The Church’s lectionary for this year begins at the end of the book of Mark: Mark’s “Little Apocalypse.” The term apocalyptic, from the Greek apokálupsis (literally “revelation”), means to “uncover” or “pull back the veil”; to reveal the underbelly of reality. More popularly understood, the term is used to describe mythic texts about the end of the world. 

There are two common errors made when reading apocalyptic literature. The first is to treat the text as being too mysterious – like an indecipherable enigma with no practical meaning. The second error is to impose a supposedly literal meaning on the text to make specific predictions about future events. 

Jesus makes clear that it is a mistake to look for chronological meaning within his discourse. The disciples are told that the end times “will appear as the great tribulation” (see Mark 13:17, 19, 20, 24), but they are told that they cannot know when the time is, nor even what to look for. (Mark 13:32-33). But is the end of the world meant to be understood as an empirical, historical event? 

As theologian Ched Myers describes in Binding the Strongman: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988), that apocalyptic writing is meant to instill a “bifocal” perspective: “the collapsing of linear history into the political ‘moment’ in which a choice is demanded between competing ‘histories’ (e.g., that of domination and that of liberation)” (141). When Jesus talks about this time apocalyptically he is not talking about an event in history, but rather that now is the time to usher in a new way of living. In Greek, this is the difference between time as chronos and time as kairos. Chronos is linear time, as many view time today – and kairos means the time or moment for something to happen.

We get clarity as to what Jesus is talking about by looking back to earlier points in the Markan text. At the outset of the Gospel, Jesus speaks of the current Kairos moment: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand” (1:15). And to drive the point home, Jesus often reminds his disciples that the kingdom of God is already at hand – it is the present Kairos in which his disciples already practice their new way of life in community (see e.g., 10:29-30: “there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age”; and 1:14: “The time has come”).

Jesus’s message is clear if you choose to see it; but those who see apocalyptic discourse as deterministic have not understood it. It is neither fatalistic, nor deterministic. Rather, the new age can be present now, so long as the people live into it. But this requires both vigilance and political discernment amidst changing circumstances. The context of Mark’s Gospel makes these requirements clear.

Mark’s Gospel was written several decades after Christ’s murder at the hands of the Roman Empire, and during the Jewish-Roman War (66-70 CE), after Jewish rebels had captured the holy city of Jerusalem (66 CE) – the former seat of the Jewish Kingdom under David – and before the Romans would ultimately recapture the City and destroy the Second Jewish Temple (70 CE). During this time, many Jewish sects had placed a messianic hope in the flourishing of an autonomous Jewish Temple, free from the political control of Rome, and by extension, a free Jewish community based in Jerusalem. It is within these circumstances that Mark places Jesus’s apocalyptic sermon and the instruction – not to join the ultimately failed attempts to overthrow the Roman Empire, but to “keep awake.” 

Thus, amidst the messianic fervor of the Jewish-Roman War, Mark tells of Jesus preaching a sermon to his followers about political discernment. Mark’s contemporaries hoped that Roman domination of Jerusalem would come to an end – a goal that Jesus, who was crucified by Roman authorities for challenging their power (see 15:1-15), obviously shared. At the time of Mark’s writing, Jewish militias had, for the time being, taken back control of the temple, and it appeared as if they might have been successful in their goal. But what were they going to replace the current system with? 

Knowing that the system the rebels wished to replace the existing system with would replicate many of the same power relationships as before, Jesus asks his followers not to be swept up in the fervor of the moment, but rather to wait and keep awake!

To Sobrino, the only appropriate theological understanding of history is to view it as a story of conflict and crisis. As a Jesuit, Sobrino draws from the central meditation of “The Two Standards” in Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual exercises to articulate what he calls “historical discernment.” Loyola described two competing “standards” that seek to determine the future of the world: the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of Satan, whereas Sobrino refers to the Kingdom of God, and the “anti-kingdom.” In his book Jesus the Liberator, Sobrino understands the “anti-kingdom” as specific historical realities that work against and oppose the kingdom of God. To Sobrino, the conflict between these two kingdoms is the most fundamental structure of historical reality (161-2).

