We hear Jesus talk about division and the destruction of the Temple with a sense of fear while he offers hope.
For Sunday
Proper 28C
Collect
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 21:5-19
“But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
Reflection
Jesus and his disciples are leaving the Temple. It’s the time we honor as Holy Week. The students are marveling at the size and scope of the place. Country folk in the big city for the first time. Everything is bigger there. Everything a marvel.
Jesus snaps their attention like he fears they’re being intoxicated by the great city’s charm and the Temple’s grandeur.
This, of course, is the second Temple. The first was built by Solomon to contain God on earth and was destroyed by the Babylonians. Half of the people were taken into exile. The educated people. The scholars. Teachers. Priests. Leaders. All taken away.
In Exile, that half is integrated, fattened up, compelled to stay in the beautiful city of Babylon. The new wealth and the destruction of home are quite enticing arguments.
When the Babylonians are defeated and the exiled Hebrews are invited to return home after decades, the ones who choose to go, return changed to a changed people. Reintegration isn’t easy. Everything is different. But they do have a common goal: to rebuild the Temple to give God a home again.
The words Jesus offers the disciples about the Temple and the future are frightening.
They betray a seeming hopelessness and inevitability that makes us just as uncomfortable as the specter they offer: division, hatred, and violence.
They also serve as a stark reminder that the disciples’ work isn’t pie-in-the-sky or magic that happens without our participation. God doesn’t work like that. These potent earthly forces cultivate destruction. And the human impulse is to destroy in return.
How alluring the city is to the disciples and how grand the Temple may be, these are no less human constructions to our vanity, pride, fear, and anxiety. They project the majesty of God and yet we can’t protect them from erosion by age, inclement weather, or violent disagreement.
Jesus doesn’t want our heads intoxicated by grandeur or spectacle when neighbors would destroy neighbors. He wants us quick-witted for when family would place country, tradition, tribe before God.
As gloomy and difficult as this is to hear, it’s also a wake-up call. Not so much a blunt pessimistic rant, but a necessary reorientation.
We already understand that following Jesus isn’t easy. But this is the reminder that the way of Christ is fundamentally different from the way of the world.
A reminder as true now as ever. But a reminder as hopeful as ever. Because we have purpose. And endurance. And the love of God to share.