Today marks the 33rd Sunday in ordinary time; in 2 more
weeks, we'll begin our new liturgical year with the start of Advent. At the end of our Church's year, it seems appropriate for our
readings to focus on the end times today. The apocalyptic nature of today’s first reading and Gospel can be
frightening and disconcerting to us at first glance as we hear these words with
our modern way of thinking. The Book of Daniel talks about the end times as “a time unsurpassed
in distress”. After the end times, some
will live forever, while others will be in everlasting horror and
disgrace. Mark's Gospel tells us that the sun will be darkened, the moon won't
give light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers in heaven will be
shaken. What dark and jagged images we
have in these reading. But this apocalyptic message brings us not only an expectation of the
light that is to come, but also enlightenment and hope in the darkness itself.
These readings are in the apocalyptic tradition of Jewish literature,
which has a dual purpose. They speak about the evils of the current age, in the trials and
tribulations that are endured, but they also call us to the glorious age that
is to come. There is a promise of a future moment when God will intervene, when
history as we know it will come to an end. At that time, all evil will end and the righteous will be saved. The coming of this future age brings hope to the oppressed, hope to
those in pain and in suffering.
In its context in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus' pronouncement about the end
times comes just before the last supper with the apostles, leading up to Jesus'
passion, death, and resurrection. The time of this Gospel reading was indeed a dark time in Jesus’
life. Those communities in the early
Church that first heard this Gospel reading were experiencing dark times as
well, as they lived under the cloud of fear, persecution, and oppression.
As human beings, we've probably all known darkness in our lives to
one extent or another. We can experience
darkness in many ways: disappointment,
disillusionment, depression, loss or despair. Darkness can come in the loss of a job, the death of a loved one,
struggles in our family and personal life, drug and alcohol addiction, or
mental or physical illness. The poet Mary Oliver wrote about darkness in a short poem entitled
“The Uses of Sorrow.” This poem came to
her in a dream after the death of her life-long companion. Oliver writes: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” The love we're called to as Christ's disciples, as human beings, can
bring us great joy, but our experiences as disciples also can bring us pain and
darkness; all of this makes up our journey. We can relate this to the darkness that Christ’s disciples
experienced when their Savior and Redeemer was brutally killed on the cross. Think about how when loss occurs in the death of a loved one: we
grieve and mourn the void in our lives, in addition to the deep emptiness we
feel inside of our hearts. But, at the same time, we celebrate the life of our deceased loved
one, how that life was a gift to us and a gift to our world. A box full of darkness may not seem like a gift at all. It might be anything but a gift at first when we’re struggling to
come to terms with the darkness and loss in our lives. But in time, darkness can give way to awareness, understanding,
forgiveness, and peace. We then can
appreciate what comes out of the darkness, and what we gain from it.
Just as Christ's journey and today's apocalyptic message from Mark
help us to understand the darkness in our lives, the journey of the Jewish people
in the Book of Daniel brings us a message originally written for a community of
persecuted Jews. Daniel speaks for the first time in the Hebrew Scriptures about
resurrection, about the people of God being brought to new life. Daniel tells them that they’ll shine brightly like the splendor of
the firmament of the heavens. Daniel spoke to the community at a time of unsurpassed distress, but
the message and reassurance from God is that they have nothing to fear, that
they will be brought to new life. This
message still speaks to us in our modern era today.
Each time we gather together around the Lord's table as a community
of faith to celebrate the Eucharist, we remember how Jesus faced the darkness. We remember and we give thanks for the gifts that
he brought out of this darkness. We celebrate the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ with the
hope that it gives us to face the darkness in our own lives. We are called to
gain understanding from the darkness, and to hold fast to the light that Christ
is to us and to our world. We are now near the end of Church’s liturgical year; perhaps we are at
a point when we are experiencing great darkness in our lives. But we'll enter a period of waiting in the beginning of the new
liturgical year in Advent where there is the promise of a great light in the
birth of Christ. We trust that the darkness is perhaps not what it seems on the
surface, that it isn’t something permanent. We are called to cling to the radical commitment that is the hope of
our faith, as God promises us hope even in the midst of the brokenness &
darkness of our world. Yes, our hope goes way beyond our words & our prayers – it is
indeed the light of Christ shining in the darkness.
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