pentecost 24 year B

1 Samuel 1: 4-20 NRSV text
1 Samuel 2: 1-10 NRSV text
Hebrews 10: 11-25 NRSV text
Mark 13: 1-8 NRSV text

Welcome to the start of one of the most puzzling and controversial passages in Mark’s gospel! Possibly no passage in the gospel has received such concentrated and varied scholarly attention as the “Little Apocalypse” (so-called not because it is of minor significance, but because it is held to represent the insertion into the text of Mark’s story a Readers’ Digest-length version of something like the book of Daniel). Yet, at the risk of becoming boring, I want to complain yet again that the problems arise from treating this as an isolated “pearl on a string”, rather than seeing its interweaving into the context of Mark’s story as a whole (heaves deep sigh!).

The intersection of two stories
Before getting started, though, I want to note that there is a complexity here. This is the point at which two stories intersect most closely: the story of Mark’s Jesus and the story of Mark’s community. Just as Jesus is at crunch point, turning his back finally on the whole socio-economic system represented by the Temple and turning actively towards the Way of the Cross, so Mark’s community is at a crunch point.

Their world (circa 69 CE) is the world of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE). It is a revolt centred on the Temple. 69 CE is a grace period. In the popular minds, it’s a period of “amazing grace” – and a sure sign that Yahweh is on the side of the rebels! The first Roman to try and crush the revolt – Cestus Gallus, legate of Syria – had been turned back when his siege of the temple mount had failed. Then Vespasian, the greatest general of his time, had arrived on Rome’s orders. He’d re-taken Galilee, Perea and western Judea. In June of 68, he is ready to begin his siege of Jerusalem … only to get word that he needs urgently to return to Rome because Nero has died and he’s one of the four candidates for Emperor! The siege is aborted. Yahweh has twice saved the holy city miraculously!

But everyone knows that a final battle is in the offing. There has to be a decisive showdown. The problem can’t be resolved by an infinite series of delays. Rome will not take this lying down – and neither will the Jewish rebels! A final battle is in the offing for both sides. This is precisely what is about to happen. Titus will be despatched from Rome on Vespasian’s orders. He will begin his siege of Jerusalem in April of 70 CE, and after 5 months of pitched battle, Jerusalem will fall, be sacked and the temple will be burned to the ground. That’s still a year in the future. Right now, the Jewish resistance is gearing up for the Big Fight. It’s the final countdown. And they’re recruiting for Yahweh’s army – the messianic army that will save the Temple!

The conclusion of the temple narrative: Mark 13: 1-2
In 13:1, Jesus abandons the temple in disgust. It is a “den of robbers”, not Yahweh’s house. The “strong men” who “devour widows’ houses” have been silenced, but the system has not been overthrown. Jesus has “defeated” the system. He has exposed its pseudo-legitimation. It is flawed – cracked through irreparably. It is not the cherished house of Yahweh, but part of the system from which Jesus has come to liberate people.

Those “cracks” are nowhere in evidence as Jesus and the disciples exit the Temple for the last time. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Temple has recently been completed and restored – a project that began almost a century earlier Herod the Great. It is difficult to imagine its magnificence, and the effect it had on rural visitors like the Galilean fishermen who, having failed signally to “get” Jesus’ criticism of the Temple, now look up at exclaim in awe, “What incredible stones! What huge buildings!” It must have been pretty impossible for the disciples to believe that anything could shatter the permanence of such a building – particularly because it was so inextricably a part and foundation of the whole fabric of Judaism. Listen to how the historian Josephus describes it:

Now the outward face of the temple front lacked nothing that was likely to astonish either human minds or eyes: it was covered all over with extremely heavy plates of gold, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back such a fiery splendour that made those who forced themselves to look at it turn away, just as they would have done if they had been looking at the sun itself. But this Temple appeared to strangers (when they saw it from far off) like a mountain covered with snow; those parts of it that were not covered in gilt were a dazzling white… Of its stones, some were forty-five cubits in length, five cubits high and six cubits wide [War, V.v.6]

What the disciples express here is an instinctive argument against Jesus’ criticisms of the Temple: how can something this large, this permanent, and this magnificent fail to be of God? This is God’s house! This is the very centre of the world! Why, Jesus, to imagine the Temple gone would be like trying to imagine the end of the world!

