Summer is near

Mark 13:28-31

This is not the first time we have encountered a fig tree in Mark’s Gospel. In day 33, chapter 11: 12-14 Jesus discovers a fig tree which has leaves but bears no fruit, a symbol of a religious establishment and way of living which is empty.

The imagery in chapter 13 is subtly different: here the picture is of a fig tree breaking into leaf, the first sign of the coming summer, an image of a coming abundance and new life. Again, the image points to both present experience and the future. When will we experience the time of God’s great liberation? The answer is both past and present. Even in our present reality we can see signs of this new life emerging which point towards the coming kingdom.

One of my favourite quotations comes from the American Christian activist, Jim Wallis. He argues that ‘Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then making the evidence change.’ That seems a contradiction in terms.

We may be more familiar with Civil Rights movement in USA than our own in the UK. Roy Hackett led a Bus Boycott in Bristol in 1963 when the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to hire any black workers. Roy was instrumental in moving our country towards antidiscrimination legislation. The important parallel with the passage though is the sense that the hope of a new future, even in the midst of contradictory evidence, provides us with the motive to start changing the world around us now. As we do this, we begin to see the tender stems of a new summer dawning.

This chapter, which begins with a reminder of suffering and persecution, also provides us with encouragement and a challenge to dare to hope and live the new reality now.