The key to understanding the lesson for today is to
understand the temple as the heart of Jewish culture. It was the hub from which everything else
radiated out and the spokes of the wheel held everything in place. It was that place and what it did that was
going to be removed from existence.
The temple is going to be disassembled piece by
piece. Using pry bars it is going to be
thrown down stone by stone. There will
be aggression and violence. The romans
will throw it down with malice deliberation and force.
Can you understand why Jesus’ listeners were
alarmed? “Teacher, when will this be,
and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” Jesus’ comment has made them very
anxious. Their fears, usually hidden,
have been brought to the surface. Why
did Jesus say these alarming things?
He doesn’t seem to answer their question. Instead he speaks to the kind of behavior
anxiety gets going. Did he deliberately
make them anxious so that he could then give them tools for coping in anxious
times? Do we live in anxious times?
He begins, “Beware that you are not lead astray.” Anxiety leads us astray. It’s so hard to hear clearly and think
sensibly when we fell anxious. We take a
deep breath, we go for a walk, we pray, “God help me to see what’s going on
here and to not allow my fear or anger or confusion to interfere with deciding
what’s best.”
Anxiety gets rumors going. When things are shifting about and the old
certainties, dysfunctional as they may be, no longer comfort us it’s easy for
untruth to spread as though it were truth.
Anxious people catch each other’s anxieties and stories that common
sense would ordinarily suppress no longer do so and falsehoods spread like wild
fire.
Anxiety produces environments conducive to giving into
our fears. Real peace and certainty can
never come from buildings like the temple.
Jesus came to give us a different way of being
together. He came to show us God’s
presence apart from the evil structures of human culture. In Jesus things are different. This time God’s intervention is
different. Now it was not just about
Jesus’ use of the temple’s destruction describes the
end result of the human Culture that was founded by Adam and Eve’s son
Cain. This is part of what Jesus is
referring to when he says: parents, brothers, relatives and friends will betray
you. All of human culture, work,
government, religion and family will fall because they are of defective human
origin. Jesus has come into the world to
redeem God’s creation. To re-boot the
whole of creation and to give it a chance to be as God intended it. Today’s lesson, the destruction of the
temple, is a promise of God’s love, replacing people’s evil and defective way
of relating to each other. The kingdom
of people is dying and the kingdom of God is dawning.
We can’t change this and we don’t want to change it
because it must happen. It is inevitable
that what is rotten will fall apart. As
God’s people we should welcome this. We
will stand as part of it as those who have crossed over from the kingdom of
people into the
Remember when Peter got out of the boat in the storm
and started to walk toward Jesus? He was
fine as long as he kept his eyes fixed on his Lord. But as soon as he was distracted by the wind
and the waves he lost it. That is the
danger here for us also. We can see the
world as God intended it or we can look at and get sucked into seeing human
corruption as the only reality.
The myth of human cultural progress has taken many forms. Constitutional monarchy, communism,
democracy, capitalism socialism; there are many dreams and dreamers. These are all false dreams. In the first century there were a group of
people who were accused of being atheists.
Why? Because they denied the
powers of the gods of the state, it was as though the god’s did not exist for
them. At that time everybody, everywhere
believed in the gods of their state. Who
were these atheists? Who were these
people for whom there appeared to be no earthly or heavenly authority? They were Christians, followers of the same
Lord Jesus Christ as we.
Some of these first Christians died for what they
believed. Rather than compromise and cut
corners, they, with their very lives pointed at the way the truth and the life
that is Jesus.
I think we should look at the lives of the martyrs and
consider what they did in their time and then honor these early Christian by
following them not in the way they died because that is not necessary but by
following how they lived. The only
source of true hope is living in our Lord’s resurrected life.
1. What impresses us about large buildings and the power
of government and religion?
2. The early Christians saw the breakdown of
3. How can we live our lives after the example of the
first Christians who died for what they believed?