THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME C

[cappie]

Today we listen to these Biblical stories about the end of all things, about “dreadful portents and great signs from heaven” and the day of the Lord burning like an oven, and how not one stone will be left upon another. We always hear this as we get close to Advent. 

In the first century, the temple was the centre of Jewish religion, history, culture, civilization and civic pride, King Herod had recently completely renovated it—making it quite a bit bigger and a whole lot more elaborate. In its thousand-year history, the Temple had never been as glorious, as extensive, or as popular as it was when Jesus and his disciples visited.  It was seen as the ultimate thing in Israel—and as central and indispensable, to the plan of God and the fate of the nation.

When Jesus and his disciples visited the temple for the first time, the disciples were awestruck. Jesus isn’t quite as impressed, and he says two things about the Temple. Firstly, he predicts, quite correctly, that the Temple would soon be completely destroyed which is that the Romans did about 35 years later, after an unsuccessful Jewish rebellion. Secondly, as he predicts the destruction of the temple, and the chaos that goes with it, Jesus also says, (again quite correctly) “the end will not follow immediately.” The temple will crumble, there will be problems, but there will still be much to do. There will be people to help, and evil to resist, and prayers to say – just like before the Temple was destroyed. So, the temple falls, but “the end will not follow immediately”.
That must have been a hard thing to hear. It was almost impossible for anyone in Israel to imagine the destruction of the temple. After all, everyone knew that the Temple was the ultimate thing, the final thing: if it went, everything else was sure to go, too.

But that was wrong. The Temple was not the ultimate thing after all, it was only one of the penultimate things, something that was next door to ultimate, maybe, but that’s all. The main thing, the one truly important and indispensable thing, is God, and what God is up to. Everything else is penultimate.
Everything else takes a back seat. Everything else can—and will—crumble to dust.  Who God is and what God is up to – this is what abides, this is the main thing. This alone is ultimate.

When the Temple actually fell, (and the world did not end) the little Christian church in Jerusalem (as well as many Jewish groups) faced a huge crisis of faith. Lots of people then simply could not separate what was most important and most valuable and most immediate to them from what was most important and most valuable and most immediate to God. They had confused the ultimate with the penultimate.

And something very much like that is still with us. We all have our temples, we all have our own ideas of what is indispensable, these may be personal things, or religious things, or social things, or cultural things, or election results, things we cannot conceive being otherwise, or doing differently, or losing – things we cannot imagine that either we or the world or God could ever live without.

So, every now and then, we need to be reminded that these things are not quite ultimate.

It’s very important to be able to make this distinction—to be able to realize that our special concern, our pet project, our current passion, is not really the same thing as the kingdom of God, or the will of God. This whole business of the last things, the end of the world, all of that is here to remind us that our stuff, no matter how important it may be, our stuff is not ultimate. It will all pass away.  

Instead, it is who God is and what God is doing, right now among us, that is of ultimate importance. Nothing else matters nearly as much, nothing else will matter for so long. The point is not to hang on tight to what we have. The point is to keep our eyes and hearts open. In our troubling times, Christians are being persecuted perhaps more than ever. Our temples, our churches, are literally being torn down in parts of the world. War and violence are widespread. Those are not future predictions but present realities
 
The words of Jesus spoken in Sunday’s Gospel are words meant for us today, not for some future time. “By your perseverance you will secure your lives." No matter what is happening around us, we are to remain strong in our faith in Christ. We are to trust in the Lord’s promises.