S. Pentecost 24.09 “In the End is my Beginning” Mark 13:1-13

Woody Allen (back when he was still funny) once fretted that: “If Nietzsche is right and everything will happen again and again, an endless cycle of the eternal return, then that means I’m going to have to sit through the “Ice Capades” again. And again…” A chilling thought, then as now, I’m sure.

We live much of our life in cycles; which is why Nietzsche’s gloomy vision of the eternal return is compelling for many. Fall and winter, spring and summer cycle round and around, again and again. We rake the leaves, watch the trees go bare, shovel a bit of snow, yearn for spring, see it come, smell air moistened with fresh rain, see the fields green up, feel the air warm with summer, delight in the end of school term, bask in the lazy July days by the beach, and then, before we know it, kids are back in school, and we’re raking the leaves again and wondering how it all went by so fast. And it seems to go by faster and faster with each succeeding season, doesn’t it?

I read somewhere that reincarnation is a much more widespread belief in our world than resurrection. The prison house of cycles is one most have given up ever escaping. Disney certainly promotes it with their “Lion King” mythology and the “Circle of Life” pounded into our heads with the endlessly repeating drum and bass tracks. Business cycles and market cycles dominate our thinking and the game is figuring out where on the cycle we’re at now, how long till the worm turns again and things improve. And we see the merchants gearing up for another Christmas cycle and the jingles will start being drummed into our head next week in all the stores until by the time Christmas finally comes, we’re sick of them.

Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Passover. It was the third one for Him and His disciples, third one since He’d hit the road with them three years before, preaching a Gospel of freedom from the old rat race we’re all on. Jesus lived His life on earth in the cycle of the church year, Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, the three big feasts, marking the cyclical return of things like everyone else. So Moses had commanded the faithful, and Jesus followed the pattern with His disciples, kept the feasts, year after year.

But this particular year, this particular feast, third one in His public ministry, He has a little bombshell to drop on the disciples. Herod built the most magnificent temple Judaism had ever seen, right on the spot where the first temple of Solomon had stood, and where the doughty house of Zerubbabel had replaced it after the exile. One of the things I like about the new Lutheran Study Bible is they have scale drawings of each of the three temples and you can flip the pages and compare them and see how Herod’s building dwarfed them all. It must have been a sight to see…

Fifty years they’d been building it, on this Passover in 30 A.D. when Jesus and His disciples were looking at it. They had seen great progress in the construction, Jesus and his disciples in their lifetime. Now, the temple building itself was nearly finished, they were working on the outer courtyards, and the disciples are gawking and gushing over it to Jesus.

And He shocks them, jolts them from their tourist daydreams of glory by going: “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down…” And that will disrupt the familiar cycle of Passover feasts Israel has known for many centuries! That will mean an end to the holy cycle that has been their life and their hope.

Which throws them into a panic. They’ve learned that Jesus’ words come true. The opinion of One omniscient Guy has come to be more reliable than the sunrise for them. So they pepper Him with questions: “Tell us! When will these things be? And what will be the sign of the end…?”

And Jesus tells them not to be deceived, that many will come in His Name, saying “I am…” and will deceive many with phony prophecies of the end. There will be wars and rumors of wars. Don’t let that alarm you. No earthly war is going to herald the true end. Nation will rise against nation. There will be earthquakes in various places, natural disasters, famines, maybe even climate change. Still not the end. Just the beginning of the birth pains, actually.

Be on your guard, He tells us. They will deliver you to councils, and you will be beaten in the synagogues, and will stand accused before governors and kings to be martyrs, literally in the Greek, for Jesus’ sake (the Greek word “witness” is literally martyr, let the reader understand). And the Gospel will first be proclaimed to all nations. But when you are delivered to trial, don’t be anxious what to say, for it will be given you, the words, in that hour, and it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. Brother will betray brother, and father his child, and children will rise against parents, and you will be hated by all for Christ’s name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

Which doesn’t really answer their question, does it? They wanted to know how they could discern the end, and Jesus runs through a bunch of signs that will precede but not help them predict the end. Lots of worse things than knocking down a big tourist trap of a temple in Jerusalem will happen, Jesus says, bad stuff will happen to all of us who bear His Name in the world. But don’t worry about it. Endure to the end, and you will be saved.

The cycle of war and famine and building and peace and joy and sorrow and spring and fall and Christmas then Easter will continue. It all happened to the apostles and repeats for us, these cycles. The wars, the famines, the persecution has come to our fathers and will circle around to us. But don’t be deceived. Life is not, finally, a circle, a cycle. It is a line, not straight, I grant, often twisting and turning through scenes that seem familiar, but it is a line that is leading to an end, end of this world, and the coming of a new Kingdom.

The poet T.S. Eliot was a Christian who favored lines over circles. He recognized cycles, patterns in life; knew that as we get older we see the word become “stranger, the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living.” The experienced find “a lifetime burning in every moment.” But he believed, above all, we should press on…

“Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In the end is my beginning.”*

 

Jesus calls us not to cycle with Nietzsche round a circle of repeating patterns, but to be explorers with Him pressing on to a new Kingdom. The petrel is a seabird that is usually found flying far from land; it’s associated with St. Peter. So we are to move beyond our comfortable confines, through the trials and troubles of life, to the Kingdom of Christ, far from familiar shores. We endure all things as sojourners, eyes set always on the new world…

Even the repeating seasons of the church point us beyond themselves to the One who is Alpha and Omega. We take up the cross again today with Him, through Gospel Word and Sacrament and we press on to the End. In the end is my beginning, and Peace that surpasses understanding, guarding heart and mind in Christ Jesus. Amen.

T.S. Eliot Four Quartets: East Coker V