Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Times – Cycle B
Reflecting on Mark 13: 24-32
I wonder if I can still find it. Ah. Here it is. A very old, grainy picture sits at the bottom of my file marked “Apocalyptic Literature.” I sort through papers on the Book of Daniel, with its great tales of angels in the fiery furnace, and ravenous lions who lay down at Daniel’s feet in their den. I love those stories, written in a time of great peril, about God’s power to save.
And then, of course, there is my big, fat, juicy file on the book of Revelation. Lakes of fire. Seven seals and seven trumpets. The Four Horsemen. A New Jerusalem.
I like the sound of that. If ever a city, and its embattled history, cries out to be made new, it’s Jerusalem.
I hold the precious picture, given to me by a devout Oklahoma evangelical gospel singer forty years ago. It was taken during a tornado. After it was developed, the believing family gasped. There, in the midst of the deepening dark clouds, is a figure clothed in white, right there in the middle of the storm.
I’ve held that photograph close through the years, through times of shuddering illness and shattering loss. Perhaps it’s a trick of the light. Perhaps it’s vapors swirling in the vortex. But I choose to believe that the image is one of the endless signs to us of the nearness of God.
They will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds, reads the fading caption, typed out on an old Underwood, decades before the personal computer. My experience compels me to add Jesus’ words at his ascension: And behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.
What moments in your life do you remember as a sure sign of the comforting presence of God?