Thought for the Day - The Beginning and the End

The Course of Empire: Destruction, Thomas Cole, 1836

A Thought for the Day given at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 29th April 2025 based on the text of Mark 13.5-13

Our gospel reading today forms the start of what some call the “Little Apocalypse”. As well as recording the longest speech by Jesus in the whole of Mark’s gospel, it’s a passage that may reveal something about the people who first heard the text, whose writer the church remembers today.

Sermon - All will be thrown down

A sermon given during the Sung Eucharist at St George’s Bloomsbury on Sunday 17th November 2024 (Second before Advent) based on the text of Mark 13.1-8.

Start:Stop - Keep Awake

Apocalyptic City, Ludwig Meidner, 1913

Hello and welcome to this week’s Start:Stop reflection, my name is Phillip Dawson. An audio version of this reflection can be found here.

Chapter Thirteen of Mark’s Gospel contains the longest speech on a single topic in the whole of the text. In what some call the “Markan Apocalypse,” Jesus offers a glimpse of what’s in store for his followers in the future. In the tradition of ancient apocalyptic writing, the passage ‘elasticates’ time – giving descriptions of persecution and suffering that may well have been already happening to the Christian communities to whom Mark is likely to have been writing – as well as seeming to predict events in the more distant future. But the timeline snaps back - ending firmly in the present, as Jesus explains that not even he knows when these things will come to pass – so we must all “keep awake”; the last words he speaks before his passion and death.