In Mark’s Little Apocalypse, Jesus invites us to see what we’d rather avoid: not only the finitude of existence but the challenge of a life of trusting God.
How our temples deny our trust
Proper 28B | Mark 13:1-8
I don’t envy the disciples. Here they are, marveling the enormity of the Temple, looking at the hulking structure. And Jesus plays the downer. He goes full Eeyore to the disciple’s Tigger. Don’t worry. It’ll all be gone soon.
And I really do sympathize with them. Who among us raised in small towns hasn’t walked into a big city and marveled at the skyscrapers? Or stood near the side of the Grand Canyon and had an existential crisis pondering the finitude of life and the tiny stature of the human form? Maybe that’s just me.
But imagine that. The Temple Mount is hundreds of yards wide and deep. The walls and structures rise far above their heads. This is easily the biggest structure any of them has ever seen.
And it’s even more important than that. This is the center of everything. So for many of us here, Washington National Cathedral, Canterbury, St. Peter’s in Rome only begin to approximate the attachment. This isn’t where God’s favored preside — God lives here. And who are we to make this humble pilgrimage to the holiest place on earth?
Of course, this is our second trip here. Jesus made a big spectacle yesterday. Then today he was confronted by all the leaders. In all the hubbub and eagerness, we didn’t really look around; we didn’t see the Temple, you know? It’s all around, but from here, we can really see it. And it is impressive.
Looking Up
Given that feeling of awe, how shocking it is to have that sense dashed with hopeless pessimism. It feels like you’re telling a loved one about your day and their response is “you know, we’re all going to die.”
This sense is important. And it is deeply spiritual. We gather on Ash Wednesday to remember that we are dust and will return to the dust. And there’s a Buddhist teaching that says “To find happiness, contemplate death five times a day.”
You can even get an app that will do this — reminding you randomly five times a day that you are going to die. Life is fleeting. It’s aptly called WeCroak.
So we all get it intellectually, but it is a total buzzkill. And here, it feels like a nonsequitor. But we all know, deep down, that it’s not. That we need to hear this.
Jesus follows this up with apocalyptic talk of the wars and division and conflict; which doesn’t make us feel the least bit better. It sounds deranged and destructive.
Of course, every generation reads this passage and thinks it’s about the present age. There are always wars and rumors of wars. Too much persecution. Earthquakes and famines.
And times like these with heightened geopolitical upheaval and political transformations, climate change with more intense storms and greater destruction, these words are all the more chilling. Many of us are asking if the end is near and others keep repeating the refrain “what do we do in the midst of this?”
Back up.
This section of Mark feels really odd. It totally stands out as a weird and cynical moment in this gospel. Scholars have even given it a name: “The Little Apocalypse”.
And I think the very sense of being overwhelmed by the bad stuff in the world is the same reason we struggle to hear Jesus here. Or really, to read any apocalyptic literature, like the book of Revelation. The emotions and implications of a blunt reading are too raw and troubling. It’s like a child telling you about sex. Or a parent making funeral plans.
Here’s the wall to protect us. Stop talking. Avoid the subject.
But we do a real disservice to ourselves because this story comes with a context and Jesus is telling us that the plans are bigger than who wins the moment.
Can you remember what they were just talking about before they left the Temple, marveling at it? Before leaving the city and hearing about its apocalyptic demise?
The Temple system.
Specifically, how the powerful maintained power, felt good about their power, and how they oppressed the poor.
When they came to the Temple on Monday of Holy Week, Jesus drove the moneychangers and the dove sellers out of the Temple. Why?
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”?
But you have made it a den of robbers.’
It is a place of scheming and stealing and protecting the criminal. The place where the exploiters are protected.
Then on Tuesday, he’s asked to prove his authority by a sequence of questions. In the end, he’s showing again how this “house of prayer for all the nations” is really “a den of robbers”. They’re willing to devour the houses of the poor.
This Temple isn’t impressive. This human achievement isn’t glorifying God, it’s oppressing and stealing and worse. It only protects those who steal, leaving the poor to fend for themselves, powerless. There is nothing Godly about the Temple as Jesus sees it.
It’s going down. But not without a fight.
And not because the faithful turn to God and humanity transcends the Temple. But because a human empire will come and obliterate the most impressive thing these fishermen have ever seen.
The Great Revealing
The word apocalypse means “revealing.” What means that something apocalyptic is not entirely about destruction or division — it’s what God is revealing about the world. And what happens when we know the truth.
So this little apocalypse isn’t really about division and climate change directly, but what all of this reveals. The arrogance and distrust in the human heart.
And more importantly, it is setting up the great revealing to come on Good Friday and Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. This Temple is not going to last forever — don’t put your trust in it. This isn’t God! The true Temple will die and come back again.
Jesus tells us that the Temple isn’t the temple. The temple’s Jesus.
And for 21st Century Christians, we need to remember all the more what has been revealed in 2000 years since! That the true temple isn’t Jesus’s body. It isn’t the human flesh or even the divine person of the Trinity as imagined in complex theology bouncing around in the brain of true believers.
The temple, like Jesus, is an icon — the incarnational focus of our attention. It’s where our love of God is drawn.
So a Temple which takes the last pennies of the poor and bestows certain rigid piety upon the wealthy isn’t God’s.
Like the Presiding Bishop says, “If it’s not about love, then it’s not about God.”
Jesus guides us to a new temple.
A humbler beauty
The challenge of the Little Apocalypse of Mark really is a lot like the challenge of living in our world right now. When we’re asking each other how to move forward now, how to heal our division. And it all feels beyond our ability to understand.
Like learning uncomfortable truths, we often believe we’d rather keep the truth hidden. Just like the veil inside the temple protecting the Holy of Holies. We want to believe forever that this is where God will always dwell.
But it isn’t.
God is revealed daily in us when we turn our love toward each other. When we reveal God in ourselves. The small acts of kindness and the grand acts of generosity. The secret gifts with no acclaim and the throwing our hearts into homeless bags and serving our children in K.I.D.S Worship.
It certainly was a lot easier to find the awe in this church during the boom times. Looking at all of this offering to the glory of God as truly beautiful. And ultimately very finite and human.
And yet, there is a far greater beauty, a more humble beauty, in discovering awe today with our new limits. Seeing God in the service of our readers, our choir, ushers who serve at the last minute.
And what happens when that humble beauty expands beyond our service? When we begin to see God everywhere? This temple-vision, this Jesus-vision, this incarnate God vision helps us see God’s work everywhere.
Because that’s what Jesus does with his disciples! He keeps telling them to flip things around and see the kin-dom here! Put on those God Glasses, those holy specs and see!
See!
Got ‘em on? Put on those frames and see! OK, now, stop looking up! God isn’t found up there! God isn’t found in the sky or in these skyscrapers or this human-made temple. We’re all looking in the wrong direction. Look out! — Look down! You can’t see God when you’re looking in the wrong place!
This is what the love of Christ does! It keeps revealing what we’d rather not see, what we’d rather avoid. How we’d rather construct elaborate human systems to justify our ignorance and distrust!
But it’s Christ’s love that reveals it anyway! Yes, this is it! We all will die someday! Yes, we are all just dust! But stop looking in the sky as if the solution will arrive if you pray hard enough! All that does is ensure we ignore the people around us!
We are stardust come from the heavens. So, yes, the sky is a marvel of beauty. But we are down here. And our work is down here!
Jesus is always compelling us to look outward, not upward, for the people around us. Always building and tearing down and rebuilding the temple so that we can truly know God. So we can truly serve God. So we can truly trust God.
That’s how much God loves us. Trusting us to trust each other.