The Sword in the Sky

Dominik Mayer Art

   

Propers: The First Sunday of Advent, AD 2024 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.

“At the end of the world, when all has been lost, I will be with you.”

Jesus was born beneath the boot of the mighty Roman Empire. As a child, the puppet-king appointed by Caesar sought to take His life. As an adult, His teachings flew in the face of Roman norms, coöpting tax collectors and promising earth to the meek. At the end of His mortal ministry, Jesus died on a Roman Cross, beneath a Latin sign, not for the crime of claiming to be God, but because He entered into Jerusalem at the Passover riding on a donkey as a King. And Rome hates kings.

He told His disciples not to fight, not to raise the sword, but to lay down their lives for the truth, to denounce murder and conquest and the oppression of the poor. He angered the rich and the powerful by His refusal to keep silent, commanding His Apostles do the same. And He warned them—warned us—that worse was yet to come. He knew that but a few would accept the Way of Jesus, the way of active nonviolent resistance, of impartial love and superabundant grace, neither surrendering us to evil nor resorting to evil ourselves.

The people of Israel, Jesus’ people, would rise up in rage against Rome. And in response, Rome would bring the hammer down. He was desperate to avoid this, but knew it would occur. “There will be signs,” He said: distress, confusion, roaring, fear, foreboding. The powers of the heavens shall be shaken. “Be alert,” He said. Be strong and pray. Let not that day catch you unawares. But stand up and raise your heads, because now your redemption draws near. The world as you know it will end; but I will still be with you.

Jesus’ preaching is prophetic, not in the sense that He’s divining the future as through a crystal ball, but in that He draws upon the Prophets of the Bible, who—inspired by the Holy Spirit—boldly spoke the will of God regardless of the cost. They could point to the injustices, the evils of their day, and say, “Repent! Turn back! Stop doing these terrible things. If you will not cease, the consequences are your own.” Evil is a serpent devouring its tail. You don’t need a time-machine to see how this plays out.

Jesus is also prophetic in that He draws from the Prophets’ store of imagery and symbols; where the land represents Israel, the sea the Gentile nations, and the falling of the heavens is political disarray. Empires rise, and empires fall. God and His people endure. So in this morning’s little Lukan apocalypse, that of which Jesus speaks is not the end of the world in an eschatological sense, but the brewing of a war that shall destroy Jerusalem. He fortifies His friends for the chaos yet to come.

The Temple will fall. Jerusalem will fall. But the end of this city shall not be the end of you. I am with you to the end of the age.

Yosef ben Mattityahu was born but a few years after Jesus’ Crucifixion. His father was a priest and his mother was a royal: scion of the dynasty that Herod had destroyed. Yosef too grew up under Roman occupation. He too sought to avoid violence; in fact, he travelled to Rome in order to negotiate with Nero. Yet war came nonetheless. The taxes proved intolerable, the ethnic tensions too entrenched, and the imperial governors far too heavy-handed. Thus began the Revolt, the First Romano-Jewish War.

Incredibly, the Judeans at the first seemed to pull off the impossible. They ambushed and massacred the Thunderbolt Twelfth Legion, the Syrian Army of Rome, putting more than 6000 soldiers to the sword. This was Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. People hailed it as a miracle, and fanatical religious Zealots flocked to Jerusalem in order to welcome the messianic age, burning food supplies to force a final confrontation. Yosef ben Mattityahu took charge as the general of the Galilee, Jesus’ own home turf.

Alas, if you kill a Legion, the Romans send four more. Titus Flavius Vespasianus marched into Judea and annihilated the Galilean army so completely that poor Yosef was one of only two survivors—two out of a force of some 65,000. The blow shook him so thoroughly that, either out of awe or simple self-preservation, Yosef declared Vespasian to be the promised Christ, the Messiah sent to punish all Judea. Amused by this sudden turn of allegiance, Vespasian appointed Yosef to be his personal scribe, and soon thereafter made him a Roman citizen: Flavius Josephus.

And he chronicled the conquest of his people. There were signs in the heavens over Jerusalem, according to Josephus: a comet like a sword atop the city; a light as of day in the middle of the night; a cow giving birth to a lamb in the sacred courtyard; the armored eastern gate swinging open by itself; armies seen marching in the sky; disembodied voices in the Temple calling, “We depart from hence”; and a maniac named Joshua—that is, Jesus—wandering inconsolably throughout the streets of the city, crying, “A voice against Jerusalem and the sanctuary! A voice against the bridegroom and the bride!” That should sound familiar.

And all of this occurred within 40 years of Jesus’ death: a single biblical generation. “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among the nations … Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all [these] things have taken place.”

A million Jews died in the war, Josephus writes. 97,000 more were sold in Roman slavery. Not one single Judean was left within Jerusalem, which the Legions levelled and rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina: a Roman colony, dedicated to Jupiter, from which Jews were expressly forbidden for nearly 500 years. That was the end of the world. That was the end of everything God’s people thought they knew. The whole Book of Revelation, and even the Gospels themselves, spring from the Jewish-Christian community grappling with the obliteration of Jerusalem: the City of God, the City of the Temple and the Tomb.

As for Vespasian, well, he went on to conquer Rome and burn their temples too, crowning himself Emperor by fire and the sword. The plundered treasury of God’s Temple went to build the Colosseum, that blood-drenched theater of mass-murder and of martyrs. Who could have imagined then all that was to come? Who would’ve thought that Judaism and Christianity would go on hence to reach unparalleled heights, or that one day the very Empire which crucified Christ, would see a successor of Vespasian be baptized?

In my darkest days, at my lowest points, when all about me feels chaotic and everything seems lost, I retreat to the still and quiet center of my soul, and there I find that I am not alone. I have been supported at every step by my family and friends, often separated by distance, time, or even death. But it’s enough to know that they love me, for that cannot be taken away. Their love for me is a mirror of the love of Christ for us all. Jesus is always with us. Nothing can take us from Him: not fear, not stress, neither hardship nor loss.

Empires rise, and empires fall. Cities are burnt and rebuilt. We struggle mightily with disease and deprivation, with poverty and politics, with longing and with loss. The waves roar, and the earth is distressed, and still our God is with us. That is the message of our Gospel for this morning. Never pretend that bad things only happen to bad people. Jesus doesn’t promise us an easy life; to the contrary, he promises to each of us a cross. The Way of Christ is arduous, for love is sacrificial. Love is vulnerability.

But you will never be alone. You have never been alone. God in Christ is with you. God in Christ is for you. God in Christ will never let you go. Whatever the journey, whatever the path, whatever the pains we endure, we are going home. And nothing can stop that. Not debt, not cancer, not war, not sin nor death nor hell, not all of our regrets combined with all our wasted dreams. We are going home! Lift up your heads, for salvation is at hand.

I know how hard this life can be, and I have had it easy. Imagine then how intimately, how utterly, how fully Jesus knows your pain, for He has taken it too, taken it into His flesh. He has borne His Cross and died His death and risen again for you! The world can fall around us, the stars be knocked from heaven, and at the end of everything Christ is with us still. “At the end of the world, when all has been lost, I will be with you.” That is all we know on earth, and all we need to know.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come to raise us up. Come to take us home.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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