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wesleyhill · 4 years

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Spy Wednesday: The Shaking of the Powers

A homily on Mark 13:24-27, preached for the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham, Alabama, on Spy Wednesday 2020, Coronatide

I would speak to you in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

During Holy Week, as he moves slowly, inexorably, toward the cross, Jesus talks at length with his followers. Shortly after his symbolic judgment of the temple and his debate with the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead, Jesus offers a long discourse that has often been described as “apocalyptic.”

In somewhat cryptic terms, Jesus looks ahead to what will happen in Jerusalem after his death and resurrection. “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be,” he says, “then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter.” It’s hard to know precisely what Jesus is referring to here. It could be that he is predicting the way the Zealot fighters occupied the temple in the lead-up to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. It could be that he is thinking of the time when Titus, the Roman general, after the successful siege of the city, as the temple burns, peers into the Holy of Holies, the place where no unbidden human eye should ever look.

Whatever the case, Jesus tells his followers that there will be a yet more momentous event. If you thought the sack of Jerusalem was apocalyptic, he seems to say, wait until you see what comes next.

And that brings us to our passage for today: “[I]n those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” With these words, Jesus’s perspective seems to shift. He is looking past the destruction of Jerusalem to a time “after that suffering.” He is looking ahead, many readers have thought, to the conclusion of history and the end of the world. And the first thing he sees and tells his hearers about it is that it will involve a cosmic cataclysm. The sun will go dark. (If, like me, you found the solar eclipse in 2017 a bit eerie, can you imagine what it would be like to see the sun’s light finally giving out for good?) The moon will cease to shine, Jesus says. And the stars will fall as the powers in the heavens are unsettled and displaced. These are images of decreation, of the unraveling of the fabric of the cosmos.

It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that Jesus’s audience probably would have thought of the stars in personal terms — like spirits. Think of how Satan and the demons’ fall from heaven is described in terms of the falling of a star (Isaiah 14:12).

You may remember in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia story The Voyage of the Dawn Treader how the children encounter a star named Ramandu. The children are initially puzzled. “‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’” And Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” The stars, for ancient people, represented cosmic powers — personal powers.

One of the earliest Christian interpreters of Jesus’s words here was Eusebius, the historian of the early church. He drew a connection between Jesus’s vision — “the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” — and what we read in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians about spiritual warfare: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” According to Eusebius’s interpretation of Jesus’s apocalyptic message, at the end of history, the cosmic forces of darkness and evil will be undone — they will fall from their heights and be humbled at the appearance of the glory and kingdom of God.

It can be uncomfortable for modern Christians to think in these kinds of “mythological” ways, but we should be honest and admit that this way of speaking is on virtually every page of the New Testament. Jesus and his apostles believed in personal agents of spiritual evil — Satan and the demons. In one of his radio broadcasts during the bombing of Britain in World War II (an apocalyptic time if there ever was one!), C. S. Lewis said: “One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin.” Lewis admits that modern people often have a hard time taking this imagery seriously. We tend to picture a man in a red suit with horns and a pitchfork and an evil grin. Forget that picture, Lewis advises us, and focus instead on the reality: “Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

Personally, I think the world has changed since the 1940s in such a way that people might find it more possible to conceive of evil in personal terms than they did back then. Think, for example, about how we now talk about addictions. We say that we are “gripped” by them, “held captive” by them, “ruled” by them. That’s the language of personified agency. Think, for another example, about how in this time of the coronavirus, the language of apocalyptic is back in the pages of our newspapers. We are newly aware of how truly vulnerable we are to powers and agencies and movements at work in the universe that are beyond our ability to control.

I don’t know whether you saw it, but at the beginning of March, Pope Francis went to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Divine Love — where his predecessor Pope Pius XII had gone to pray in June of 1944 for an end to the bloodshed in Europe — and begged the Virgin Mary to intercede to her Son to bring an end to the plague. Now, I’m Protestant enough to want to go directly to Jesus myself in prayer, but, still, I was deeply moved by this sign of faith. We are not simply meant to wrestle in laboratories and hospitals, as grateful as I am for scientific advances. We are also meant to plead with God to bring Satan and his minions to heel — to intervene in the world and defeat, once and for all, the spiritual forces of wickedness at work in the heavenly places.

And what is the outcome we are ultimately praying for?

“[T]he stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.”

Jesus, looking ahead to the world’s end, sees the starry hosts falling from their heights. He sees the cosmic forces being toppled from their thrones. And then, he says, those enemies of humankind will see a Human Being, the Son of Man foreseen by the prophet Daniel, descending in the clouds. Then the cosmic forces of evil will be the captors in his wake, in his triumphal procession after the final victory has been won. They will behold him whom they crucified (1 Cor. 2:8). They will see him coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and they will bend the knee.

This is the gospel of Holy Week. Jesus, on his way to the cross, promises that that cross will not be his final end. He will go into death, pass through it, triumph over it, and emerge victorious on the other side. He will bear our sins and griefs — and bear them away. He will be crowned with glory and honor. And when he comes again, all viruses — all sicknesses, all sorrows, all poverty and unemployment, all losses, even death itself — will be defeated. The coronavirus, and all other sadnesses, will be vanquished.

Let us pray, even now, for foretastes of that final victory. Let us, this week, keep company with Jesus as he walks the way of the cross, secure in the knowledge that his cross is the victory that has overcome the world.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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