My words will not pass away
This chapter from Mark is part of
a farewell speech from Jesus to his followers in the last days of his earthly
life. It sounds almost apocalyptic because we are nearing the end of the
Church’s liturgical year and so the texts we read take this tone. Jesus is
revealing to his disciples something about the new order which is coming. He
talks about the ‘end times’ and this can appear frightening at first. However,
if we enter into a meditation on this Gospel we might bring to mind something
of those moments in our own lives when we felt like our world was ending.
Perhaps it was the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the end of
one stage of your life. Things which seemed so familiar and helped keep us
secure suddenly changed. These can be extremely difficult periods of one’s
life. It is during those times that someone comes to us offering prophecy of
better times to come, of words that ‘will not pass away’. Jesus is preparing
the disciples for what is about to happen to him and with assurance that God’s
kingdom is far greater than any evil that is about to occur. The passage is
often interpreted as referring to the seconding coming of Christ or his
resurrection. Whenever we experience trauma we keep going with the assurance
that resurrection is all around us and a new way of being is on the horizon.
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