THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED

 

THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED

It is a strange way to begin. The first person to write a gospel starts by describing the end of the world. ‘The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from heaven’. This, eventually, becomes Chapter 13 after Mark goes back to write the earlier chapters. What are we to make of this? Perhaps we imagine something like the worst outcome of the climate crisis? In 1982, Annie Dillard wrote an account of her experience of a total eclipse (cf. Google).

 

            ‘… I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The                     grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone                         lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print.  This colour has never been             seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte.’

This is a taste of a long description of the effect of the eclipse on her. It is a taste too, perhaps, for us of what it the end could be like. Dillard writes of the disorientation and horror of our natural world in convulsion. Another quote:

            ‘The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. … My    mind                was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. …   You have                   seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those                  photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more                cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity             of internal experience. … You see the  wide world swaddled in darkness; you see a vast breadth of             hilly land, and an enormous, distant, blackened valley; you see towns’ lights, a river’s path. …

 

            “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the    long run he                 was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The                                mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world,                 and all eternity, and God.’

 

The whole article is worth a careful read. It opens our consciousness to all that is beyond our imagination and comprehension. It is an awesome thought, both frightening and joyful. Frightening, because the onset of the end of the world seems set to be a time of unimaginable turmoil. Joyful, because we know that the gospel message is one, ultimately, of hope. The end will not be a catastrophe. It will be the moment when the ‘Son of Man’ will reveal the final triumph of God and the long foretold ‘gathering’ of his people. It is a message of consolation to close a difficult year.

14 November 2021      Sunday 33B     Dan 12:1-3      Heb 10:11…18            Mk 13:24-32