Proper 28 (November 13-19)
Texts: Mark 13:1-8;
Heb 10:11-25; Dan 12:1-3
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Wsj_MyFNRDM
See accompanying Sermon Notes
SURVIVING THE END OF THE WORLD
Well, here we are at the end of the world. You might say, ‘Hey, Pastor Paul, things aren’t that bad, that depressing, are they.’ To which I would respond, ‘They might be, we’ll see. But I’m talking first about this morning’s Gospel Reading.’ The impact of Jesus’ prophecy about the destruction of the Temple in Mark 13 sounds like the end of the world. Two thousand years later, it’s hard for us to gauge the shock value at what Jesus is telling his disciples. Today, the parallel would be for us to be standing outside the Capitol building in Washington D.C., and I’d say to you, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The Temple in Jerusalem held that kind of place at the center of their culture and nation. In fact, I guess the parallel works in reverse, too. Because I remember in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol that commentators were frequently referring to the Capitol as the “temple of our democracy.” Whether we’re talking about the Jerusalem temple in the first century or the Washington Capitol in the twenty-first century, we’re talking about the loss of a nation’s central focus. We’re talking about the destruction of the symbolic heart of a nation’s way of life. For Jews in the First Century or Americans in the Twenty-first Century, this destruction would mark the end of the world in the sense of the end of our way of life.
I’d like to consider both of these catastrophic losses, one which already happened in history and the second feeling like it might not be too far away, at least in the metaphorical sense of losing our democracy, if not literally losing the Capitol building.
First, let’s consider the one that already happened. There are two historical layers to this story in the Gospel of Mark.1 Mark is relating something that happened between Jesus and his followers sometime around the year 33 A.D. But Mark does not write this book until around the year 70 A.D. An entire generation has come and gone since the time that Jesus walked out of those temple precincts and said those words to the people who were his students. Back then, some forty years earlier, Mark said that Jesus warned them: It’s not going to be here much longer. It’s all going to be cast down. Later, in A.D. 70, Mark’s report would seem like a sort of an insight or a prophetic glance or that an impossible, unthinkable thing which had just become reality. Because that was the year, A.D. 70, when the Romans had had enough. They took an army into Jerusalem, and they crushed the Jews. They knocked that temple off of its foundations, stealing all of its holy artifacts, and marching them in a parade back across the Mediterranean Sea and into the streets of Rome, the pagan imperial city. The temple was indeed destroyed. The unthinkable actually happened.
The Jewish-Roman War had started four years earlier, in the year 66, when the Jews finally had had enough of the Romans, and they violently revolted against them. At first, it seemed like the Jews might have won, mostly because there were a whole bunch of political events back in Rome that kept the Roman army occupied in other parts of the empire. But once Rome woke up and they realized what was going on out in Jerusalem, there’s no way that they were going to let rebellion stand. They were Rome. Resistance is futile. They sent their great army to Jerusalem, and they did their worst to the Jews. They did their worst to Jerusalem. And when the Roman army did its worst, it was horrible. Thousands and thousands of innocent Jews were slaughtered in the streets of Jerusalem. Thousands were captured and sold into slavery. And thousands were exiled into other parts of the Roman Empire. It was the end of their world, the endo of their way of life.
At the time Mark wrote his Gospel — the first Gospel written that we know of — this chapter, chapter 13, was in many ways the most important chapter. Mark’s Jewish congregation needed to understand this catastrophe. In fact, there’s a good chance that it is the reason that Mark’s community decided to write a Gospel. It was these words from Jesus about the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple which established Jesus as a true prophet. What he had warned about forty years earlier had come true. Tragically true.
But being a true prophet, especially in the line of the Hebrew prophets, is more than about giving true predictions. True prophecy is not about locking people into a certain future, a certain fate. No, it’s about warning people away from what may happen by offering them an alternative, a choice. Jesus’ warning about the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple shows them the end of the path they are currently on, by contemplating the war against Rome which they would eventually choose. But Jesus, as not only a true prophet but also as the true Messiah, is there to offer them a different path, a way to avoid the consequences of this dire prediction. He’s there to offer them, in short, the path away from what we might call nationalism and onto the path of God’s way of reigning. Jesus is there to lead them into a reign based on the power of love rather than the power of violence, a reign in which we love our enemies rather than hate and fear them. Shockingly, it is a reign based on suffering violence rather than inflicting it, on choosing the way of forgiveness rather than the way of retribution.
I named what Jesus came to steer us away from as nationalism. All this past year I’ve been trying to stand in Jesus’ way of prophecy to help us understand how wrong the path of nationalism is. It represents the ‘same ‘ol same ‘ol’ type of human governance, in which the gods favor our nation to violently protect its way of life. Jesus definitely opposed the Roman Nationalism of their oppressors. There’s no doubt about that. But he came to warn his people that the way to defeat it was not to take up a Jewish form of nationalism. That God’s way of reigning offers something distinctly different. In the end, not enough people listened to him, so they went the usual end of human nationalistic ways of governing. Utter destruction and human suffering. Rome would someday suffer that fate, too. All the empires do, because they are based on nationalistic thinking guided by violent gods of wrath.
