Little Apocalypse

Propers: The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Gospels are for grandchildren. They represent second-generation Christian witness preserved for the benefit of third-generation Christians.

See, early on there wasn’t really any need to write things down. The first generation of Christianity was made up of the immediate followers of Jesus: 12 Apostles, 70 disciples, however many in the crowds saw His signs and heard His words. We can include in this Mary, His mother, and Mary Magdalene, “the Tower”—as well as James the Just and Saul of Tarsus, both of whom were not followers of Jesus until after they had encountered for themselves the crucified and resurrected Christ.

The second generation were those who witnessed the power of the Spirit moving in those disciples: in Peter and Paul and Mary and James and all those transformed by the paschal miracle of Easter. And that took us through a good 30 to 40 years, a full biblical generation, not half bad. But then things took a turn for the worse. In AD 64, the mad Emperor Nero blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome—the conflagration at which, legend tells us, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”

This led to the first great persecution of the Church by the Roman state. Paul lost his head. Peter was crucified upside-down. And James the Just was stoned to death. At one fell swoop, the top brass of the early Church were nearly all wiped out. And then something truly horrifying happened: the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. I can barely describe to you just how shocking that must have been.

From the time of Solomon, a thousand years before the Christ, the Temple in Jerusalem had been the house of God on earth. It was the center of Jewish identity, the center of history, religion, nationality, and politics for the people of Israel. We have no building like it. If you were to combine the U.S. Treasury, the Capitol, the White House, the National Cathedral, and the Twin Towers, all into one, then maybe you’d be getting close.

The greatest trauma in Israelite history had been some 600 years before Jesus, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar II, Nebuchadnezzar the Great, sacked Jerusalem, burned the Temple, and scattered the people of God into Exile. The greatest miracle in Israelite history occurred 70 year later, when Cyrus the Great, the first Persian Emperor, conquered Babylon, freed the Exiles, and allowed them to return and rebuild the Temple. The entire Hebrew Bible can be read through this lens of Exile and Return—the death and resurrection of God’s people Israel.

Amazingly enough, the Exile was not really a surprise. The major Prophets had been warning about it all along, warning that the evils of the nation were an implicit and often explicit rejection of God’s love. The Lord will never condone wickedness done toward others, no matter how special we think that we are. Ezekiel wrote that before the Neo-Babylonians had come to burn it, the presence of God had already left the Temple, already exited east to the Mount of Olives, going forth with His people into their Exile. The house of God had fallen, in other words, because it had ceased to welcome God, and was now just an empty shell.

But the people came back. Their children and their grandchildren came back. And God, who had never abandoned them, came back with them. The Temple was rebuilt, a Second Temple in Jerusalem. And later, under Herod the Great, the Temple was expanded to become one of the true wonders of the ancient world. It got so big, in fact, that they had to expand the mountain on which it sat. Really! They built a massive wall, 300 feet high, with stones weighing anywhere from 250 tons to 570 tons. And then they filled in that wall to make an enormous flat platform.

Inside the Temple—and in the Dome of the Rock today—there’s this stone sticking up, which is the peak of the original Mount Zion, the only part still poking through. And the Western Wall, which you see in the news all the time, isn’t a wall of the Temple, which has long since fallen, but of the Temple Mount. The Temple itself was gigantic, covered in polished white stone and thick plates of gold so that it would reflect the dawn in the east every morning. Contemporaries wrote that it shone like a second rising sun on a snow-covered mountain.

And flames and smoke were forever billowing forth from ceaseless sacrifices—the refuse of which would flow out a sluice gate into Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, where, according to Jesus, the fire always burns and the worm never dies. The scale of the place must’ve been unimaginable to anyone outside of a Chicago slaughterhouse. And that is what the Romans destroyed—in AD 70, about a generation after Jesus’ Crucifixion—during the First Romano-Jewish War.

For any Jew living at the time, and thus for any Christian, it would’ve seemed little less than the end of the world, the loss of everything they thought they’d known. And that, my friends, is why the Gospels were written down—and Revelation too. Peter was dead, Paul was dead, James was dead, Jerusalem utterly laid to waste. So what do we do now? How do we make sense of what has happened? And what is going to happen to us next? That’s what’s on everyone’s mind reading the Gospels.

Mark is the first of the four, according to scholarly consensus. This shortest and bluntest of the written Gospels was first put to parchment right around the time of Jerusalem’s destruction, either just before or just after. Tradition says there was an earlier one, a Hebrew Gospel written by St Matthew, but this is lost to us, save in what has been preserved by our four canonical witnesses. And in Mark’s Gospel today we read a story of Jesus visiting the Temple.

Now, this would not have been unusual for Him. What little we know of Jesus’ life assures us that He regularly attended worship in the Temple on every holiday from Hanukkah to Passover. But it’s new for at least one disciple. “Look, Teacher!” he cries, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of someone gawking at skyscrapers for the first time. “What large stones! What large buildings!”

“Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus replies, nonplussed. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Oof. There’s a slap to the face. And He says this, apparently, as they’re leaving, heading out the Eastern Gate toward the Mount of Olives; just as God left for that same mountain according to Ezekiel. Now, Jesus’ inner circle—James, John, Peter, and Andrew—aren’t about to let such a comment go unaddressed. “What are you talking about?” they ask Him. “When will this be? And how will we know when it’s about to be accomplished?”

So Jesus lays it all out. There will be other claimants, other christs, He says, false messiahs. There will be wars and earthquakes and famines, as there always are, especially in Judea, in the Holy Land. But the end is still to come. And note that He’s talking here about the end of the Temple, not the end of the world—though certainly some would imagine those to both be one and the same. And He comforts them, telling them: “This is but the beginnings of the birth pangs.”

Imagine Mark’s original audience. They have heard that the Temple in Jerusalem is about to be destroyed, perhaps already has been destroyed. And Mark is saying, “Be not afraid. Jesus warned us about this. These are but birth pangs—signs of new life.” This, take note, is why stories similar to this in the Gospels are often called “little apocalypses.” Because this is what apocalypse, as a literary genre, is for. When things are falling apart, when everything’s in an uproar, people write apocalypses.

And an apocalypse says, “Peace! Take heart! This is not the end! There is an end, that God has planned, a long, long time from now, when all wrongs shall be righted, and every loss restored. But that’s not what this is today.” Apocalypses interpret modern crises through a religious lens in order to assure us that God is in control, and that no terrible thing is so horrific that it can steal from us our promised end, our promised rest in God. That’s what today’s Gospel means.

A skeptic might be tempted to ask if Mark didn’t just make this up. Christians needed reassurance, and here Mark has given it to them straight from Jesus’ lips. But here’s the thing: we know that Jesus taught His followers that the Temple soon would fall. We know this because when it happened, when the Roman Legions came, the Christians had already evacuated Jerusalem for the nearby city of Pella, because Jesus had warned them to do so, thus avoiding the cataclysm to come.

It’s not the end of the world. There is an end, a good one, and this ain’t it. These are for us but the birth pangs. These are for us but the promise of a new life yet to be.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.