They, of course, are referring to “the end of the temple” only in terms of Jesus’ criticisms of the system. Jesus’ response is astonishing in its shock value: “You look at these stones and see that sort of security? Let me tell you, not one stone of these buildings will be left upon another!” Jesus, in other words, not only repudiates the moral legitimacy of the temple state of Judaism: he says that Temple itself will be destroyed. The Temple will end up like Pharaoh’s horses and chariots in the concluding verse of the deliverance cycle in Exodus – the equivalent of “dead on the sea shore” (Exodus 14:30). Like the system of slavery in the brickyards of Egypt, the entire system of Second Temple Judaism must go, because it, too, exploits the poor and vulnerable and “devours widows’ houses”.

A brief historical excursus: did Jesus predict the Temple’s destruction?
Yes, I think he did. Of course, it all depends on how and where you date Mark, and my difficulty with much of the standard historical-critical arguments about the dating of Mark is that they are driven by the wrong criteria. At the risk of caricature, those who argue that Mark 13 is a historical read-back, placed on the lips of Jesus by Mark who was writing post-70 and the destruction of the Temple, are frequently driven by a resistance to the idea that Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple. Similarly, conservative scholars who argue for an early date are often driven by the desire to “prove” that Jesus could do things like predict the future. I don’t want to make too much of the point, because it risks trivialising some serious and fascinating historical reconstruction.

I do want to suggest, though, that it is the flow and content of Mark’s narrative itself that gives the best clues in dating the gospel. Take the fact that Jesus says that the Temple will be “thrown down” – torn down stone by stone (something that will figure decisively in his prosecution by the Sanhedrin in 14:58 and their taunts as he hangs on the cross in 15:29). The Temple was in fact destroyed by fire – but not as completely as Jesus states here. Some of those stones “stand upon each other” to the present. Were Mark engaged in a “read-back”, it would have been easy to have Jesus talk about destruction by fire. Mark’s narrative, therefore, pushes us towards a composition date that predates the Roman victory of 70 CE.

Furthermore, the Second Sermon on the Mount of Olives (13: 3-37) makes clearest sense if we read it against the events of 69 CE - of fevered preparation for the final defence of Jerusalem against Titus which everyone knows is coming. These are the “wars and rumours of wars” and the “kingdoms rising against kingdoms” (13: 6;8). It is to this Second Sermon that we must now turn our attention as Jesus leaves the temple mount and moves to the Mount of Olives. He “sits down” in a place where he is observing the city and the Temple, just as, earlier, he has sat opposite the Temple treasury, watched what has gone on and pronounced his judgement.

A Christian community under pressure to enlist
Here is where the narrative of Jesus and the narrative of Mark’s community – both having reached crucial transition points – intersect. Jesus has left the Temple for the last time and is about to go underground, retreating from public life. The pressure is on – and Jesus has made his position absolutely clear. It has provoked the authorities to move decisively to kill him.

The Jewish revolt had started in 66 CE. To date, Rome had failed to crush it. At every point when the Temple – the heart of it all – was threatened, Yahweh had appeared to intervene to save. This was surely a sign promising ultimate victory to the rebels. The rebels were recruiting frantically for the defence of the Temple, and what seems most likely is that Mark’s Christian community is under intense pressure to declare its allegiance in the Jewish-Roman war.

What is the argument of the recruiters? Their message to the Christian community must have gone something like this: “This is Yahweh’s war! The false kingdom of Rome has set itself against the kingdom of Yahweh. But Yahweh has sent his messiah (citing any one of several prominent rebel leaders among the various factions) to lead us to victory!” This is what Jesus means when he says, “Many will come in my name and say, “I am he (God’s messiah)” (13: 6). These “messiahs” justify their claim to the title by the fact that they are military Davidic patriots who will establish Israel as a sovereign state under Yahweh, centred on the Temple.