Jesus was trying to show his people, in that different picture of the reign of God, a different kind of God. A very different God. But one within their own stories and journey as a people. He came to help them understand their own scriptures in a different way. The covenant with Abraham and Sarah is about a different kind of God, a God of love who had journeyed with them through thick and thin. This God which the Hebrew prophets had begun to present to them is a God not so much of the powerful kings who champion nationalism but a God of widows and orphans, a God of the marginalized, who champions true justice for all. This God which the prophets represented is a God of equality and peace who wants all the people to come together as a family rather than to dwell in constant state of unrest along lines of inequality and division.
These same prophets had also for centuries told the people of Israel that God didn’t want any of the blood sacrifices of the temple; that God wanted instead things like ‘doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God’ (Micah 6:82). So Jesus the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, was there to offer them a wholly new kind of reign that doesn’t involve kings presiding over inequality and the sacrificing of the powerless by the powerful. This Messiah’s God was, is, offering a new and better way that involves the healing of divisive inequalities such that the powerless become the focus of everyone’s care. If anyone desires to be great and powerful, they must follow the way of loving service, the way of caring for all (Mark 10:42-45; see sermon for Proper 24B).
Here’s the really Good News: Jesus was there not only to model this prophetic reign of God but also to bring it about. To launch it in the shocking way of being executed on the favored way of Roman torture and execution, the cross, but also to do so with the trust and faith in the Creator God’s power of life — which is the power of love. And so when he is raised three days later on the first Easter, God’s reign has begun. The time of New Creation has come to pass.
Once again, let’s be very clear about this. It is not about the replacement of one religion by another, of Judaism by so-called Christianity. It’s about the launching of God’s reign as an alternative in the midst of continuing human reigns. And understanding how this launching comes about is particularly important, because — and I think we need to be honest with ourselves here — so many of us have been taught in a tragically mistaken way. We’ve been wrongly taught that the cross and resurrection are about a wrathful god being appeased by Jesus’s loving sacrifice on the cross. Well, that’s the same logic as the sacrifice of the temples which God through the Jewish prophets had for centuries declared as passe, as something which human beings need to grow out of. The temples had in fact come to represent the way of nationalistic empires, sacrificing those at the margins of power to save those at the center of power. The people truly propped up by the practices of temples are kings and emperors and billionaires (assuming places like Wall Street and what happens in the Capitol building, the temple of our democracy, can be controlled by their wealth).
So, No!, the cross and resurrection represent something quite different — the opposite, really. The cross and resurrection represent a God of love, the power of life itself, offering us another reign, another way of governance. It’s a reign that moves away from the strong man king or emperor who promises retribution against one’s enemies — for the small price of inequality and injustice, where the powerful reign over the powerless. Jesus comes to offer God’s way of reigning, which foregoes the violent strongman altogether in favor of the king who serves in love. This is what Jesus has been telling us over and over again throughout Mark’s Gospel. That God is calling all people under this reign to caring for one another and for our earth home.
So this past year (see especially the sermon for Maundy Thursday) I’ve also talked about how I think democracy is at least an important step forward towards this different reign of God. We’ve foregone the violent strongman king in favor of leaders who are supposedly equal under the law to the rest of us, that they might serve all of us for designated periods of time, after which we have nonviolent transitions to new servant leaders. This American experiment, of course, is still a long way away from the fullness of God’s reign in Jesus the Messiah. For one thing, there has never yet been a true equality. We started out with only white landowning Christian men being able to vote and become our leaders. Over the nearly 250 years, we’ve begun course corrections on that, giving the vote to all, despite continuing efforts to suppress it, and beginning to have women and people of color as leaders — though having a woman President still eludes us.
The gloom I’ve felt these past two weeks is that I believe that we have now taken a step backwards in choosing leadership that is backed by the same old nationalistic way — they straightforwardly name it as “Christian Nationalism” — a path which could lead to the end of our world as we know it, the end of our experiement with democracy, at least for now.
But as followers of Jesus the Messiah, our calling remains the same: namely, to live into God’s reign, as best we can, in the path that he’s forged for us. More on that next week. For now, we turn our attention to the one thing which Mark narrates for us between this dire prophecy in chapter 13, about the so-called end of the world, and the launching of God’s reign through the cross and resurrection over the final three chapters. That one thing is the Lord’s Supper — where instead of killing something on an altar we remember the way of self-giving with which our Lord nourishes us and strengthens us for this arduous journey to peace — the way of his body broken for us, his blood poured out for us. The way of New Creation. It’s here. It’s real. We are called to live into it. So let us eat and drink of that food, strengthened for whatever lies ahead. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, November 17, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Wsj_MyFNRDM
Notes
1. Beginning at this point, the next two paragraphs are a lightly edited version from Diana Butler Bass’s “Sunday Musings” on this text, titled “The Rock That Births You,” which can be accessed at: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-532?utm_campaign=email-post&r=9tcpq&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
2. It is important to note that the lead-up to Micah 6:8 is this: “‘With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” This is one of the many passages in the prophets in which they say that God wants justice instead of blood sacrifices. Others include: Psalms 40:6, 11-13; Isaiah 1:11-17; Jer. 7:22-23; Hosea 6:6; and Amos 5:21-24. Jesus also quotes Hosea 6:6 twice in Matthew at 9:13 and 12:7.
