26th Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Mark 13:1-8
Pastor Jean M. Hansen
While driving to St. Louis recently, I listened to an interesting book titled, Subpar Planet by Amber Share in which she described many of the worlds most celebrated landmarks but introduces them with the one-star rating that some clueless travelers gave on Trip Advisor. For example, “A pile of sloppily laid bricks” was the comment about the Great Wall of China which stretches 13,000 miles and is an example of ancient engineering expertise. Then there was, “A big pile of stones,” about Stone Henge in England, thought to be 5000 years old, possibly a solar calendar which features an outer ring of stones that weigh 25 tons each and are 13 feet high and 7 feet wide. And, can you believe it, someone wrote “just don’t”, as in “just don’t go there” about Machu Picchu in Peru, a 15th century Incan citadel that is listed in the New Seven Wonders of the World.
Most of us, I believe, would react to those places with awe and wonder, just as the disciples did concerning the Temple in Jerusalem in the beginning of today’s Gospel reading. They were impressed by the grandeur before them and though Jesus would join them in their sense of awe. This Temple is the one constructed by Herod the Great about 50 years before the day described in today’s Gospel lesson. It occupied 35 acres, and the ancient historian Josephus recorded that some of the stones were 60 feet long, 11 feet high and 8 feet deep. So, it’s easy to understand why the disciples were impressed. But Jesus responds somewhat like those one-star reviews I mentioned earlier.
He deflates their enthusiasm with the news that it may look impressive and impenetrable, it will all be destroyed and scattered, which indeed did happen in 70 AD. Of course, the disciples want to know when this will occur, since the demise of the Temple would be a sign of the end of the world, or so they believed. They want to know what sign will predict that day’s arrival.
If you look at the text closely, you’ll notice that Jesus did not fulfill their request for a sign. Instead, he said that the false messiahs, wars, earthquakes and famines are just the birth pangs of what is to come. These are the consequences of living in an imperfect world where towering buildings crumble, oceans flood miles inland, funnel clouds destroy towns, the ground shakes and undulates and people are hurt and cause hurt. When these tragedies occur, the struggle is, at least in part, that what someone once believed to be true is not – structures do not stand forever, oceans to do stay securely in their seabeds and people make unreliable and even destructive choices.
Indeed, it has been a long labor; those birth pangs have been going on for thousands of years. The challenge, then, is for Jesus’ followers not to be fooled by those who claim to represent God or overwhelmed by destructiveness, either at the hands of people or nature. Instead, we must focus on the hope that Jesus offers. “Do not be alarmed,” Jesus said. It’s good advice, I suppose, but nearly impossible to follow.
In Jesus’ day, through the centuries that followed, until this very moment, there has always been some spectacle or disaster or political intrigue or conflict or unexpected and unexplained challenge to distract us from what matters. All of it may seem overwhelming, and permanent, but it is not. As one of my favorite sayings announces, “This too shall pass.” That “passing” may not happen quickly or easily, but we live in an ever-changing world, for better and for worse. However, the hope that is ours in and through Jesus never fades, although our ability to grasp it comes and goes.
The first disciples struggled, as do we. They focused on the spectacle of the Temple, impressed by the strength it conveyed, dreaming of the power the Messiah, even as Jesus was continuing his journey of sacrifice to the Cross, which is our source of hope. Why? It’s because no matter what happens around us, the great good news is that the grace of God that claims us as God’s loved and forgiven children cannot be shaken.
There are times, thankfully not all the time, when we are shaken, overwhelmed, angry and afraid. It may seem to us that the signs are clear that the world, at least as we have known it, is no more. And, yet, the grace of God is solid.
So, as commentator Rodger Y. Nishioka notes, “Our focus must not be on the signs themselves, but rather on the one who is (with us now) and to come – the one who enables us to look up after such devastations and claim the certainty of blessing. Things may seem to have fallen apart…. Nevertheless, the center will hold and – much to our amazement – we will discover that we have much faithful work to do. (1)
When the foundation is shaking, the only way for us to not be alarmed, as Jesus advises, is to know that hope is alive. We are empowered, even as the birth pangs continue, to give birth to God’s vision of a world built on unconditional, sacrificial love. Amen
Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, 2009 Westminster John Knox Press, pg. 312