If you are to email NASA with a scientific question, it is likely to be answered by Dr. David Morrison, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard, and that’s only important because I don’t think that Harvard gets enough attention for being a good school. But, according to Dr. Morrison, he spends a minimum of one hour every day answering people’s questions about the end of times, or at least the end of the world as we know it. We seem to be obsessed with this idea, but it’s not really anything new. We find similar things in the Hebrew scriptures, and the New Testament is full of discussion, as well as speculation within writings about when such things were going to happen. Clement, an early bishop of Rome, said the end would happen in the year 90. Hilary of Potiers said it would be in 365. His more famous student Martin of Tours said the year 400. The German emperor Otis III thought that an eclipse in 968 would be the harbinger, and Pope Innocent III said 1284. The Shakers said 1792, and Charles Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism preferred 1794, although he was already dead 6 years by that time. For Jehovah’s witnesses it was 1914, also1918, 1941 and 1975, to name just a few and for Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson the end was coming in 1980, or 1982, 1985, 1988 and then 2007, and of course there have been many more failed predictions since then. And what do they all have in common? First, they were wrong, and second, according to Jesus, they never should have been making predictions at all, and in doing so were only serving as false prophet’s intent on leading people astray, and so we need to stop listening to such end of time mongers telling us they have insider knowledge, because Jesus says they are all wrong, and we’ll get back to that.
The selection of passages we heard from Mark today come from the 13th chapter which is known as Mark’s Little Apocalypse. Now typically, when we hear the word apocalypse, we think it means talk about the end of the world, and so we talk about apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movies, like Mad Max as an example. But the word itself has nothing to do with the end of times. instead it simply means an unveiling or revealing, so that some divine knowledge is being revealed. The apocalypse with which most of us are familiar, is of course the apocalypse of John, which is also known as Revelation, and is the only full-blown apocalypse we have in scripture. But we have other types of apocalyptic pieces found in the book of Daniel, which is the other best scriptural example, but also to be found in Joel and Isaiah and Amos and Zephaniah, who all talk about the end of time.
