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
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