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| The Destruction of the Temple Francesco Hayez (1867) |
- 1 Samuel 1:4-20 and 1 Samuel 2:1-10 •
- Daniel 12:1-3 and Psalm 16 •
- Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25 •
- Mark 13:1-8
Imagine you heard someone predict that a few years from now,
the buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington DC would lie in ruins, never to be rebuilt.
Would you believe it? Probably not, but if you did take it seriously, it would
be a truly frightening prospect – in effect, pretty much the end of the world
as we know it. This little thought experiment may help to give us insight into
how the prediction Jesus makes in the Gospel for this Sunday must have struck
his hearers. Of course, only his disciples would have taken him seriously;
everyone else would have written him off as crazy. Yet he was right. Within
forty years, the massive Temple at Jerusalem, a symbol for the Jews of the
enduring stability of their faith, was destroyed by Rome, the most powerful
empire the world had ever seen. But, Jesus adds, the destruction of the Temple and
the wars that will follow it are just the start.
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| Hannah Praying in the Temple - Marc Chagall |
These apocalyptic passages from the Gospels are sometimes thought
to be embarrassing. They seem to portray Jesus as a ‘prophet of doom’, just
like one of those eccentric people who walk the streets with a billboard
declaring ‘The End of the World is Nigh”. When we see them in this light,though,
it needs to be remembered that the Empire did indeed collapse and its Capitol was ruined,
just as the Jewish Temple was. Thereby a whole world -- the ancient world of
Greece and Rome – came to an end. In its place of course, other worlds arose,
up to and including the ‘global village’ of which we are increasingly a part. They
too will end, and so will ours.
The ‘triumph’ of Jesus over sin and death stands in sharp
contrast to the dominance of the Temple and the might of Rome. It does not take
the form of even more spectacular and longer lasting political and military
institutions. Jesus is executed as a criminal, yet “by this single offering”
the passage from Hebrews tells us, “he has perfected for all time those who are
sanctified”. It seems highly implausible. But “the bows of the mighty are
broken, while the feeble gird on strength”, Hannah reminds us in the Book of Samuel. As the Empire began to
crumble, a few humble people in an obscure corner of the earth gave birth to a
truly different kind of institution – the Church – that mystical Body in which billions
of people, both living and dead, are united as one in Christ Jesus. It is here,
and only here, the Gospel tells us, that we can expect to find ‘an abiding
city’.
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