PROPER 28, YEAR C

November 16, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I. 

 

 

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." (Luke 21:5-6)

 

The Temple of Jerusalem on Mount Zion was the heart of Israel’s national life for over a thousand years, from the tenth century BC until the first century AD. During this time, it took three distinct forms: the First Temple, the Second Temple, and the Third Temple.

 

The First Temple was constructed by King Solomon. His father, King David, had completed the conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land, and established his capital in Jerusalem. Building a temple in the city legitimized the new kingdom by demonstrating that the king and his rule had divine approval.

 

Solomon’s Temple stood for about four hundred years until the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 587 BC. After that, the Temple lay in ruins for nearly seventy years while the people were captives in Babylon. When the exiles returned, they rebuilt the edifice, creating the Second Temple. From this time forward, however, the Jewish people were no longer politically independent. They lived first under the Persian Empire, and then, from the time of Alexander the Great, under the Hellenistic Greek Empire.

 

Under foreign rule, the Temple became the symbol of Jewish religious and national identity. When the Greeks foolishly installed a statue of Zeus in the Temple in 167 BC—what the Book of Daniel calls “the abomination of desolation”—Judas Maccabeus led a revolt that resulted in a century of Jewish political independence, until the Roman Empire took control in 63 BC.

 

The Romans appointed a client king, Herod I, known as Herod the Great, who undertook many impressive building projects, most notably the reconstruction of the Temple. Herod surrounded this third Temple with expansive courtyards on a large platform, which still stands to this day. The Temple's exterior walls were sheathed in gold. This project was a central part of Herod’s political strategy. He aimed not only to win the favor of his Jewish subjects, who often saw him as a traitor and collaborator, but also to impress his Roman overlords.

 

And it was of this third Temple that 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, his words nonetheless must have been shocking to his contemporaries. 

 

In the ancient world, religious buildings didn’t function as they do today. We often think of churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, and temples mainly as places for public worship. Even though the Jerusalem Temple was indeed the center of Jewish worship, with sacrifices offered daily on its altars, its primary designation in the Bible is “the House of God.” 

 

In other words, the Temple was viewed as a divine residence, the dwelling place of Israel’s God. Most people could access only its courtyards. Only the priests were allowed to enter its inner chambers. The Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, was off-limits to everyone except the High Priest, who was permitted to enter only once a year—on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. As God’s dwelling on Earth, the Temple served as the visible symbol 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. Yet, within a generation, his prophecy came true. 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 ablaze and destroyed. In its place today stands the Muslim Dome of the Rock, constructed in the 7th century AD.

 

But even though the Temple’s destruction seemed an unimaginable catastrophe at the time, the world didn’t come to an end. Life went on. The Jewish religion persisted. In the roughly hundred years after the Temple’s destruction, Judaism reorganized and transformed itself into a religion centered in local synagogues around the world, with worship no longer focused 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 so that we may embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life in Christ Jesus our Lord. The practice of hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the Scriptures is a tradition we inherited from our Jewish forbears, for which we owe them our everlasting gratitude.

 

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

 

Sometimes I look back on my life as a series of projects. While that’s probably not always the best way to understand one's life, it can provide 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 of these projects went better than others. Some were big successes; others had mixed results; a few were abject failures.

 

When a project fails, it can feel like a form of death, which is never pleasant. For example, when I graduated from college, I was all set on a career in government. That plan didn't work out. Instead, I ended up spending six years working in the corporate world before going to seminary. My original ambitions died a kind of death, which I mourned for a long time. However, that loss opened the way for me to discern my calling to the priesthood. These many years later, it’s clear that I’ve been much happier as a priest than I would have been doing anything else. Still, the initial plan had to fail so I could start to understand where I was truly being called.

 

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

 

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