Daniel in our first reading (Dn 12:1-3) talks of “a time unsurpassed in distress”. Mark (Mk 13:24-32) recounts Jesus saying: “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.”
There are other places in Scripture where we find similar language. There is a tradition of reading these sayings as referring to events in the future, the “end of the world”. But nothing in these passages really supports that reading. Daniel is talking about the situation that the people of Israel were in at that time (the Maccabean revolt of 165 BC), not at some point in the future – and he sets his story 400 years in the past. Mark makes his contemporary reference even clearer when he has Jesus say “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place”. Mark is helping his readers come to terms with the destruction of the temple and the barbaric slaughter in Jerusalem following the the Jewish revolt against the Romans in AD 70, after Jesus’s death but before Mark wrote his Gospel.
We may feel we are living in times of great distress, certainly a time of great stress for many people. It would be hard to argue they are “unsurpassed”, if we look with the eyes of a historian. But we’re looking at things with our eyes, in our time, with our feelings of stress and distress – whether that is social, political, or personal. And if you’re fortunate not to be dealing with such feelings at this time, you know you have been or very likely could be in the future.
Chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel, that we read from today, sits between the story of the widow who gives her last pennies to the temple – something totally trivial which Jesus invests with great meaning – and the Feast of Passover which marks the beginning of Jesus Passion – a time indeed unsurpassed in distress.
Both Daniel and Mark are telling us that despite these circumstances, whatever the distress, God is on our side, at our side. Daniel personifies that power in the figure of the great angel Michael. Jesus tells us that what matters more than anything, what survives everything, is his words – what he has told us. And what he has told us, throughout Mark’s Gospel, over and over, is to love. Love survives even the time of unsurpassed distress – the death of a dearest loved one, the deaths of thousands in wars, the abuse of children, all wickedness. Love survives it all, Christ conquered evil. We don’t know the hows, the whys, the whens, as we would like. Only the Father knows all.
We believe in the Son who came to show us that Father and his love, the most powerful force on earth, at all times.