Sobrino writes in Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador: 

“From St. Ignatius we used to recall the great moments in the Exercises: The contemplation of the incarnation, to enable us to see the real world with God’s own eyes – that is, a world going down to hell – and to react with God’s own compassion, that is, ‘to work redemption.’ And it is important to remember this because, as for many other Salvadorans, it was not anger . . . or revenge, much less hatred that was the motive force in their [the Salvadoran martyrs] lives, but love: ‘working redemption,’ as St. Ignatius called it” (18).

On this first Sunday in Lent, we invite you to consider some of the dark moments in recent past – be it the crisis in Occupied Palestine, or something else – and pray that you might be able to see the real world “with God’s own eyes,” and consider what is required of you to “react with God’s own compassion, that is, ‘to work redemption’” within this world. In other words, how do you “keep awake?”

December 2nd marks the anniversary of when, in 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Cleveland Lay Missionary Jean Donovan were raped and murdered by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military, in the early days of that country’s brutal civil war. 

The women had gone to El Salvador in response to a request from Archbishop Oscar Romero (martyred, 1980; canonized, 2018) for missionaries. Clarke and Ford worked in Chalatenango, where the military committed over 50 massacres against the village’s poor. The women were “awake” to the needs of others and worked in practical ways to assist them, organizing the transportation of food, medicine, and wounded people. They were laboring to usher a new way of life – a “new age”, to use apocalyptic terms – in the context of war and “anti-kingdom” conditions. They also knew, as Ford said the night before she was murdered, that “one who is committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor.” 

U.S. Officials blamed the women for their own deaths, suggesting they had put themselves in harm’s way. Official accounts of their deaths failed to acknowledge that they were raped and shot execution style. Their deaths helped galvanize opposition within churches to the United States’s support for the Salvadoran government’s repression of its own people. The war did not end, however, until 1992, and cost more than 75,000 lives.

Bishop Oswaldo Escobar of Chalatenango said of the women, “[N]ot only did they show solidarity with the poor, they suffered the same fate as the poor, the thousands of murdered catechists, delegates of the Word, at the hands of a bloody repression.” Unlike Oscar Romero, the women were never officially canonized, but according to Father Manuel Acosta of Chalatenango, “Our people [the Salvadorians] have already canonized them.” 

“Patro Nia” is originally a Brazilian song, the Portuguese text of which was shared anonymously throughout Central and South America during the 1980s, in the wake of Oscar Romero’s death, and the death of the Maryknoll martyrs. It became a popular song among the “base communities” of liberation theology. 

The lyrics appropriately express the faith and political ethic of the Salvadoran Martyrs. They also appropriately express a feeling of yearning, waiting, and hoping for, in the words of Jon Sobrino, “the power of God to remake an unjust world and to do justice to its victims.”

It can be heard here:

Lyrics from: https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Patro_Nia_de_Latin-Ameriko_(Krysztof_Daletski) 

Patro, Ho Patro nia!
Father! Oh, Our Father!

1. Ho, Patro, kiom dure, la popolon / per subpremado vidi krucumata!
Oh father, will the world once belong to the poor, our brothers and sisters?
Oh father, how hard it is to see the folk crucified through oppression!

2. Ho, Patro, kiu viŝos for la larmojn / de l’ homoj kiuj sen pano?
Ho, Patro, kiu kun favor’ satigos / la malriĉulojn per libereco?
Oh father, who will wipe off the tears of the people without bread?
Oh father, who will gracefully satisfy the poor with freedom?

3. Ho, Patro de vundata Ameriko / Ve! Kiom da aflikta vivo!
Ho, Patro, kiam venos libereco / al la popoloj de tiuj nacioj?
Oh, father of the wounded America, alas! How much grief!
Oh father, when will freedom come to the peoples of these nations?

4. Ho, Patro, la rompita kor’ de nia / popol’ senŝarĝiĝon deziras!
Ho, Patro, la espero de nuntempo / estas disdono kaj egaleco.
Oh father, the broken heart of our folk desires relief!
Oh father, the hope of our time is repartition and equality.

5. Ho, Patro, ĉu la tero estos iam / de l’ povra popolamaso?
Ho, Patro, ĉu la mondo estos nia, / de la povruloj, sen subpremado?
Oh father, will the earth once belong to the poor masses?
Oh father, will the world once be ours, of the poor, without oppression.