Just the Beginning

 Mark 13:1-8

November 14, 2021

He Wept Over It
Enrique Simonet

Jesus and the disciples have

finished their travels around Israel,

and they have finally come to Jerusalem,

where Jesus is debating with the

religious leaders who he had

predicted would arrest and kill him.

 

The temple that they were coming out of  was impressive.

It was the Second Temple.

The first was built by Solomon, David’s son and that was destroyed.

This was called Herod’s Temple

because the Herod family spent a lot of time

adding on to the temple that was built.

 

It took nearly 100 years to build the addition.

It took 10 thousand laborers

the stones were between 1 and 100 tons.

Most of them were 10 tons each.

It was adorned with gold.

 

The temple was supposed to be built

for the glory of God, but of course,

it was also built to show the glory of King

Herod and his kingdom.

The might and strength of the structure was intimidating.

 

Might and strength are impressive to humans.

The illusion of permanence is  tempting.

We like to think that some things will last forever.

Things that humans create like buildings and

cities and societies and religion can be impressive.

But we can sometimes confuse the strength

of human made things with God.

The disciples were taken with the large stones

and the impressive structure of the temple.

The temple had been standing where

it was for 500 years, it probably seemed like

it would last forever.

So when Jesus said that it would be destroyed,

they were probably shocked.

But he was right.

 

Around the year 70 CE, about 40 years

after Jesus death, the Roman army came in

to Jerusalem to put an end to the ongoing

Jewish insurrections against their leadership.

They meant to take over the temple

and make it a temple to one of their gods,

but in the midst of the battle,

someone set the beams inside the temple on fire

and it started to burn.

Since it seemed like a loss, they broke the stone

to steal the gold gilding out of it.

The impressive temple that took hundreds of years to build,

only took about a week to destroy.

In that event, it’s estimated that The Roman Army

killed 600,000 Jews.

The rest they evicted from Jerusalem.

 

The gospel of Mark was written around this time

and the events of 70AD were certainly a factor

in the writing of this gospel.

It must have been terrifying.

It must have seemed like all was lost.

Even like God was in jeopardy.

 

Terror has been part of our world for a long time.

humans killing humans has been a part of our reality

since Cain killed Abel it’s a foundational

event of our existence.

Even then, we knew it wasn’t right, but still it goes on.

 

We have had quite a few terrifying days in our lives:

D-day, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis,

9-11, the Boston Marathon, January 6^th,

And the seemingly endless string of mass shootings

in our gun-obsessed country.

Life can be terrifying.

 

But the violence that we see today is not new.

The weapons are different, but the terror isn’t.

In the gospel,

Jesus warns his disciples and us that as we’re waiting,

we will see many of these kind of things.

We will hear about wars and rumors of wars and other scary things,

But he tells us that we shouldn’t be led astray.

 

On one level, these apocalyptic texts like this might not

seem very comforting.

They remind us that nothing will last forever,

this world that we love: the people the buildings,

institutions, relationships, nothing will last forever.

Life is uncertain.

Everything, even the strongest things, are temporary.

 

But in some ways this gospel is comforting.

It helps us to put things in perspective.

It reminds us that the world has

been shaken before and we are still here.

And it reminds us that even when these awful events happen,

people of faith need to keep our heads about us.

The temptation then is the temptation now.

Like Jesus says, people will come,

many of them in Jesus name,

and look at these events and they will say

“that this is it, this is the end.”

They’ll tell us that it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Plenty of preachers have been doing this for decades.

 

They basically look at events and say

it’s the sign of the end times,

(like there is any proof of what that will look like at all.)

Then they insinuate that we should act differently.

That we should abandon our integrity,

and our morality, and our standards of right and wrong,

because times like this call for drastic measures.

That we should abandon all hope for humanity,

because this time is different.  Regular preachers,

TV preachers, and Q-anon, and all sorts of other

conspiracy theorists have been doing this for years.

Wash, rinse, panic, repeat.

 

But as Jesus says, it’s not the end.

