Don’t wake up – Keep Awake
Preacher: Dr Euan Grant, Research Fellow, School of Divinity
Readings: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37
‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’
Can you pray that? Could you pray that?
Of course, to pray for it in the first place you’d need to believe that it’s possible – that what’s possible, that God could tear up the veil of spacetime with his own bare hands? That Jesus could – Jesus will – appear again blazing with such glory that not just the hills quake but that the fusion chambers locked deep in the hearts of the primaeval stars will be shivered at his coming?
‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in heaven will be shaken.’
Based.
But could you believe it?
Let’s imagine that we trust God to be God. The Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible – how could we fail to believe it? What could be beyond God? Let’s agree that our imaginations are not so small that they will cut down to size the Lord of hosts, enthroned upon the cherubim, whose face shines forth on those who call upon his name. Or that they are too small, pitifully small – but gloriously open, if sin does not close them, to the God who will surpass them even as he comes to fill them completely. Let us imagine that we trust, and believe.
‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.’
There is still a question. Could we pray for the heavens to be torn open? Could I pray for that? Could you?
Some could, perhaps – those so worn by the times and seasons that the any consummation is devoutly to be wished. Or those who really do feel that they have become like one who is unclean, and all their righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. God coming down will put that right, one way or another.
But some less so. Those of us congratulating ourselves on a semester well done, or those of us inclined to credit success to our own highly-creditable capacities, and failure to the simply overwhelming difficulties of the environment. But I am not here to moralise – or at least, not in that way. Many things make it difficult to pray that things should go God’s way, and not all of them are bad; some things make it easier, but not all of them are good.
But to pray for something so dramatic, to see the Son of Man coming clouds with great power and glory – that is something more than just praying that things should go God’s way. It is to pray that things should go God’s ways no matter what, that they should go so much God’s way that it won’t matter if all of our immediate concerns are rolled up like a scroll and thrown away. Is it even possible to go about wanting that? The thing about our immediate concerns, after all, is that they are very close to us: before our eyes and in the grasp of our hands. How are we to go about wanting God in a way that goes not just through them and beyond them – in a way which might, as God alone will decide, bring them to a permanent end?
To that question – how can we wish, and hope, and pray for something which is wholly in God’s hands – I have perhaps a little good news, and at least a scrap of advice to offer you.
The good news is that God has done it before, to rejoicing and not to despair. And the advice will come after it, but you have it on your orders of service already. How are we to understand and comport ourselves before this coming in which God has God’s way? Don’t wake up – but do keep awake.
So here is the good news. ‘Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.’ It has been seen. It is done. Consummatum est. Tetelestai. Our Lord has come down, and he has brought the fullness of his power with him, precisely as he was raised up in the weakness of the cross. The power and glory of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, were displayed in their fullness on the rock of Calvary. ‘And the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom’ – and what is the veil of the heavens, the thin film of photons and atoms, compared to the veil which marked the glory of the Holy of Holies from Sion, a wilderness, from Jerusalem, a desolation?
‘The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.’ The Resurrection defeats the Crucifixion as it restates it, and restates it as it defeats it. Christ Jesus in his first coming brought with him all the glory of the Lord and displayed it in weakness, and there is no reserve surplus of glory to lower against us when he comes again. We shall, ere too long now, celebrate that coming, when Mary bere Jhesu, hevene king, and as we struggle to look for another coming from the heavens, let us recall that the God who is to come is the one who has come already, of old by the Galilean lake – and take heart. It is hard to pray that God should tear open the heavens and come down, but perhaps it’s easier to pray that the Lord Jesus might come back.
And there is more good news, because Jesus isn’t just gone. There is a first coming in the flesh, yes, and in the dead-and-risden, wounded flesh of his body he has ascended to return to his Father. But there is another coming in between: ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him.’
Perhaps that’s not easy to believe either, but it’s something worth praying for.
