FINDINGS II


Proper 28 - C - November 14, 2010

Luke 21: 5-19




Harry T. Cook

Luke 21: 5-19

At the time some of the people were speaking about the Temple and about how it was decorated with beautiful stonework and ritual gifts hung up, Jesus said, "As for what you are regarding, the time is nigh when not one stone will be left on top of another  -- all will be razed." They asked him, "Teacher, when is this to take place? What sign will there be to tell us when?"  He said, "Be careful not to be misled, because there will be those who speak as if for me and say, 'I am the One' and 'the time is near.' Don't pay attention to them. When you get word that wars and revolutions have broken out, don't be terrorized. Such things must happen first, but the end is not yet." And more he said to them: "Nations will rise against each other, kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and here and there famines and plagues; there will be ominous portents and signs from the heavens. But before any of that, the arm of the law will be upon you and you will be persecuted; you will be handed over to synagogues and prisons; you will be taken away to stand before kings and magistrates because [you have associated yourselves with] my name. You will be in a position that you will have to give testimony. So set your minds against preparing any defense in advance; for I will give you words of wisdom against which none of your adversaries will be able to prevail or to comprehend. You may even be betrayed by relatives and friends. Some of you will be killed. All will hate you because [you have been associated with] my reputation. But you will lose not one hair from your head. You will be secure in your endurance [of it all]." (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)




RUBRIC

Push has come to shove in Luke's narrative. Talk of the end (eschaton) and of what usually dire truth it will disclose (apocalypse) is now the topic of Jesus' Temple teaching. The subjects were occasioned in the scene Luke depicts by the wonderment those attendant upon Jesus expressed over the evident glories of the temple -- its stone work and the votive gifts that adorned the site.


This is a case of "be careful what you ask for; you may get it." In Mark and Matthew, the disciples are doing the oohing and aahing. In Luke it is just folks. The Jesus depicted by all three synoptic evangelists changes the subject abruptly. "Beauty, my foot. This will all disappear sooner rather than later. And, by the way, you will all be involved."


From here on out in the Lucan narrative, it is a rapid descent into the maelstrom.




WORKSHOP

 

The line of least resistance in biblical interpretation is to buy the proposition that whatever the text at hand, it should be taken at face value. In the case of the passage above, its face value is the prediction of the Temple's destruction. Thus is inference invited that Jesus could foresee that event at a 30 or so year remove. Such an interpretation allows the interpreter to make a case for the prescience of Jesus, being further support for the notion that he was super-human.


The trouble is that Mark first proposed the story sometime after 70 C.E., the year of the destruction of the edifice. It was an event that caught the world by surprise. It is not mentioned in the sayings material of Q and not by Thomas. Nowhere in the authentic epistles of Paul is there to be found any mention of any such prediction by Jesus -- and it could hardly have been left unmentioned by the apostle.


It can be safely said that it would have been inconceivable to Jews of the early-to mid-first century that the Temple was anything other than a permanent fixture. It had been around in one form or another since before the Babylonian exile and well into the second half of the first century was still undergoing reconstruction and improvement under Herod's aegis. It survived the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. But the Jewish-Roman war took an unexpected turn in the eighth decade of the first century C.E. culminating in the Temple's desecration (at the hands of the Romans) and burning (at the hands of "Jews themselves," if the syntax of Josephus at The Wars of the Jews, Book 6, ch. 4, 5, 251) is to be thus construed.


This journeyman scholar of the New Testament sees the narrative gospels beginning with Mark as a direct response to the Temple's destruction. The small corpus of Jesus' sayings, which had apparently sustained the communities of Jesus Jews from his death to 70 C.E. was insufficient to carry them past the catastrophic end of Temple Judaism.


Thus the passage at hand (Luke 21:5-19 with parallels at Mark 13: 9-13 and Matthew 24: 9-14) was composed or emerged in the wake of the Jerusalem catastrophe and because of it. Therefore, the questions to ask about it are 1) what would it have meant to and for the late first century Jesus Jew communities?  And 2) what purpose did Jesus' "prediction" of the Temple's destruction serve in the gospel narrative?


For some number of late first century Jews, the loss of the cultic site in Jerusalem and all that was lost with it had to have been an enduring trauma as the pressures from Rome and synagogue Judaism became less and less tolerable. For Jesus Jews ca. 90 C.E. to be told that Jesus had not only predicted the disaster to his own contemporaries but also that he told them they could survive it by their own "endurance," it might have been for them a source of encouragement.


What to make of the warnings about natural cataclysms? Ezekiel 38:19 in the Gog narrative makes reference to "a great shaking." It was not until the era of modern science that people began to understand that such calamities as earthquakes were, in fact, part of earth's continued formation. In this day of heightened appreciation of the role of human activity in climate change, however, one could say that our giant carbon footprint aids and abets the monster storm.


What then of the predicted suffering of the faithful and the severing of human ties? How much of this is paranoia, and how much unease with current or immediately past events? What seems clear is that sometimes the fault line of commitment runs straight through human relationships, causing families to fracture over opposing claims to truth.



HOMILETIC COMMENTARY


The contemporary homilist or homiletic critic might wish to survey national life from the promontory of this text and observe how those who try to live their lives in harmony with gospel values so often find themselves in a counter-cultural situation in having, for the sake of being faithful, to oppose, for example, the death penalty or the corporate world's domination of the individual. The hope is that those who persistently put up with the harassment that comes as a result of opposition to one public policy or another will, in so having done, preserve their essential selves, will not have sold their souls in a dubious Faustian bargain.


This becomes enormously difficult as members of families differ, sometimes profoundly, over politics and religion. In a perverse kind of way, severance of relationships over competing claims to truth may speak to the integrity of such commitments -- though at what point does earnest, well-thought-out commitment become fanaticism?


� Copyright 2010, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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