PROPER 28, YEAR C

November 18, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

“As some spoke of the Temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, Jesus said, ‘As for these things which you see here, the days will come when there shall not be one stone left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.’” (Luke 21:5-6)

 

The Temple of Jerusalem on Mount Zion was the center of Israel’s national life for over a millennium, from the tenth century BC until the first century AD. Over the course of this thousand-year period, its existence went through three distinct stages, sometimes known as the First Temple, the Second Temple, and the Third Temple.

 

King Solomon built the First Temple. His father King David had completed the conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land, and established his royal capital at Jerusalem. Construction of a temple in the capital city served to legitimize the new kingdom by showing that the king and his regime enjoyed divine approval.

 

The First Temple stood about four hundred years, until Jerusalem’s capture by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Then, for almost seventy years, the Temple lay in ruins while the people were captives in Babylon. Then the returning exiles rebuilt the Temple, thus creating a Second Temple. During the ensuing centuries, however, the Jewish people were no longer politically independent, but lived within first the Persian and then the Hellenistic Greek empires.

 

Under foreign rule, the Temple became the symbolic focus of Jewish religious and national identity. When the Hellenistic Greeks were foolish enough in 167 BC to install in the Temple a statue of Zeus—which the Book of Daniel calls “the abomination of desolation”— Judas Maccabeus led a revolt, resulting in a century of Jewish political independence, until the Roman Empire took over in 63 BC.

 

The Romans installed a client king, Herod I, known as Herod the Great, who undertook many spectacular building projects, of which the greatest was a reconstructed Temple. Herod surrounded this third Temple with vast courtyards resting on a huge platform. Its exterior walls were covered with gold. This project was a key component of Herod’s political agenda. He wanted not only to court the favor of his Jewish subjects, who tended to regard him as a collaborator and traitor, but also to impress his Roman overlords with his kingdom’s importance within their empire.

 

And it was this third Temple of which Jesus prophesied, “the days shall come when there shall not be one stone left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.” Although Jesus is here echoing Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel who foretold Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BC, his words nonetheless must have been shocking to his contemporaries. 

 

In the ancient world, religious buildings didn’t function in quite the same way as they do today. We’re apt to think of churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, and temples primarily as places of public assembly for worship. But even though the Jerusalem Temple was indeed a center of worship, with animal sacrifices offered daily upon its altars, its primary designation in the Bible is “the House of God.” 

 

In other words, the Temple was seen as a divine residence. The general populace had access only to its courtyards. Only the priests were allowed into its interior. And its inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, was off limits to all but the High Priest, and even he was allowed to enter only one day of the year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. So, as God’s dwelling place on earth, the Temple was the visible sign of God’s presence with his people Israel.

 

For Jesus to predict that this holy building would be torn down would have seemed scandalous, even blasphemous. And yet, within a generation, his prophecy came to pass. In response to the Jewish rebellion of AD 66, the Roman legions laid siege to Jerusalem in AD 70. When the city fell, the Temple was set on fire and razed to the ground.

 

Even though its destruction must have seemed an unimaginable catastrophe, the world didn’t come to an end. Life went on. And the Jewish religion went on. In the century or so after the Temple’s destruction, Judaism effectively reorganized itself and transformed itself into a religion centered in local synagogues throughout the world, with worship focused no longer on animal sacrifice but on the study and practice of Torah, God’s teachings as received in the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

Today’s Collect reminds us that God caused the Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning that we may embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And the practice of hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting them is something that we in the Christian Church inherited from our forebears in the Jewish synagogue, for which we ought to be eternally thankful.

 

Now, I’m not saying that the Temple’s destruction was a good thing. It was a kind of death, and death is always bad. But it did make way for something new. And we know, from a Christian perspective, that before we can receive new life, before we can experience resurrection, we must first undergo death in one form or another.

 

Sometimes I look at my own life as a series of projects. That’s not necessarily the best way of looking at life, but sometimes it offers a helpful perspective. There was the getting into college project, the graduate school project, the first job project, the getting married project, the seminary project, the first parish project, and so on. Some projects have worked better than others. Some were great successes; others had mixed results; a few were dismal failures.

 

When a project fails, one experiences a kind of death, which is never pleasant. When I graduated from college, for example, I had my heart set on a career in government. To make a long story short, that project failed. I ended up working in the corporate world for six years and then going to seminary. My original ambitions underwent a kind of death, which I grieved at length. But that death made possible the gradual emergence of my awareness of a vocation to the priesthood. And these many years later, it’s clear to me that I’ve been much happier and more fulfilled as a priest than I could have been doing anything else I might have spent my life doing. Still, the original project had to fail before I could even begin to understand where I was really being called.

 

That’s how God works: always creating new life, opening up new possibilities, bringing new worlds into being. But before we can enter the new life into which God is calling us, we need to let go of the old forms to which we’re apt to cling so desperately.

 

Sometimes we’re given no choice. Our projects fail and are dismantled with not one stone left standing upon another. Even so, the world doesn’t come to an end. Then we discover that God’s gift of new life is always there, waiting for us, if only we have the courage to accept it.