This week’s sermon is from Luke 21:5-19. It is not an easy passage. This passage seems to be something like a rocky coastline, it seems impossible not to wreck your ship against it.

As is usually the case the best way to approach a difficult passage is through the context of the passage. I remember as a young seminarian being amazed at the dazzling learnedness of the fat Biblical commentaries that were available in the library and bookstores. A sort of temporal and scholastic snobbishness was brewing in my imagination thinking that surely all of this new learning was somehow better than what had come before. My father’s library was filled with commentaries that were old when he was in school and I wondered how he could work at all with them. I remember asking him and he telling me “I mostly look at the context of a passage to get a sense of it.”

I also remember John Stek my professor of Old Testament who was full of wisdom telling us “if you have time to read only one book on the passage you’re studying, read the book its in.”

The longer I study the Bible the more I value the wisdom of what these two men handed down to me.

In this section in Luke Jesus has come to Jerusalem and his coming is escatalogically consequential. The crowd is filled with visions of angelic interventions and Old Testamentish spectacles cleansing the land of Roman legions and their cultural contamination. Many of the religious caretakers are filled not with that kind of imaginary faith but rather with practical cynicism and doubt. They’ve seen messianic pretenders before, the Romans with their cross win every time, the same will be true of this Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus has been under assault by the religious authorities. He’s been verbally tested by the chief priests, the scribes, the elders and the Sadducees. and in 20:41 he stops responding and takes the offensive. He first silences them with a quote from Psalm 110, putting that Psalm squarely in the center of Christian understanding of Jesus’ relationship with David and Israel.

Jesus continues his much longer term project of teaching his disciples in the presence of the people how their leadership of the coming new Israel must contrast that which is being exercised by the keepers of Herod’s temple. The leaders that Jesus is contending with at the moment derive their authority, position, power and wealth by virtue of their connection with the institution of the temple but Jesus is announcing the end to all of that. Jesus has demonstrated in his question to them regarding John the Baptist’s ministry that these guardians of the temple themselves don’t deeply believe in the reality of what the temple is supposed to embody. They fear the people and so are silenced in a way that Jesus is not. Jesus is willing to put his body where his mouth is while they are unwilling to risk their employment.

In 20:45 Jesus warns his disciples in the presence of the people “Beware the scribes” as they nurse their enlarged egos at the expense of the core of their mission. The widow theme is picked up in 21:1-4 as notes that the benefaction of the kingdom is reverse of that practiced by the rich and powerful of Jerusalem. It is in the glow of false splendor of the gold of the rich and the temple that the little apocalypse enters our view.

First the disciples and the people were dazzled by the large gifts given to the temple treasury by those who wished to aspire to an exclusive list of benefactors to the temple of God, now the temple itself elicits their wonder. This wonder seems to have swallowed the disciples up into the commonness of the crowd. The disciples have been dazzled by the glitter of the big temple, its pomp and circumstance, its pretense and apparent power and that that it has conferred upon its guardians, the ones who have been attacking Jesus.

Seeing his disciples lost in the spectacle Jesus decides to burst their bubble. All that is eliciting their wonder will become unclean, defiled and destroyed by Roman boots. The temple will not be excluded from the age of decay, it will come down sooner than any of them can imagine and it is all attributable to how the temple and its stewards have received the true king of its mountain.

When you were in school you likely learned of the story of Odysseus and the two monsters Scylla and Charibdis. If you tried to escape the one you’d be taken by the other. Sometimes we say “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” We see that here too. The disciples are first dazzled by the spectacle of the temple, its pretense, its power, all that it seems to offer but which Jesus has decried as hollow. It is not hollow because splendor, architecture, culture, pageantry and such are wrong in themselves. Jesus’ condemnation has fallen upon it because they have majored in the show but failed at the core of its mission. The temple was to be a place for the nations to gather for worship, prayer, healing, justice, fellowship restored with the creator God, but it has become an empty show that dazzles simply by the spectacle of show.

The spectacle of the temple show Jesus explains will be replaced by a spectacle of horror and war. This is equally a spectacle. This is the temptation of the little apocalypse. We too get lost in the spectacle of the predicted horrors rather than focusing on the clear heart of the passage. Are you disoriented by the spectacle of the temple? It will all come to ruin. Are you disoriented by the spectacle of the ruin of the splendor? Put it out of your mind, focus on what you have always needed to focus on, the abiding commitment of your heavenly Father for the rescue of your deepest selves. Don’t lose your head in either spectacle, but beware, stay awake, sober, minds, eyes and hearts locked onto the center of peaceful, quiet, circumstance-unrelated dependency on the radical commitment of your Father in heaven for the resurrection of heaven and earth.

CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters has a terrific chapter on the future.

“Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead. Don’t think lust is an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. … The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.” The Screwtape Letters chapter 15

What does Lewis recognize in this? He is seeing exactly what Jesus is warning about and is describing exactly what we tend to do with this kind of literature in the Bible. We approach the future either with excitement or fear. We either imagine that with some insider information here we can capitalize on the impending chaos or we are caught be fear and sin in some self-saving way excused by the prediction of disaster.

This is most clear in the statement that would make any procrastinating pastor or student excited and every Boy Scout shudder, “don’t pre-prepare your speech! the Spirit will tell you what to say!” Is Jesus point here that we shouldn’t be prepared? No, it is that our relationships with the future should not be preoccupied as it normally is with all of us, with self-saving fantasies about how the manna we have stored up today will get us through whatever comes. Jesus basically says “there is no point to it. You can’t prepare, don’t fret, be calm, trust, believe and obey.”

Lewis gets this idea right in his chapter as well. Preparing for tomorrow is part of today’s duty, but it must be separated from anxiety about tomorrow. Our plans always rest in today and must stay there with our hearts. Tomorrow is unknown and unknowable.

Jesus predicts both disaster and security here. Did you notice he seems to be contradicting himself? On one hand he talks about his disciples being arrested and some of them killed. On the other he says “not a hair on your head will perish.” How does that make any sense?

Here we see how Jesus wants to give us a different kind of future orientation than the sinful kind Lewis is warning us about. Jesus reminds us of the fact of the age of decay, that everything is broken and it will all come down. He also wants to draw us into the resurrection where all that is good will endure and persist. You cannot save yourself. All that try to save themselves are lost, all that lose themselves in Jesus cannot perish.

The irony of what we do with Jesus warning is that we turn it against what Jesus is doing with it. That is common to what we do with a lot of what Jesus says. It isn’t Jesus’ fault, it is how our hearts work. It is what the religious leadership did with the first temple, destroyed by the Babylonians. It is what they did with the second temple, destroyed by the Romans. And it is what we do with the church. Jesus cautions us not to go chasing off after the latest person offering insider information. The point isn’t some new secret revealed by math or reading tea leaves or signs in the sky. The resurrection is our fundamental orientation, it is our past, our present and our future. To be fixed on the resurrection makes the spectacle of the religious shows available today look paltry and gives calm and peace when wars and earthquakes and calamities undo the physical foundations of our every day comforts and securities.