Over the last couple weeks I have spent much more time on social media than I care to admit. It’s like being unable to turn away from a car wreck– you don’t want to look– you really don’t want to look– but for some reason your eyes just keep looking back to see the damage. In the months leading up to the U.S. Presidential election and in these weeks that have followed there has been so much tension that you can cut it with a knife. Every election by nature highlights that a country is divided, whether it be by political ideology or social morals, but the echo chamber that is social media has escalated this division to a whole new level. As I scroll through my feeds I see Democrats calling out Republicans and Republicans calling out Democrats and a good chunk of people calling out everybody. Now don’t get me wrong–  Jesus did some calling himself– but much of what I’ve seen has been anything but Christ-like. The language and the vitriol has been toxic, aggressive, and disheartening, and there is a lot of fear about how to heal a nation plagued by this epidemic of division.

While I’m generally quick to skip over Scripture passages with apocalyptic language, feeling it a bit too far away from my daily reality, my jaw-dropped when I read this Gospel passage for the thirty-third week of ordinary time. Our Gospel today doesn’t feel like a text written so long ago. The community of Mark writes, “But in those days, after that time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” Now these days our sun isn’t literally eclipsed, the moon hasn’t grown dim and the stars seem to be right where they’re supposed to be. But if we read this passage as art, as metaphor, it’s highlighting some deep truth of the current climate. In many corners of the United States compassion has been darkened, kindness has lost its brightness, empathy has fallen to the wayside, and who we are meant to be in community has been shaken off of its axis. It’s easy to feel like the end times aren’t so far away.

It’s nothing short of miraculous, then, that Jesus tells us it is exactly when we feel this despair and this sense of foreboding that “the Promised One is near.” In fact, the Gospel says, the Promised One is right at our door. Now, I know that historically this passage has been interpreted eschatologically, to speak of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. But what if it was never meant to predict the eschaton? Can we imagine together for a moment that instead of prophesying the second coming of Jesus this passage is actually a roadmap for hope? Maybe Jesus is reminding us of something that we need to hear when we’re at our lowest. When we feel the most despair, the most fear, the most anxiety, that is when God is the closest to us. That is when we are the least alone. That is when the Promised One is right at our door.

This sacred truth that the capacity to hope never leaves our doorstep was even proclaimed among our Jewish ancestors. Our first reading also speaks of a time of despair and a time of great suffering. The book of Daniel says that at those hard times, “the wise will shine like the bright heavens, and the leaders of justice like the stars.”

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian, Jewish Holocaust survivor and author of the book Man’s Search for Meaning, would probably have known this passage from Daniel. His ancestors lived story after story of steadfast hope. And perhaps these stories informed his miraculous and enduring hope in the time of the deepest despair imaginable. Dr. Frankl wrote that “when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

We may not be able to change the toxicity of divisiveness that plagues the U.S. and our world in these days. Sometimes it feels like the very air we breathe and its easy to feel small in the face of that abyss. But what we can do is know that hope is waiting for us on our doorstep. We can let hope in, and we can be most hospitable to our houseguest. Because when we have hope, when we remember that– even in the trying times, especially in the trying times–  the great Hope-Bearer is right here, knocking at the door of our hearts, we can sustain any season. So take heart– take hope– and unlock your door.

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