And so we some good news – the good news of the Advent of the Lord. He has come down in the weakness and humility which show that his power and glory are really God’s – the King of a Kingdom not of this world. However straitened the circumstances, in four weeks time that coming we will celebrate. And even as the work of that advent among us was complete, and he was lifted up out of our sight, he comes still, in spirit and in power- to turn our faces to that final coming – strong in grace, in truth victorious – that final appearing for which, for all that, it is still so hard to pray.
So how are we to prepare in this season of preparation? Perhaps what we need is to change our point of view, to wake up and see things as they really are. Perhaps then we will be able to pray as we ought? Perhaps, really, we just need to wake up? Not I, but the Lord says, ‘Keep awake’; I and not the Lord say to you that that does not mean ‘Wake up’.
Waking up is something that we are often commanded to do, nowadays. The world around us, it seems, is a tissue of shadows and illusions, and it is not just our hope but our duty to pierce through, to see beyond. To wake up is to move cross the line of truth and dream, to see behind the façade into the ugly or glorious – but probably ugly – heart of things.
This is a way of thinking with which we are very familiar today. In our public conversation, the demand to wake up pours in from every side. Sometimes it comes seemingly out of the air – not coincidentally the realm of Paul’s powers and principalities, spirits at work in the sons of disobedience. Before it became a catch-all of abuse, ‘woke’ praised just this attitude, and perhaps in the wild one can still come across its estranged right-wing cousin, ‘red-pilled’ – originally from a film released before most of the undergraduates of this university were born, though of course there is now a whole line of pills to combat somnolence available to the discerning consumer: ‘grillpilled’, ‘pinkpilled’, ‘breadpilled’. Maybe even Christpilled.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘Suggesting an isomorphism between “woke” and “redpilled”: why would you say something so controversial, and yet so brave?’
The truth is that I think this way of thinking surrounds us at all times, from the conspiracist fringe to the bureaucratic-inquisitorial centre, powered by the raging id of the attention economy, expressing a deep and pervasive sense of powerlessness, desperately seeking a palliative in finding the big secret which will make it all make sense. It will be clear from my summary that I do not think this a highly-productive course of action.
To wake up is to cross the boundary of reality and dream, but in a world without bearings, to cross the boundary and keep going is to enter ever more deeply into fantasy, the projection of meanings and unity onto a reality which always proves ever more refractory, leaving the identity constructed to order and address it ever more strained, weakened, and dissipated.
So don’t wake up. It can only lead deeper into the dream. Instead, keep awake.
Whatever you make of my view, the command Jesus gives us is not to wake up to see the real thing, the unfolding plan which will let us grasp our salvation, but to keep awake amidst signs we cannot read, marking times and seasons whereof the ends we do not know, waiting for a Father and a Lord who have left us in charge, but will return without warning and, appearing of a sudden, may find us asleep.
What does it mean, then, to keep awake?
We cannot read or calculate the times, not as God does. So our wakefulness is not the fantastical vision of the wakener from and into the dream, but the waking of the doorkeeper on the watch. Christ has charged us with his house, and given us each our work. The doorkeeper is a guard, and some of us are charged as guards, to keep the household of faith from the incursion and spoliation of the thief – that most malicious whisperer of the power of the air.
Not all of us are doorkeepers, but we are, each of us, slaves of the household with our tasks. And at them we must keep awake. Awake to the concrete realities around us, to the particularities of our place in the systems which escape our grasp, to the neighbours, in whatever form, who daily make claims on our time, our patience, and our goodwill.
Like faithful crewmates in the ship of faith, we must keep about our tasks – not refusing to ask and seek and look and learn, where learning yields understanding – but recognising that we are caught in patterns far vaster and more complex than we could ever wake up to master, and that those patterns too are inscrutable signs, as God writes and reads them, of an hour which is coming in God’s own good time.
Don’t spend yourself too much trying to wake up – but do keep awake. God came down in the flesh and in it he tore the veil of the temple in two. He comes down now, and he help us rend our hearts and not our garments, so that we might serve one another in all the work of his household, and he is coming again – and when he comes he will tear the heavens in two.
‘Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the to the ends of heaven.’
Alleluia, through ages long.