Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 21:5-19
We don’t always get what we want, and even when we do, it is never clear which is better.
Blessings turn into cages, and what we thought were our failures may turn out to be gifts. We keep revising our opinions of the past and of events that brought us to where we are. Perspective, like prophecy, is a tricky thing. Just when we think we have a grasp on either one, it shifts.
You will be betrayed, Jesus says. Some of you will be killed, he says, yet not a hair on your head will perish.
Well, which is it? That seems a reasonable enough question, given the plain contradiction. Are we talking metaphorically? The things he describes don’t seem to be metaphors.
This isn’t the happy Jesus of bumper sticker Christianity. It’s not warm and fuzzy theology, and this isn’t the passage one would choose to read to new converts.
Or maybe it is precisely the right passage. They would know what they were in for. It would match up with what life brings them. A gospel life is not a trouble free life, and blessings are not magic. In Christian theology, all paths lead to the cross.
All the stones will be torn down, Jesus says. All of them will be torn down, with not one left on top of the other.
All of the stones were torn down, of course. The Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, purposefully reducing the stone walls to nothing but rubble, making the sort of point that Rome was so very good at making in the face of rebellion.
Today many Christians read this passage as a word of prophecy from Jesus, telling the crowd about things that would happen. Some say that this Gospel was written after 70 AD, when the author of Luke already had experienced the destruction of the temple and seen political persecution of Christians, and so the writer put these words into the mouth of Jesus. That last view is not particularly infused with faith, true enough, but it’s out there, and it’s possible. Still, who knows? God can work with anything, perhaps even a crafty gospel writer.
The meaning and the value of what Jesus is saying doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the temple in Jerusalem, or with stones in actual walls, or the persecution that played out in ancient courts. All of it could apply equally well at any time to our interior landscape, our inner life, our real lives, regardless of what is going on in the world.
Jesus knew that sooner or later our walls fall down. The stones crack and our building blocks get scattered. Maybe we call it depression, or cancer, or the loss of a loved one, or the lack of someone to love. Maybe it’s war, displacement, a flood, loss of work, loss of the ability to work. Our walls fall down. Our temple, our heart, where we cherish the things we have come to love, is broken, and we are cracked open, torn apart.
One of my favorite words is in the last verse of this passage. It is usually translated as patience or endurance, and I have written about it on other occasions: by your endurance you will gain your souls. Endurance. Patience. ὑπομονῇ. Hypomone. Taking this compound word literally, the meaning is remaining under. Living under. Dwelling in all of what life piles onto us.
It is a word of hope, but not the sort of word that most people want to hear. It is a word of being delivered in our troubles, but not out of them, and it does not match up with popular theology. It is the sort of thing understood best by people who have lost something, or who never had it to begin with—the poor, the troubled, the disenfranchised, those who understand that they live in the Exile, like strangers in a strange land, and knowing they may never see the Exodus in this life.
Sooner or later we are all exiles. Every single one of us. It may last a week, or a season, or the rest of our lives, but our walls crack and fall and we are left in the rubble.
The gospel hope is in the presence of a God who does not reside just in high places and in the palaces of a heaven we have not seen. The hope of Christianity is in a God who did not refuse or flee when we chose to kill rather than embrace the incarnation of God.
Yes, that sounds stark.
Christians are used to hearing words like sacrifice and redemption. It is the language which we in the Church use in part to explain and in part to distance ourselves from the event of the crucifixion. The simple fact of the gospel story is that we, or our counterparts from long ago, wanted this Jesus fellow gone. The presence of this god-man, if that is what he was, made us uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that we wanted him dead. Executed. Maybe a few of us would have stood faithful at the cross with John and the three Marys, but most of us can make no such claim. Not if we are honest.
The gospel story tells that God permitted us to kill even God. Perhaps that is what it took for us to grow to the next stage of humanity—killing the God we thought we knew, that we might grow to know the God who dwells among us like a stranger in a strange land. The resurrection story tells us of a God we had never truly known, and a new way of living in the presence of a God who stops at nothing, not even death, to remain present with us.
We may lose everything. All our stones may crack and fall, not one left piled on top of another. We may be betrayed by those we love, killed outright. Jesus gives us the promise of being present, that he will give us the word we need at the right time, the right place, to offer an answer and a reason for our lives. And when a wall falls, there is something on the other side. By our endurance we gain our lives.
As the late Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
