Truly
I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have
taken place. Heaven and earth will pass
away, but my words will not pass away. [Mark 13:30-31]
Well, there seem to be three issues here. The first is the strange statement Jesus
makes, that this generation will not pass
away until these things – he refers to the return of the Son of Man in
glory and judgement – have taken place. As we know, we are necessarily in the
business of restating Christian truth for our generation and our age and the
culture of human arrogance and alternative facts. Those earliest Christians expected the Lord’s
return any day. It would be most
dramatic, nothing like his first Advent at Bethlehem, and all wrongs would be
righted. Here Jesus seems to be saying it will be during their generation… but
clearly it wasn’t. Contemplatives know a
way to see this more meaningfully. The
end time is always now. Now is the only
time we have. And an essential feature
of contemplative life and prayer is that we are motivated and equipped to live
fully in the now – rather than, for instance, what our culture calls living my
dream… or retreating from reality into memories, be they triumphs or regrets…
Jesus meets us in real time and in truth.
St Paul wrote: Behold, now is the
acceptable moment[1],
now is the day of salvation! Contemplative
prayer, our prayer of silence and stillness, is always the courage and honesty to
mark and name and respect the present moment, to stand in it and realise we are
not alone here.
Secondly he says, heaven and earth will pass away.
Indeed they will, in two respects.
In 1st century terms, heaven
and earth was the whole cosmos, the earth and the sky, the known universe. Now we know that, although it always had a
limited life, we are now helping the process along, accelerating it, by our
plundering and misuse of the environment.
The second sense in which heaven and earth will pass away is that we are
part of it and plainly mortal. Our
bodies stop working. We too pass away –
in the lovely poetry of the Psalmist: The wind passeth over it and it is gone, and
the place thereof knoweth it no more.[2]
And thirdly he says, my words will not pass away.
What endures is the life and truth to which Jesus witnesses. It is the truth, the words, the teaching, the
presence, the gift of new life, that compels us to silence and stillness, to
respond with our innermost Yes, our deepest consent. It is the preference of love over fear, mercy
over judgement, the relinquishing of arrogance and the delusion of control, the
subduing of the ego. Jesus brings us
into the realm of truth in which death itself forfeits any right to the final
word. Jesus’s words are eternal because
they are words of freedom… freedom to celebrate mystery unafraid… freedom to be
still and receptive in the kairos,
the present moment.
[1] II
Corinthians 6:2. It’s that word kairos which we have met already a few
times.
[2]
Psalm 103:16.
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