Endurance
Luke 21:5-19
Click here for the video, "Endurance."
So, last week we heard the word of the Lord through the prophet Haggai to the people of God returned from exile. They were discouraged because they had returned home and nothing was like they remembered, or how it had been told to them by those who still remembered Solomon’s temple; what’s sometimes referred to as the first temple. You know how these things work. The minute someone starts talking about the first temple, you know there must at least be a second temple. And, sure enough, there was. That’s sort of what the prophet was getting at. There was this sense that the rebuilt second temple just couldn’t measure up to the legend of the first. It reminds me a story that humorist David Sedaris tells about the pets his family had growing up. A short time after (their collie) Duchess, died, [their] father came home with a German shepherd puppy. “For reasons that were never explained,” he writes, “the privilege of naming the dog went to a friend of my older sister’s, a fourteen-year-old girl named Cindy. She was studying German at the time, and after carefully examining the puppy and weighing it with her hands, she announced it would be called Mädchen, which apparently meant “girl” to the Volks back in the Vaterland. We weren’t wild about the name but considered ourselves lucky that Cindy wasn’t studying one of the harder-to-pronounce Asian languages.
“When she was six,” he goes on, “Mädchen was killed by a car. Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home an identical German shepherd, whom the same Cindy thoughtfully christened Mädchen Two. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially for the new dog, who was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor.
‘Mädchen One would never have wet the floor like that,’ my father would scold, and the dog would sigh, knowing she was the canine equivalent of a rebound.”
Well, the second temple was the religious equivalent of a rebound. The initial attempt looked as nothing in the sight of the returned exiles. But by the time Jesus and his disciples were hanging around in Jerusalem some it had become one of the wonders of its time, mostly due to the refurbishment efforts of the Hasmoneans and the embellishments of Herod the Great. Yes, that Herod; the one written about in Matthew’s gospel, the one who intercepted the wise men from the East and allegedly ordered the slaughter of children under the age of two at the suggestion that a “King of the Jews” had been born.
In today’s reading, the words of the prophet Haggai have been fulfilled. The latter glory of this super-sized second temple has easily become greater than the glory of the former first temple. Jesus’ friends from the sticks are marveling at it and the fancy stones and jewels that adorn it. They are, in a word, impressed. That’s when Jesus tells them the hard truth, “all will be thrown down.” Did Jesus know what was coming? Did he know that 70 years down the road the second temple would fall just like the first at the hands of a foreign army? Did Jesus predict the disastrous result of the failed Jewish rebellion against Rome? Or was Jesus talking about something more?
It creates a little whiplash from last week to this week, to hear about the promise of latter glory, to marvel at the fulfillment of that promise with his disciples, and then to hear Jesus talk about its imminent destruction. Why you gotta be such a killjoy, Jesus? Why indeed? It’s one of the questions that Jesus actually answers… sort of. They ask about the destruction he’s predicting, and the sign that it’s about to take place. And he warns them about being led astray. Because when it comes to the end of the world, it’s easy to be led astray.
One of our favorite TV shows from the turn of the 21st century was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On the surface you might be tempted to dismiss it as just one more supernatural teenage drama. But it was so much more than that. As the opening narration explained in its first season, “In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.” So, the show was about vampires, but it was also about high school. And the place where those two elements continually intersected was that the world was always coming to an end.
But it isn’t just teenagers who have a tendency to think that the world is always coming to an end. Last year, as fires were consuming California, and hurricanes were churning through the Caribbean, I overheard a man at the gym telling a friend we had to be in the end times. If that’s what you’re looking for, if that is what you are afraid of, then all you have to do is look around to find evidence of wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines and plagues; all manner of dreadful portents. Jesus didn’t need a crystal ball to see the fault lines of history that ran through Jerusalem. They were right in front of them all. Judea was an occupied land. The people of that land had fought empires in the past and won their independence. The brutality of Rome and the zealotry of Jewish nationalism were on a collision course. It wasn’t a matter of if they would clash, but when. The combustible atmosphere that would lead to Jesus’ crucifixion is that same one that would ultimately bring the temple to the ground.
Temples rise, temples fall. It looks like the end of the world. It feels like the end of the world. Empires rise, empires fall. It looks like the end of the world. It feels like the end of the world. Some disasters are natural, some are not. Jesus talks about being arrested, persecuted; being handed over to stand before kings and governors, asked to say something. Jesus talks about all of these things in Jerusalem, just days before these very same things will happen to him; betrayal at the hands of friends and being put to death. Even so, it is not the end.
There will always be somebody who comes along in Jesus’ name convinced that the end is nigh, that whatever upheaval is taking place, whatever norms are being shattered, whatever disaster is wreaking havoc is one more sign that God is getting ready to call it a wrap and put an end to the whole shebang. And Jesus cautions us not to be led astray by such talk. Jesus urges us not to be terrified when it looks like the world is coming to an end. Which I have to admit is difficult to hear because there is a whole lot going on in the world right now that is terrifying- starting with the world itself, this planet and its people problem. Do we really need more signs than the ones we already have that our continued carbon emissions and rising global temperatures could have catastrophic consequences that would make the destruction of the temple look like child’s play? In the face of this and other equally terrible things happening around the globe and in our own back yard, Jesus urges us not to give in to our fears. Not because we’ve shown ourselves to be exceptionally skilled at navigating our way out of such disasters. We really haven’t. In some ways it’s our own stubborn insistence on self-reliance that contributes to so much of our own destruction. No matter how we try, we can’t seem to outrun that age-old impulse to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in an attempt to supplant God as the one in charge of our destiny.
To those of us on the other side of the temple’s destruction, to those of us on the other side of something that has been lost, or destroyed, or diminished in our lives, we know what Jesus is talking about. We know that there is nothing we can build, no matter how impressive and great, that it cannot be destroyed. There is nothing we put our hand to that cannot be taken away from us. No matter how much we may marvel at it, no matter how much we may cling to it, these things are never forever. But what that also means is that neither are the things that test us; neither is the hatred we may face for speaking the truth, neither is the betrayal we may experience and the hand of a loved one. Everything comes to an end. But it is never the end of the world. It is never the end of us.
In fact, it is precisely through our endurance of such disaster and heartache that we discover this truth. It is by our endurance of such threats and loss that we come to know the faithfulness of God even through our failure, even at the world’s, and our, worst. We experience the presence of the one who promises never to leave or forsake us, the one who is with us always. And in so doing we gain the truest sense of who we are in the eyes of the one whose love is never ending. In a word, we gain our souls.