Jesus said to his disciples, “In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.” (Mark 13.24-27)
Between 1933 and 1941, Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance languages and literature in Dresden in the province of Saxony, kept a diary that was published many years later with the title, I Will Bear Witness. Now described as the most observant recorder of daily life in the Third Reich under Hitler, Klemperer, a Jew, recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. He clearly saw with his own eyes the struggle between good and evil.
Written in secret, the diary offers vivid details of the end of the world as he knew it. In one entry, he writes, “It’s astounding how easily everything collapses.” As Hitler tightens his control, Klemperer finds his world being torn apart. He loses his job, his phone, his car, even his typewriter. He’s banned from the library. He’s harassed with nonsensical fees and taxes.
Because he is a World War I veteran and because his wife, Eva, is Aryan, they’re not deported. But they are forced to give up their house and to move into a house for Jews, the last step before the concentration camps. He records how he has to put his cat to death because Jews were not permitted to own pets.
As the indignities and injuries pile up, Klemperer continues to record the events in his diary, although if discovered, they would pose an even greater threat to his life. “I continue to write,” he pens in 1941 after a terrible run-in with the police. “This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end.”
Klemperer’s diary is as good as any way to understand the strange section in Mark’s gospel that we see today, a section that scholars often call an apocalyptic vision by Rabbi Jesus, placing it in the broader category of writing known as apocalypticism, a branch of Jewish thought that came to the fore in the last few centuries before Rabbi Jesus’ birth, best reflected in the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures.
Employing vivid imagery and opaque symbolism, apocalyptic literature always forecasts a future time, an end time, when the present day is brought to a close, its trials and tribulations adjudicated. Calamities and cataclysms herald the approach of that time when the Most High God, who has watched the fall of the world, reclaims it, vindicating those who have suffered for the good, punishing those who have inflicted evil upon others.
Born in the brutal experiences of the Jewish people, a people more often than not under foreign occupation and persecution, these apocalyptic visions afforded hope to the people suffering torment and troubled times. That hope was to be found in the future, when the God of Israel would right all the wrongs done, bringing the sword of justice with him as he destroys the forces of evil that have held the world in their grip.
As we can see, Rabbi Jesus, well acquainted with this Jewish belief, offers his own apocalyptic insights to his followers as they stand in the Temple area in Jerusalem, the mammoth structure standing before them, the Rabbi promising that a time will come when not one stone will not be left standing upon another. “In those days,” the Rabbi says, alerting his disciples to the promises made by the prophets of old, “the Son of Man will come in the clouds with great power and glory.”
Mark, placing this prediction at the end of the Rabbi’s public ministry, his crucifixion around the corner, wants us to understand that the Rabbi’s impending death will usher in this time, the first sign of the end times when God will reclaim the world and will restore his kingdom, ridding this world of wrong and routing it of wicked powers that have ruled with impunity and injustice.
The message is clear–God will make all things right. That is the promise of the apocalyptic writings as a whole and it is the same prophesy that Rabbi Jesus makes as he approaches his unjust death. His point, always the point of apocalypticism, is that his followers, however afraid or afflicted, must hold onto hope, the bedrock belief that God is in charge, all appearances to the contrary. What he wants of them is to be witnesses of the truth, as Klemperer was, as the world around them collapses.
That same message is now given to us, these centuries later, an assurance that our suffering for good is not in vain and that our injuries for the faith is not futile. The Rabbi, in making use of the apocalyptic currents of his times, wants to offer us an alternate view of human history, not the one we are accustomed to living and see, where the plight of the poor and the prostitute are invisible, where the cries of the hungry and thirsty are ignored, where the pleas of the widow and the orphan go unheeded.
That alternate view of history that the Rabbi offers is from God’s side, a long view of history that assures his listeners that sometime in the future, “in those days,” everything will be revealed and we will see at last that God has been at work through all ages, bringing the course of the world to its culmination, a time when “he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds.”
In promising his followers a new day, he urges them to stay strong and not to succumb to the ways of evil. Instead, they should keep their sights on that long awaited day, seeing it as the validation of their lives spent in loving others and in serving others, finding in it the redress for the pain and privation they have endured in the fight for right. In the end is God, he says to them, and that is all that matters.
That hope offered to us today by Rabbi Jesus is as valid now as then, these times as troubling and trying as any, our doubts and burdens as heavy as any, our fears and confusion as much as any. Through it all, the Rabbi asks us to do as he did, committing ourselves to the course that he calls us to follow, a way very different from the way of the world, a way that, he promises, will lead us to his Father.
Obviously, we are not there yet and the long awaited day has not arrived yet. We live in the in-between times, watchful and hopeful. We should not be bothered by the long wait, but must continue the work that is ours to do, as Rabbi Jesus often reminded his followers when speaking of the owner of the house who has gone away, the day and time of his return less important than our doing our duty and completing our work while he is away.
In the meantime, which is where we live our lives, we can learn how to live from a soldier that a professor met one time when he was asked to speak at a military base. He was met at the airport by this man whose name was Ralph. As they moved toward the baggage claim area, Ralph kept disappearing. As the professor observed, one time Ralph helped an older woman with her suitcase.
Still, another time he lifted two toddlers so that they could see Santa Claus. A third time he gave directions to someone. Each time he returned to the professor with a smile on his face. The professor, asking the man where he had learned to live like that, listened as the soldier said he had learned it during the war, explaining that he had had a tour of duty in Vietnam.
Telling the professor that his job was to clear minefields, a job where he saw any number of his fellow soldiers and close friends meet an untimely death, one after another, right before his eyes, Ralph said he “learned to live between the steps.” Seeing the puzzled look on the professor’s face, the soldier smiled and said, “I never knew whether the next one would be my last, so I had to get everything I could out of that moment between picking up my foot and putting it down again.” Ralph paused, looking at the professor, and said, “Every step felt like a whole new world.”
Living between the steps. It is the way we all can and should live. Each step counts. Each step is an opportunity for us to imitate the Galilean Rabbi, who walked many steps through Galilee doing good, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, smart enough to know that his enemies were planning and plotting to do away with him. He continued his steps, confident that his Father in heaven was in charge, whatever the circumstances. In the end, he was right, as God made all things right, resurrecting his son from the dead, the first sign that the reign of God had begun upon the earth.
–Jeremy Myers
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