There must have been tremendous temptation in the Christian community to join them. It appeared so plausible – so obviously right! The Messiah was here and the end times were at hand. Appropriately, the conflict would centre on the Temple – God’s dwelling, the centre of the universe – and the outcome would be decided in the final battle which, with Yahweh’s help, the rebels were certain to win.

Why did Mark write the gospel?
I think that we are at the heart of what drove Mark to write his gospel. It wasn’t just a case of “I think it’s time I wrote this stuff down – the memory’s fading a bit!” There is an urgency to Mark’s gospel – it rushes from one incident to the next; from place to place. It’s an “action movie” rather than an art film. The urgency is the situation of his community in the Jewish-Roman war. Under pressure to sign up for a messianic war in defence of the Temple, to become rebels (which could quite literally mean “taking up one’s cross” as the punishment for insurrection was crucifixion), Mark writes to guide the community. It’s a crucial (no pun intended!) moment. The situation crystallises the key questions about Jesus: what sort of Messiah was he? What was the kingdom he proclaimed? What sort of king was he? What was his attitude to the temple state and to the Romans? Why was he crucified? What does the Way of the Cross mean? What sort of response ought followers of Jesus to make to the call to take up arms in a messianic war in defence of the Temple?

I hope you’ve noticed (if you’ve been reading here for the past year now) that I haven’t gone down the route of “Here’s the background to Mark’s gospel – the social setting, reason for writing etc” and then unpacked it that way. What I’ve tried to do is to immerse us in the story Mark tells us – to see what his main concerns are and how he portrays them. That is why it’s only now that we are at the point where we need to consider this question. It’s come to the fore because it’s here in the text. It’s the moment in the text where the two stories – Jesus facing the cross and Mark’s community being urged to “take up their crosses” – intersects. Don’t you find it significant that this is the first occasion in the texts when we’ve had to spend time looking at historical events outside the text? Up until now, we’ve managed quite happily by interrogating the texts themselves and looking at the internal structure of Mark’s narrative. Now, for the first time, we find ourselves having to read the text against a historical context that is assumed – rather than contained – within the texts. This is because Mark’s context (literally) surfaces here explicitly. And my reason for dwelling on it in detail is that it makes a wealth of difference to the way in which we read the Little Apocalypse. This is Mark’s answer to his community – an answer that is rooted in the conflict between Jesus and the Temple, and the contrast between the Way of the Sword and the Way of the Cross.

The sermon on revolutionary patience (Mark 13: 3-8)
We find ourselves sitting on the Mount of Olives with Jesus, looking over at the temple mount. This is the second sermon in the gospel. The first followed the “Galilee campaign”, when Jesus withdrew to the sea to reflect (4:1). It’s a sermon consisting of parables.

Here, Jesus teaches “privately” – a Markan “stage direction” that he’s explaining a problem or expanding on some difficult teaching. Significantly, it’s the Mount of Olives – the site (in the Ezekiel tradition) of messianic intervention to save Jerusalem in her hour of need. Jesus has repudiated the Temple system and with it, the whole temple state with its trappings of power. He has further predicted the utter destruction of the temple – something whose only parallel was the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. And the disciples ask two questions: “When will these things happen?” and “What will be the sign when all these things are accomplished?”

Bear in mind Mark’s readers, listening then as we do now. The Mount of Olives is the place from which the temple will be most visible to the coming Roman siege army. Inside the walls, frantic preparations are underway for the defence of the Temple. As Josephus tells us, the defenders of the Temple were motivated by a desire to preserve it from desecration (cf v14), and for this reason were convinced that Yahweh would intervene on their behalf. The sanctity of the Temple is at stake, after all. But Jesus doesn’t seem too impressed with the sanctity, does he?

