Late last Sunday afternoon, I went to a beach on the South coast and watched the sun set. The car park attendant said he expected it to be ‘spectacular and romantic’. Well, I don’t know about romantic, but it certainly was spectacular. It wasn’t one of those sunsets where the entire sky is painted with extravagant splashes of colour; it was just the sight of the orange disc of the sun sinking and finally disappearing beneath the edge of the world. It was the sort of sunset that made me think of hotter places like a Greek island, or the Middle East or Egypt, perhaps. I felt I was doing something that people must have been doing since the dawn of mankind: just watching the sun set at evening time.
The following morning, I was up in time to see the same sun rise over the hills East of Cranmore. That was nice, too. But just think how important this sort of thing must have been to primitive man! How he would have watched sunrise and sunset, and learned about regularity and predictability – things we all know about now, and just take for granted. He would have watched the sun go down at night, and come up in the morning, time after time, and he would have realised that there was some order in the universe, that it wasn’t as chaotic as it sometimes seems. Remains such as Stonehenge show just how important this understanding was – where the stones are aligned to celebrate the precise location of sunrise at the summer solstice.
And, if there was an order, how did that come about? I dare say questions like that would have led him straight into the search for, and the belief in, God. Being able to know what to expect and when, must have seemed like the clearest indication of the hand of God. In a wonderful outpouring of praise of God’s works in Psalm 104, we read, in one verse, “The moon marks off the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.”
So, if you go along with what I say, one way God has brought us to himself is by the order and routine reliability which can be found in the universe he created, and in which we exist as his creatures. With that in mind, it is strange to hear what we heard in today’s reading. Strange to hear that the coming of the Son of Man will be associated, not with order at all, but with what seems more like astronomical chaos: the sun darkened, the moon not giving its light, and the stars falling from the sky. And, that the onset of this chaos will not be predictable at all; in fact, no-one knows when it will happen. It seems as if God is to take away the very thing that led us to him in the first place.
Jesus is talking about this because four of his disciples asked him privately when the destruction of the temple would occur, and what sign there would be that it was going to happen. Jesus goes well beyond a simple answer to their question, and talks about the end of the universe, and we might well ask why he did so. Well, he was talking to men for whom the glorious temple was the centre of religious life, and for whom its destruction would have been the ultimate calamity. Nothing worse could happen. Jesus needs to tell them that, compared to the real ultimate calamity, the destruction of the temple is nothing. If they let that depress them, they won’t be able to cope with the real thing! They can expect all sorts of dreadful things to lie ahead of them. They need to be strong and to persevere.
But the last thing Jesus says in his answer to the four disciples’ question, is addressed not just to them, but to everyone, and that includes us. “What I say to you, I say to everyone, ‘Watch!’” So you see, it’s all very simple, all we have to do is watch. We don’t have to do anything else; just watch!
Any questions spring to mind? Like ‘Watch what?’ Like ‘Why? How will watching help?’ Like ‘What does he mean “Watch!”?’ Well we’re not really talking about watching anything in particular. It’s not that kind of watching at all. It’s more like what a night-watchman does, and it’s really the same word as “Wake!” Jesus is telling us to be awake, and alert, like someone on the watch; or even a watchdog, on guard, ready to respond to danger. Remember how, when Jesus finds his friends asleep in Gethsemane, he says, “Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”
Well, that gives us a clue about where to go next. It’s not all plain sailing, though. He says, “Keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back – whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the cock crows, or at dawn.” It sounds as if he means we have to stay awake 24/7. But he can’t mean that literally. Even Jesus appreciated his sleep! Think of the time he was in that boat, exhausted!
No, it clearly one of Jesus’s parables – where he’s talking of spiritual matters by using everyday ideas. So what IS he referring to, when he says to all of us, ‘Watch!’ (‘Keep awake!’) And what good WILL it do? All right, let’s take the plunge and go for some answers!
The reason Jesus tells us to keep watch is that we do not know when the owner of the house will come back. He says, “It’s like a man going away. He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with his assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch.” Well, if the house is creation, and the owner is God, and the servants are the people who serve God, then Jesus is telling us in no uncertain terms that God has left his creation in the hands of his servants. They are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that it is kept safe from enemies and other dangers until he returns to reclaim what he has made at the end of time.
With an unoccupied house, of course, the biggest danger is that someone else would break in and claim to be the new owner. In spiritual terms, this means that people would stop being faithful to God, and deny his kingdom. Their new king would not be God at all, would be some worldly power or worse, or they would say that they don’t serve any greater power at all. And you can see that we are talking about serious stuff here. Aren’t we in the mess we are in precisely because we do not give God his due? That’s why being constantly alert to such dangers is so important. While we are on guard duty, there is no other way that we can really mean anything when we say, “Thy kingdom come” except by taking every opportunity to show respect for the true owner of the house.
It’s not a question of times and seasons. God may reveal himself to us through such things as the mathematical orderliness of sunset and sunrise, but to serve the God who has revealed himself in this way is the work of a lifetime.
However, one arrangement of times and seasons that does help us on our way, I think, is the Church’s year. How orderly and predictable that is, going from Advent to Christmas, Lent to Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. and then through the ordinary time of the Sundays after Trinity. How comforting to know for sure that at Advent, we can look forward to the coming birth of Jesus. Just as that car park attendant could say with confidence that he expected a spectacular sunset, as we look forward to our celebration of the coming visit of the owner’s own son, we too can say with confidence that in precisely four weeks from now we expect a most spectacular sunrise.