Eden, what do we do now? Freed from and forced out of Egypt, what do we do now? Jesus is nowhere to be found, and God’s enemies have erased Temple of the Lord from the face of the earth. Again. So, what do we do now?
It’s like those pecans in our backyard. The days are growing short, the husks are popping open, and the tree is beginning to shut itself down. As their familiar world comes to an end, what can all those the nuts possibly do now? Forced from everything they’ve ever known, what might their future hold? Their time on the branch is over. What’s coming will come. They have no choice but to drop from the tree.
But their end is not the end.
The tree itself continues to stand. Its future has never relied on the success or failure of any one crop. So what does it do now? It remains faithful to its purpose, resting, renewing itself, and gathering strength for the coming spring. And if the nuts are faithful in facing the coming change, if they awake to their potential, in the end they might just find that in the end, the reality is that they weren’t simply little nuts. They’re the beginning of something new. They’ve been seeds all along, and the dawning world is theirs to build.
The world is always ending. And the world is always beginning.
So with that finally in the open, what do we do now?
The answer is simple: we remain faithful. Like the pecan tree tending its fruit throughout the year, we remain faithful. Like that same tree resting in anticipation of its own renewal, we remain faithful. When we make ourselves sick with anticipation and fear (or ladybugs), we remain faithful. In the face of death and endings, as we’re released from the only existence we’ve ever known, we draw on the life of God hidden inside us and break through the tough shell of our own fear to forge a bolder, better reality—one shaped by the past but looking to the Reign of the Heavens.
We honor God—faithfully. We follow Christ—faithfully. We listen for the guidance of the Holy Spirit—faithfully. And no matter the circumstances, we faithfully continue to love and serve our neighbor, knowing that
“This is but the [ending]…” “…the [beginning] is still to come.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.