What follows is all the more shocking because of its powerful irony. Mark paints a picture of God’s true Messiah on the Mount of Olives. But he is not standing in readiness to deliver; rather, he is sitting in judgement. He is not proposing to act to deliver the city, but pronounces its doom. He does not urge the disciples to defend Jerusalem, but to abandon its defence. The forthcoming “last battle” is not the Last Battle. The defence of the Temple is not the task of God’s Messiah – the task of God’s Messiah is to pronounce judgement upon the whole temple state with its ideology of power and its practice of exploitation because God’s kingdom is coming – and it isn’t a restored Davidic kingdom! Nor is it the Roman state. It’s something radically new – based not upon power and military might, but upon the universal practice of the commandments to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and neighbour as self.

“The war is not the kingdom” – true temple worship (1 Samuel 1: 4-20; 2: 1-10)
“This is not a messianic war because the Messiah was crucified for his attitude to the Temple. The Messiah turned his back on the whole Davidic restoration project because it was a system that abused and exploited the weak and the vulnerable. His kingdom is a different one altogether”. That’s Mark’s message to his community – a message drawn from Jesus’ mission, the conflict over the content of messiahship, and, very particularly, from the time of Jesus’ own “taking up of the cross”. No war in defence of the temple is the Final Battle! That is not how the kingdom of God will come.

It is significant that the Lectionary takes us to the temple – but the temple at Shiloh, before the monarchy, before David, Jerusalem, the temple and the whole Davidic covenant stuff, centred on the temple in Jerusalem.

To read this passage in the context of today’s gospel passage draws us into the contrast between what is going on at Shiloh and what is happening in the Temple in Jesus’ Jerusalem.

• There is nothing spectacular about this building: its significance is that this is where God is to be found.
• Eli (as we will discover if we read chapters 2 and 3) is not a good priest. His sons, in particular, abuse their position. Yet the system works. It is possible to be a good priest within it.
• Hannah is despised because she is barren. Yet Yahweh’s concern is for her in her barrenness. The key to this is the character of Yahweh. Look at Hannah’s prayer (2: 1-10): “Yahweh makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap” (vv 7-8). This is the God whom Jesus proclaimed ought to be found in the Jerusalem temple. Instead, the god who appears to demand everything of the vulnerable – who “grinds the poor into the dust and reduces the needy to ashes” – cannot possibly be Yahweh.
• The poor leave this temple rejoicing.

“The war is not the kingdom – a world without the Temple (Hebrews 10: 11-25)
“This is not a messianic war because the sacrificial system is redundant. ‘Taking up one’s cross’ in Jesus’ terms is not about a revolution to establish a temple state. It is about following the Messiah whose own journey to the cross was the one sacrifice that made a genuinely new world – the new world of the kingdom – possible. It was the death that unleashed resurrection”.

We saw last week how the writer to the Hebrews describes Jesus’ death as the once-for-all sacrifice that makes any further sacrifice unnecessary. It is the end of the “old world” (the world of temple sacrifice) because, as he tells us this week, “Where there is forgiveness, there is no longer any offering for sin” (v18).

The disciples cannot envisage a world without the Temple. It regulated their lives, marking the seasons of the religious (and socio-political) year. Whether you were poor or rich, the Jerusalem Temple locked you into the round of sacrifices. The Temple was where God was; the temple system proclaimed what God was like. And, significantly, the Temple was the focus of messianic hope – God’s future for Israel.

That is why Jesus uses apocalyptic language to describe the end of the temple state that is coming. Mark’s language here does two things common to all apocalyptic: firstly, it enables him to speak in “code” about political matters that were incredibly dangerous. He is able to be as explicit as he dares. Secondly, it uses poetic language to give the sense of the enormity of what it describes. Apocalyptic language describes earth-shaking events – events that mean life can never be the same again. We see this in Mark’s use of earthquakes, wars, the sun being darkened, the moon failing, stars falling from heaven and the shaking of the heavenly powers and the appearance of the heavenly Son of Man in the clouds (13: 8; 24-26). The destruction of the Temple truly is “the end of the world” as it is known. But it is not The End! That is what Mark has Jesus say, both to the disciples and to his own community. However impossible to imagine, there will be a world without the Temple! It may be as impossible for the readers to envisage now as it was for the disciples to imagine that there was something beyond the awful reality of Jesus’ death on Good Friday … until Easter Sunday came!

