Advent 2: Time

“Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Hear the Salvation Army band
Down by the riverside’s
Bound to be a better ride
Than what you’ve got planned
Carry your cup in your hand
And look around you…”

Songwriter: Paul Simon

A Hazy Shade of Winter lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

Advent is all about time, the time of waiting for the coming again of Jesus. There are many that believe Jesus’ coming again will be like the conquering hero the Jewish people expected in the first place. Actually, I am not so sure that the people of the time expected the conquering hero for the Messiah as-much-as Christians have placed that expectation on the Jewish people. Consequently, I am not sure that Jesus’ “coming again time” will be significantly grander than his first coming. Still, the question of the years continues to be, “When?”

Advent is that season of the year that allows us to consider our own presuppositions about time. First, do we live in a world of circular time or linear time? Thomas Cahill posits In the Gift of the Jews that linear time is the consequence of Abram leaving home with Sarai and Lot for the Promised Land. It is the journey of Abram with the hope of God’s promise being fulfilled that introduces our ability to plan and think in linear time. Expectation, which is based on previous circumstance, is the product of circular time while hope is linear. Before Abram, and in many cultures yet today, circular time continues to be the primary product of time thinking.

Then, of course, there is the difference Paul Tillich introduces as the difference between chronological time and kairos time, that is God’s time. Chronological time plods on in its own second-by-second manner quietly measuring the distance between where we have been and the moment of now. Kairos time, on the other hand is that time when humankind recognizes the cross-roads moment when God’s way leads one way and the way of the world is goes another. (Many place the way of the world on the lefthand side of the divergence because it is sinister, but I find that thinking unhelpful. I think it is enough to know that God’s way and the world’s way are not always the same way.)

There are some who believe that the current era is one of those kairos points in history. Will the people of “project democracy” seek the justice and justification of God’s leading in this moment during the coming elections or will the people follow the ways of power, position, privilege, and protectionism? Will the country promote the needs of the people, the impoverished, and the dispossessed, or will it continue to give its favor to the wealthiest of the nation?

Lastly, Advent calls people to consider the balance between the events of our lives and the remembered time of our lives. Some might speak the romanticized memory of “the good old days” while ignoring the time of struggle that existed during them.

All of these considerations of time come into play when we read these opening words of Mark, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, [the son of God]”. Paula Fredrickson and others, including Peter (not the disciple) have pointed to the in media res (fancy language for starting in the middle) beginning, but she and most others are not helpful in connecting the need for the middle start. Peter (not the disciple) discussed the beginning of the book of Mark in Currents in Theology and Mission, View of Vol. 41 No. 6 (2014): Scripture for Christ's Time: Reading Year B (currentsjournal.org).

In short, Peter maintains that the book of Mark is written in epic form, a format where the beginning is the middle, the middle is the end, and the end is the beginning. (Does that make your brain hurt? It really pushes me.) It all has something to do with the fact that the last sentence of Mark in Greek is incomplete, something like this, “They were fleeing from the tomb, terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone for”.

My English teacher, Mrs. Murphy (Remember her? She was referenced in the 23^rd Psalm, “Surely good Mrs. Murphy will follow me all the days of my life.” I continue to have nightmares over that.) Anyway, Mrs. Murphy would have given Mark a failing grade for that conclusion, but Peter argues that Mark’s conclusion to that incomplete sentence is the first sentence of the book of Mark.

Like Genesis which begins, “In the beginning of”, and God speaks the cosmos into being, so now, Mark’s Gospel begins the good news which is God speaking the new creation of resurrection into being. This of course means that the Gospel of Mark through 10:52 is the Easter proclamation. Then in 16:6-7, the young man dressed in a white robe, set to start the story again, says, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him…. he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

At the end of this week’s reading, we see Jesus coming from Nazareth in Galilee to be baptized. This coming from Galilee is not an expectation (circular time) but hope and promise (linear time). Although it took place in historic, chronological time, it is also an historic moment when all creation witnesses God’s inbreaking with the Word (of promise and hope) made flesh and revealed in the person of Jesus. It is also that time of suffering that we can now remember with a memory of resurrection, new creation and a new vision for the world.

How does this new resurrection life begin? It begins with the prophetic work of making the rough places smooth. It begins in accountability and repentance. It begins in the waters of death drowning and new life rising with Jesus into new ways of living, new relationships with God and one another, and new ways of engaging the world.

This introduction to Jesus by John does not introduce us to Jesus his cousin, but to the risen Christ, the Easter Jesus, and it this risen Jesus, the risen Lord, who wears the sandals that John is unworthy of untying. Here in these opening days of Advent, we are offered a different way to think about time. These are not the times where “the skies are a hazy shade of winter”. They are days of new life, of promise and hope.

Indeed, “Down by the riverside’s bound to be a better ride than what you’ve got planned. Carry a cup(chalice?) in your hand….” In the confluence of all the streams of Advent time we are going to embark on a journey that will lead us into a world where the marginalized become the center of wholeness and where the blind can see the way of the cross and follow (10:52). Then when the way of resurrection discipleship is recorded, and the story is ended, Mark tells the story of the one who was crucified and is raised from the dead that we might live in this time of good news, the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.

When? Now!