And so it is in the closing chapters of the Gospel of Mark on this penultimate Sunday of the church year.  Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the church year, though we probably will not notice it all that much as we take time to celebrate our own anniversary and look forward to Thanksgiving.  But the following Sunday we will know that a new year has begun and that the season of Advent is upon us – the preparation for the coming of Christ in the celebration of his birth at Christmas and in the anticipation of his “coming again” to redeem the world.  There’s a lot going on right now in our Christian calendar and in the life of Christ.

But getting back to the text for this morning and that exclamation of the disciples over the sight of the Temple in Jerusalem, we can imagine their very human response to the glory before them.  For visitors to the Holy City in the time of Jesus the sight of the Temple must have been breathtaking.  Now only the western wall remains – the wailing wall, it’s called, the place where people come to pray and to stuff hand-written prayers in the cracks between the stones – but then the Temple was an imposing edifice, re-designed and re-constructed by King Herod the Great shortly before Jesus’ birth.

Surely Herod would have wanted to be remembered for the structures he built – which also included the city of Caesarea with its magnificent palace and great harbor as well as the fortresses at Masada and Herodion, where archaeologists would later discover his own tomb – more than he would have been wanted to be recalled for his legendary brutality.  According to Matthew, it was this same King Herod who ordered the slaughter of children two years of age and younger in and around Bethlehem to eliminate any possible opposition to his rule from a reported newborn king of the Jews named Jesus.  Whether this massacre is historically verifiable, it is fully in keeping with the reputation of this ruthless tyrant who stopped at absolutely nothing to seize power and cling to it.  King Herod the Great finds his company among the infamous dictators of recorded history.

He would not last, of course, either his influence or his life.  In the year 70 CE the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, as soon after also were Masada and the other fortresses.  All of Herod’s great physical edifices were destroyed.  It is in this context that today’s lesson should be heard.  This is the historical reality within which both the disciples’ awestruck exclamation in verse 1 and Jesus’ reply in verse 2 should be understood.  To his disciples’ exclamation, Jesus responds: “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

On the face of it, Jesus’ response seems to be a predictive prophecy announcing the event of the Temple’s destruction before it happened.  I’m not saying that Jesus did not have that power, but as the Gospel of Mark is being written the Temple, in fact, has already been destroyed.  While the story has Jesus predicting the event, the undeniable reality is that it has just happened.  In the world of the Gospel of Mark the people are looking upon a Temple in ruins.  What are they to do now?  How are they to pick up the pieces and make sense of their lives in the light of the violence of the cross and the hope of the resurrection?

I think we need to note also that this portion of Mark’s Gospel falls in the type of biblical writings known as apocalyptic.  Apocalyptic literature, which takes its name from the Book of Revelation, means essentially “revelatory,” as in revealing something formerly hidden.  It often refers to the revealing of something to come in the future, especially something to come in the “end time,” a concept that grew in biblical literature to indicate a time when the world as we know it would fall and Jesus would come to reign triumphantly over a new world.  A kind of literal rendering of the phrase in our Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Now this is a topic broad in scope and deep in layers of meaning and understanding, but let me say a couple of things about it briefly.  Since we believe that apocalyptic literature arose in the first place and renews in popularity during times of crisis situations – everything from active persecution to economic, political, religious, or social marginalization – embattled communities whose identities and even their very existence have been threatened have turned to God and prayed urgently for God to intervene directly. 

Among the closing words of the Book of Revelation is the plea: Come, Lord Jesus.  That’s how the table grace of my childhood began:  Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest . . .  That is a much tamer version of the cry that calls Jesus to come with power and fury, with vengeance upon all our enemies, to finally make the world right.

In Christian thought, apocalyptic literature plays out a bit like this:  things in the world look terribly bleak; there is no hope for a human solution; no human effort alone can effect a solution; the present age is under the dominion of Satan; the world has become so infected with unrighteousness that it is irretrievable; there is no way out; the only hope for salvation is for the Holy God to intervene with power and with might.

In other words hope grows that from a time and place beyond earthly time and place, the world as we know it will come to an end.  The forces of God will intervene with decisive power and might – beyond all imaginings.  In this cosmic battle, God will unseat the evil powers of this present darkness and will inaugurate a new reality of holiness and righteousness that is unconquerable.  Evil, once and for all, will be checkmated in the great chess game of the universe.  Those who have remained faithful until the “disclosure” of God is accomplished will be rewarded, but those who have followed the devices and desires of their own hearts and have turned their backs on God will perish.  Or, in the language of the popular book series, the fallen ones will be “left behind.”

But apocalyptic thinking has its drawbacks theologically speaking, if not its terrible dangers politically speaking.  As much as many would have it otherwise, Hebrew-Christian theology is not dualistic.  That is, the opposite of Satan is not God.  God has no opposite.  God reigns.  Evil is something like a parasite that lives off life, but evil is not the author of life.  Good is the author of life.

Second, for Christians, through the Cross and Resurrection, evil is already a defeated enemy.  Nothing in creation is “irredeemable” or “irretrievable.” 