And so Mark tells his own community that they are to abandon the defence of Jerusalem. The Temple must fall because it is part of a hopelessly corrupt system that is opposed to Jesus’ message and messiahship. It can fall because Jesus has come to “take up the Cross” – to usher in a world without sacrifice.

Here in Hebrews 10: 11-25, the writer talks about the liberation of a world that has moved beyond the need for any temple, because of what Christ has done. The Temple was there because of the need for sacrifice for sin – over and over again. The purpose of sacrifice was to atone for sin and make forgiveness possible. Yet, because Christ has died, once and for all, forgiveness is freely offered. Christ’s sacrifice as a sin-offering remains effective.

The writer uses the theological image of a heavenly temple, of which the earthly one was a shadow. This heavenly temple is still the dwelling place of God. Because of Christ, however, there are no “no-go” areas. The Holy of Holy is open (v20). It is a place thronging with people going in to God’s presence – but approaching “confidently” – knowing that they are welcomed because they are already forgiven in Christ. The dwelling place of God – but no longer a place of sacrifice, with restricted entry signs.

A final thought: non-aligned non-violence
What Mark tells his readers is that Jesus refuses both to align himself with either contenders in the conflict over the Temple and to embrace their methods. In the Jewish-Roman war, Mark has Jesus advocate non-aligned non-violence.

Does that mean that we are never to take sides in conflicts? Is the Christian way the typical liberal attempt to be even-handed; to remain uninvolved and non-aligned? Is that how we ought to respond to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? It was the response that bedevilled effective Church opposition to Apartheid – the “fence-sitting” that gave Christians an excuse not to confront the enormity of the conflict raging in South Africa at the time, and to pretend they were uninvolved when in fact they were involved whether they liked it or not. There are certain conflicts in which neutrality is impossible. I may have been bitterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq, but because my government did it, and because British policies are shaping lives in Iraq, I am involved as a player (in however distant sense) whether I like it or not. I must either be a supporter of my country’s policy, or an opponent. I cannot pretend to myself and to anyone else that I am uninvolved. I live in a democracy and I vote – therefore I am involved.

Mark’s Jesus refused alignment in the Jewish-Roman war because both contenders were fighting only for the right to be the ones to do the exploiting of the weak and vulnerable. That was not a goal worth fighting for. There was a kingdom that Jesus was prepared to fight for – the kingdom of God. It was the kingdom in which the least were put centre stage and it was a kingdom for which he was prepared to die.

The Way of the Cross is Jesus’ participation in the battle. He embraces non-violence. And in conflicts where the fight is against oppression, the Christian message is that it is God’s fight. We need to take sides, because to do nothing is to preserve the status quo. Yet our method of participation is distinctively Christian to the extent that it is non-violent. I know this to be true of Christian faith and morality. I agree with Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and the authors of Peacemaking – a Christian vocation. I have to say that I find it incredibly difficult – no, personally impossible at this stage of my faith journey – to be a thoroughgoing pacifist. Yet I recognise that I am not being faithful to the Way fo the Cross in this.

What gives me hope, though, is the position of someone like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He called for “critical solidarity” with the ANC during the anti-Apartheid struggle. He meant by that that Christians ought to be unequivocally clear in their support for the struggle for a free, on-racial, democratic South Africa. Tutu is not a pacifist. Yet, as a declared friend of the ANC (solidarity) he was critical of the armed struggle – a position that didn’t endear him to many Black South Africans. His justification was that, in Christian terms, violence was only and ever a last resort, when all peaceful means of persuasion and resolution had clearly failed. And he did not believe that every peaceful means had been exhausted. He therefore stood in “critical solidarity” with the ANC.

So I bless Desmond Tutu and every pacifist who is able to resist resorting to violence in Jesus’ name. They are not only hearers of Jesus’ words today, but doers.

Amen.