Not One Stone

Propers: The Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 33), AD 2022 C

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.

Julian the Apostate was the last pagan emperor of ancient Rome.

He was a nephew to Constantine, the man who legalized Christianity after 300 years of state persecution, and lost many family members early on to imperial purges. Raised in Constantinople, likely speaking Greek as his mother tongue, Julian was educated a Christian and ordained a lector. Yet around age 20 he had a change of heart.

Exposed to Neoplatonic philosophy, Julian found himself fascinated by the more mystical and magical aspects of Hellenistic thought: theurgy, astrology, spiritual alchemy; the purification of the soul by reason. He could look back over centuries of classical achievements, the glories of Greece and of Rome. Yet now the temples to the gods, to Hecate and Apollo and Zeus, all stood empty, crumbling. And Christianity appeared everywhere ascendant.

Julian became convinced, naively perhaps, that with just a little help, just a little push, the people could be reminded of the art, literature, and philosophy of the old ways. When he became Emperor—over a small lake of noble blood spilled down palace steps—he longed to share his fervent faith with the empire now laid out before him.

To him, the ancient paganism offered personal liberation, purification, a united spiritual culture, a revived civilization, and moral regeneration for himself and for his people. In this, ironically, his temperament appears rather Christian. I think he had been more shaped by the Church than he himself could ever admit. Even the revived paganism that he imagined would be built upon a Christian model.

In our reading this morning from the Gospel of St Luke, Christ has taken His disciples to Jerusalem, to the great Temple built by Solomon, rebuilt by Zerubbabel, and expanded into a wonder of the world by Herod the Great. And right they are to marvel. The walls of the Temple Mount stood some 300 feet high, with stones weighing 160,000 pounds, one of the largest structures of antiquity. Yet Christ, who has been coming to Jerusalem for His entire life, remains unimpressed.

“As for these things you see,” He tells them, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” And this shocks His hearers for a number of reasons. First of all, who could knock down such a gargantuan structure? The engineering boggles the mind. And second, who would dare? The Temple was the house of God Himself upon this earth, the holiest of holies.

Yet Jesus warns them of conflicts to come, of wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues. And He tells them to be not afraid. It isn’t the end of the world. We know that they took Him seriously, mind you, because 40 years after Jesus’ Crucifixion—the span of a single biblical generation—the Zealots of Jerusalem rose up against the might of the Roman Empire.

And when the dust settled, not one stone was left atop another. The Christians survived, because they had remembered His words and had fled from the city, fled to Pella. Thus the Christian community avoided the apocalypse of Jerusalem.

Everyone knew this story. The destruction of the Second Temple in the First Romano-Jewish War was a big deal for Christians, Jews, and pagans alike. Even centuries later, when Christians sat on the imperial throne, the Temple Mount was left in ruins, relegated to the derogatory status of a waste dump. Christians instead focused upon the Holy Sepulchre, the church built atop the twin sites of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection.

But 300 years later along came Julian the Apostate, with an agenda to weaken the Church, revive his civilization, and bring back the glories of the ancient world. And so his idea was to rebuild the great Temple of Jerusalem; truly a game-changer for the Jewish faithful, but also intended as a thumb in the eye to pious Christians. For had not Christ promised that no stone would be left atop another? What then if Julian could prove Him wrong, invalidating the words of Jesus?

So construction commenced—but it didn’t get very far. Strange things began to happen, weird and wild events, like something out of Indiana Jones. As they cleared the Temple foundations, fireballs erupted from the earth, burning up the workers. As they started to build, earthquakes shook them down. When they attempted sacrifices, famine hit the city. Officials overseeing construction began to die mysteriously, one eaten by worms, another reportedly bursting apart in public.

Many today are quick to point out that the entire Holy Land is a hotbed of tectonic activity and even fireballs leaping out of the ground at Jerusalem are nothing new. Josephus reports the same thing when men attempted to open the tombs of Solomon and David. It’s not unreasonable to infer that these were pockets of natural gas. To many, of course, no mundane explanation would do. The site was clearly cursed.

Poor Julian. He intended for his rule to have been one of reason and revival; a sharing of treasures both old and new; calling his Romans back to all that is beautiful, good, and true. He could not accept what he saw as Rome’s rejection of her heritage. Alas, he died young, at 32, having spurned a Persian peace offering in favor of leading a hopelessly doomed invasion. Pierced through the intestines, he lingered.

There were rumors that one of his own soldiers, a Christian, had assassinated him, and that he died lamenting the victory of “the Galilean.” Neither appear to be true. He was succeeded by the Emperor Jovian, named for Zeus, who reëstablished state sponsorship of Christianity. Julian’s dream drowned in the river of history.

He kind of hits differently now. For centuries we told the story of Julian the Apostate triumphally, as the last gasp of pagandom before an ascendant Christendom. But Christendom is no more. The bizarre alchemy of Church and State could not last. One cannot for long hold up the banner of Empire alongside the Cross the Christ—the Cross being a specifically imperial and notably loathsome method of execution.

Christendom always held within it the seeds of its own demise. “Put not your trust in princes,” after all. “My Kingdom is not of this world,” sayeth the Lord. Now here we are at the far side of modernity, after 400 years of redefining human liberty in terms of consumption and concupiscence, after a century of World Wars and Cold Wars, the Holocaust and the atom. And we feel a bit like Julian, don’t we?

We too look back over the long and storied history of Western civilization, full of cruelties and contradictions, yes, but also overflowing with art, beauty, exploration, engineering, and astonishing accomplishments of liberty and law, administration, technology, literature, health. And we see this heritage rejected. We see so much of what we’ve built—our culture, our legacy—dissolving away before the twin ascendancies of the atomistic individual and the absolutist state.

We are surrounded by deracinated people, an anti-culture denuded of past and of future, of root and of fruit, uneducated, uncaring, apathetic, irreligious, living out endless cycles of sleep, work, and entertainment, caring only for what we can buy next. And we do not understand. I do not understand. All this goodness and beauty and truth we reject. All this philosophy, spirituality, poetry, and art. How do people live so divorced from the divine? How do we stop the tide of time, turn back the clock?

As for these things you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down … When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified … I will give you words and a wisdom … Not a hair of your head will perish … By your endurance you will gain your souls.

The world did not end with the destruction of the Temple. The world did not end with Julian’s quixotic reign. The world did not end with Christendom’s catastrophic collapse. We are still here. God is still with us. Christ lives among us. And whatever comes next, our calling remains the same: to love one another as Christ has loved us; to love our neighbors as ourselves, yea, even love our enemies; and to have faith in the one whom God has sent, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Christianity has a long tradition of recognizing the dignity of losing well. As far as this life goes, losing teaches truths that winning never knows. We worship the Crucified and Risen Lord. Defeat is our victory, death our life, humility our glory. And this much of the future we do know: that Christ is there, that He is the Resurrection and the Life of us all. What then have we left to fear?

Stones fall. Men die. Jesus saves.

Have faith in God that nothing good is every truly lost.

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