Daniel 12:1-3; Mark 13:1-8
This Sunday, November 14, is the 33rd Sunday of the Ordinary season in the Christian liturgical (worship) calendar. This is the final “regular” Sunday before Reign of Christ Sunday (traditionally known as Christ the King), the last Sunday in the Christian year. The theme in these Sundays that immediately precede Advent and a new Christian year is end-times. This is a strange and, for some, scary topic that is often avoided. But it ought not to be dismissed. Part of our discipleship is faith in God’s good plan for the end of history and the fulfillment of the creation in goodness and love.
The reading from Daniel is brief: Chapter 12, verses 1-3. It is set just a few centuries before the birth of Jesus. The empire of Alexander the Great has been divided after his death, and a Syrian-Greek ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphnes rules over the territory of the Jews. He has set up a statue of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple, and is seen as a dangerous foe. The Jews, led by Maccabeus, will revolt in 167 CE, as recorded in the apocryphal books of Maccabees (this is the era in which a lantern miraculously burned for eight day, the source of the Hanukkah festival).
This is the first time a resurrection is alluded to — Daniel 12:2. Why would an afterlife become compelling for a long-persecuted people? Many people today do not believe in any kind of afterlife — this life is it, then nothing. What do you believe about the afterlife? How do you read the judgment expressed in Daniel 12:2-3? Do you know that the Good News of Jesus Christ is that, in him, we are absolutely assured that we will not “awake…to shame and everlasting contempt”?
Mark 13:1-8 is the opening of what is known as “the little apocalypse” in Mark (it has parallels in Matthew and Luke). This refers to its borrowing from apocalyptic literature in the Hebrew Scriptures, including Daniel 12:1-3. “Apocalypse” means “uncovering” or “revelation” (hence, in Greek, our Bible’s book Revelation is titled Apocalupseos Ioannou — “The Revelation of John”).
Jesus has left the temple and is standing around buildings made from massive stones. Some of these stones are preserved today at Jerusalem’s Western Wall (a wall of the temple that was destroyed by the Romans in 70CE). It would be hard to imagine them being “thrown down” as Jesus predicts in Mark 13:2.
As you think of the world you live in, what is hard to imagine being “thrown down”?
We Christians are called to a new way of understanding life, and death. The Apostle Paul wrote, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (I Corinthians 15:55). As an apostle of Jesus, Paul understood Jesus’ apocalyptic utterances not as scary judgment, but as a part of God’s plan to purify creation forever. In that plan was God’s will to bring human beings through death to a new life marked by complete freedom from this life’s ills — illness and death, sin and cruelty, hate and exploitation.
As you read this material this week, try to read it through the lens of Christ’s unshakable promise of eternal life. If it brings you to a place beyond the fear of death, how might it shape the days of this life that God has given you?