These times may be difficult, but it’s not the end,

Jesus actually says, we should see it as a beginning.

Jesus tells us to see these pains as birth pains.

The time of pain that comes before  joy.

 

It’s a time when we should cling harder to our

teachings, to our integrity, and to our hope.

 

All these wars  and violence

will not be the end, because wars and violence

and tragedy will not have the last word.

  

The world would like us to all lose our heads.

War-mongers would like us to be angry

and demand that we divide into them and us.

They would like to see more violence and retaliation.

Hate groups would like us to lump all strangers

and refugees together and blame them for all sorts of things.

The TV news would like us to keep watching

obsessively in fear for the next tragedy.

The devil would like for us to

give up in despair, to lose hope in humanity,

lose hope in peace, lose hope in hope.

 

But Jesus asks us to keep things in perspective

and not to let us get caught up in hype or despair.

And so I mention this.

I’ve probably said it before, and I’ll say it again:

 

Although it doesn’t seem like the case,

Actually, right now we’re living in one

of the most peaceful times in the world’s history,

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal

several years ago.

 

Violent crimes are falling in every country,

Even in places like Mexico that we think

of as out of control, the murder rate was almost

 ¼ of what it was in 1940.

There are less wars between countries,

less civil war, less personal violence.

 

 I’ll read you the beginning of the article

so you know I’m not making it up myself.

It's impossible to learn about these catastrophes without thinking,

"What is the world coming to?"

But a better question may be,

"How bad was the world in the past?"

Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse.

Violence has been in decline for thousands of years,

and today we may be living in the most peaceable

era in the existence of our species.

The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth.

It has not brought violence down to zero,

and it is not guaranteed to continue.

But it is a persistent historical development,

visible on scales from millennia to years.

 

Just in the last 60 years, deaths from

violent crime, brutality and war have fallen significantly

all over the world.

The difference is, we now we hear about every

tragedy, as its happening, not days or weeks or

even months or years later like we would have

back in the old days of 1995 and before.

 

We see video and pictures as it’s happening

we hear stories, like we’re there,

we see videos, we are emotionally

invested and involved in these acts,

not just distantly removed,

reading about the statistics later.

 

And as humans, we are horrified by the reality of violence.

Rightfully so.

We’re realizing that it doesn’t have to be like this.

We are growing more empathetic to other people

even people of other nations.

As a human race, we are beginning not to tolerate this.
We’re not in agreement about what should be done,

or how to stop it, but we’re all in agreement that

these incidents are tragedies shouldn’t be happening.

 

If we can see through the tragedies, and our sorrow

we have to see, God is doing something here.

 

And even in the midst of horrible events,

we see signs of hope and openness and people’s

desire to help.

 

Like the sainted Mr. Rogers said to

his audience of preschoolers,

“When things get scary, always look for the helpers.”

They’re there. All the time.

 

Alongside the acts of  horrible, terrible, meaningless

violence, something wonderful is being born:

Empathy, compassion, grace.

We might be in the middle of birth pains now,

but something is being born here.

It might not be born in any of our lifetimes,

but I have hope that God is doing something here.

 

As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote

in a time in our history so filled with violence and hatred:

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically

bound to the starless midnight of racism and war

that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood

can never become a reality...

I believe that unarmed truth and
unconditional love will have the final word.

Jesus reminds us that

As long as we’re on this side of the kingdom,

our lives will be filled with beginnings and endings.

things dying and things being born again.

This is one of the lessons of the cross

 

Another lesson of the cross is that pain and death

and violence, will not have the last word.

It cannot have the last word.

Because God will have the last word.

 

And our faith doesn’t lie in big stones,

or military might, or institutions,

it lies in the eternal love of God  

 

And the love of God is not based on

our strength or the size of buildings

we can use to keep us safe.

The love of God is not based on our security or

success in anything.

 

The love of God is based only on God’s love.

It is the Alpha and the Omega,

the generator of the universe.

It will be forever.

God’s love will have the final word.