Stay Awake
We have heard a lot in the daily gospel readings over the last few weeks about the need to be ready, from Matthew on Sundays and Luke on weekdays. Today’s brief passage from St Mark’s gospel repeats the message, with Jesus telling the disciples to stay awake and be ready for the master to return. ‘What I say to you I say to all: Stay awake!’.
What are we to make of this? The urgency of responding wholeheartedly to the good news is repeated again and again in the gospels (especially in the three synoptic gospels – John is a little different). Part of our response must be, as last week’s gospel for Christ the King made clear, in the way we treat other people, address the needs in our community and in our world (Matthew 25). This, Jesus says again and again.
Mark’s passage today, like similar passages in Luke, is placed just before the account of the trial and execution of Jesus. As we know, Mark and Luke were probably written a few years either side of the great Jewish revolt against the Romans in the late 60s and early 70s. One American scripture scholar, Ched Myers, suggests that part of Mark’s point in the passage is to have Jesus arguing against those who advocated violent resistance against the Roman overlords. ‘The discipleship community is exhorted to embrace the world as Gethsemane: to stay awake in the darkness of history, to refuse to compromise the politics of the cross’ (Binding the Strong Man, Orbis Books, 1988, p. 348).
The first reading for tomorrow is the well-known passage from Isaiah (2:1-5), in which all the nations come to the mountain of the Lord, who will ‘wield authority over the nations and adjudicate between many peoples; these will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war’.
You might think, two and a half thousand years after those words were written, it would be good to give them a try. Perhaps this Advent is a time to think about justice and right relationships within our communities and among the nations. As Pope Paul VI said, ‘if you want peace, work for justice’.
Jim McAloon