Third, the conclusion of the story of Noah and the flood maintains that God has forever forsaken the use of annihilating violence to “cleanse” creation of unrighteousness.  (Note the Nazi horror as an attempt at ethnic cleansing in the Holocaust or of the same technique in various places in Africa and other parts of the world to eliminate the presumed unwanted or unworthy.)  Such things are human concoctions that fly in the face of a loving and liberating God.  God’s promise after the flood is made good following the crucifixion of Christ when God gives Easter, not holocaust.

Another serious drawback to apocalyptic thinking is that those who ascribe to it can feel themselves relieved of accomplishing the work necessary for change in a world in need of restoration.  The more dismal and difficult the times, the easier it is for apocalyptic believers to retreat into the seclusion of quietism and piety, leaving the responsibility for a better world up to God.  They give in to idleness, or worse, to being obstructionist.  There are a number of Christians, for instance, who see the current state of unrest in the Middle East as the preamble to God’s return.  They are eager for the great conflagration to occur, for that great battle that will usher in Jesus’ presumed return to take place.  They try to obstruct the struggle for peace between Israel and its neighbors, pretending to be supporters of Israel, when, in fact, they wish to use Israel to create the firestorm that will end the world and bring Jesus back to earth.  I find such thinking terribly dangerous and opposed to the will of God as Jesus interprets it for us.

Jesus says that the world we live in is and will be filled with catastrophes of various kinds for that is the nature of the world.  But at some time, he also says, there will come a day in which God’s rule will become real on earth as it is in heaven.  That is the day for which we yearn and pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  But when and how that day will come to be resides in God’s mystery.  We cannot know the hour or the day, and those who claim to know are among the worst of God’s enemies.  We cannot live our life as if we know when and how the end is coming.  That it will come is inevitable, as is the end of each of our lives, but when and how the end comes we cannot know.  In the meantime, Jesus tells his disciples, keep awake.  Do not live life as if it will never end – for it will – or in the certain conviction that you know when it will end – for that is not yours to know – but live actively, thoughtfully, and prayerfully, keeping awake to the discernment of God’s will for you from day to day.

What did Jesus say to his disciples that day he sat opposite the Temple and told them something new?  What he said is that they shouldn’t be misled.  He told them not to let soothsayers and wizards and evangelists mislead them by pretending to be the Messiah, giving them precise predictions of the end of time.  This is nothing more than a scare tactic to coerce people into joining their organization. 

Yes, tragedy and catastrophic events happen in the course of human events.  They are a part of life.  They were in Jesus’ day, just as they are in our day.  The Temple that Jesus said would be destroyed was destroyed about forty years later.  But it wasn’t the end of the world.

About a month ago Kathy and I spent an overnight in New York City, by chance in a hotel literally across the street from the site of the World Trade Center devastation.  We emerged from the last stop on the subway line late at night after a long evening with Shakespeare’s poetry spoken energetically and evocatively through the mouth of a popular actor of our time, Jude Law.  “To be or not to be” is the opening line of one of Hamlet’s great soliloquies, as you recall.  Those words took on a special poignancy as we looked later that evening from the tenth-floor window of our hotel into the gaping hole where several mammoth buildings once had stood.

“You may hear some construction noise during your stay,” the desk clerk had warned us when we checked in.  “That’s a chance you take when you bid on Priceline,” I thought to myself.  And, indeed, when we emerged from the subway after the play we were startled by a loud crash as a large bulldozer dumped a huge load of boulders into the waiting truck. “Might be a rough night,” I thought to myself.

But once in the hotel, with the desire for sleep urging us into rest, the noise drifted away and we were not disturbed for those hours of repose.  Pulling aside the drapes in the morning, however, we saw the bulldozers and trucks still at work, as they must have been all through the night.  From several floors up they looked like ants in a colony busy at work.  When all the work is done, there will be a lovely memorial for the people who lost their lives on that otherwise spectacularly beautiful day that we all remember.  Families and loved ones will still remember and mourn.  We will not understand exactly why and how all that took place.  But the world will not have ended.  Even in that very spot people will still bring their prayers and hopes, and God’s creation will still be in place, though bearing yet another wound from human hubris and sin.

Jesus called the catastrophes birth pangs, like the sharp and piercing waves of pain that lead a woman into labor toward the birth of a new life.  It seems that there can never be the birth of new life without tumultuous pain.  Why?  We cannot know.  But birth pangs are what Jesus calls the way from destruction of the old to birthing of the new.  Paul tells us that all kinds of things exist, but that when all is said and done, three things alone remain.  You remember: And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.  Through the tumult, love remains. 

God is love.  That is the constant.  God.  God’s love that is ever near, through the Word in Jesus Christ and in the comfort and care of the Holy Spirit.  For everything there is a season – the wise one wrote – and a time for every matter under heaven. . . . a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together . . .   Such times are not ours to determine, but as we participate in the cause and the consequence, we are somehow held in the mystery of God’s love from day to day.  In such care we find refuge, sanctuary, and the faith to endure through the trials and travails that come upon us.  Amen.