AtomMark 13:1-8, Jeremiah 7:1-7 “Like a Rock”
“Then Jesus asked them, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another. They all will be thrown down.’” Mark 13:2
When you stand below and look up at the temple mount in Jerusalem, you cannot help but be impressed. Gigantic stones dating back to the time of Jesus still form the massive walls of the city at this point. Some of these stones are 45 feet long, nine feet high, six feet wide – 570 tons. One wonders how the builders could even move them. This is Jerusalem, the city set on a hill. Jerusalem with its gigantic, golden-domed mosque, visible for miles before one even reaches the gates of the city. If you ever have opportunity to tour the Holy Land…and I hope you do some time during your life-time…you will be impressed by this city, so dear to our faith. And so dear to the faith of the Moslem people as well – which is part of the problem in the Middle East.
In the first century…70 A.D….forty years after Jesus ascended into heaven, Jerusalem was destroyed and with it the glorious temple of the Jewish people. Many years later, when the Moslem Turks inhabited the city, they built a magnificent gold-domed mosque on the site where the temple once stood. It has remained there since, and as much as modern-day Jewish people might want to rebuild the Temple on the temple mount, they know that to do so would start a Holy War to end all wars.
The temple mount itself was expanded by King Herod at the time of Jesus, a huge platform the size of 45 football fields, rising up 250 feet above the Tyrolean Valley below. A wide arched stairway brought worshippers to the top where marble Corinthian columns greeted them. Between these columns was a “mall” of sorts, with all kinds of shops that served the temple industry: coin changers so that one could convert the currency of their homeland for the currency of the temple, pens filled with animals to be sold and bought for ritual sacrifice, proper garments for worship, and so on… It was all there. And just to the North, and dominating the center of the Platform was the temple itself, built of gleaming white marble and faced with gold. It was a marvelous structure that glowed in the sunlight and from a distance made Jerusalem appear to have a snow-capped mountain at its center. It was truly and awesome sight…this magnificent, holy building where God came to visit God’s people. It was the symbol of God’s presence in the midst of the people. It reminded them that all was well. It reminded them that they were indeed God’s people.
Mark tells us here in the gospel that as Jesus and his disciples were leaving the city that day, the disciples looked up at this awesome structure, this holy place for God and pointed it out to Jesus, “Look at these incredible stones, these incredible buildings.” And Jesus said something odd…something they did not expect…something that may have ultimately gotten him killed. “Yes,” he said looking up. “I see them…and I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” And they must have looked at Jesus in disbelief: “How could this be? How could this happen to God’s house?”
Now, you might remember that this wasn’t Jesus’ first visit to the Temple in recent days. If you have your Bibles, you might look back to chapter eleven. Jesus first comes to the Temple on the momentum of the Palm Sunday procession. The people welcome him into Jerusalem as God’s promised messenger. He goes to the Temple, looks around and leaves because it is late in the day. But the next day, he comes back and, apparently upset by what he saw the day before, Mark tells us that he threw over the tables of the money changers and drove out those who were buying and selling in the Temple area. “It is written,” he said, “that my house is to be a house of prayer for the nations, and yet you have made it a den of robbers!”
Jesus leaves and then returns a third time, which is where we are today, and is challenged by the leaders and rulers of the temple: the Scribes and Pharisees. They have many confrontations, and along the way, Jesus tells a story: “There once was a landowner,” says Jesus, “who planted a vineyard…leased it to tenants…sent a servant to collect his share…and they beat him and sent him away…again and again…beaten and killed…finally, he sends his son. “The will respect him,” he thinks.
“Ah,” they say, “if we kill the son, we inherit the vineyard.” And so they killed him. “What will the landowner do?” asks Jesus. “He will come and destroy the vineyard and give it to others. “Have you not read,” says Jesus, “the stone they rejected has now become the cornerstone?”
And the leaders looked at each other and said, “This is about us, isn’t it?”” And Mark says that now they began to make plans to arrest Jesus….he is the stone that was rejected.
Well, all this brings us back to today’s lesson. After all the conflict in the temple area, as Jesus turns to leave, the disciples point back at the temple, “Look at these great stones. Look at this magnificent building.” In spite of all that Jesus has said, there is still something about this place, something so awesome, something that says to the Jewish people, “This is where God dwells.” It is their great hope. “If the temple is here, God is here! All is well.”
It is a hope echoing back over 600 years to the time of Solomon’s temple, the first temple built in Jerusalem when Israel was a world power. “God is with us,” said the people. “Our temple is the symbol and proof of that.” All well and good. But in 587 B.C. Jerusalem was surrounded by a great Babylonian army. Jeremiah the prophet was warning a people who had forgotten God, had forgotten to seek God’s mercy and God’s help. And the people laughed at him. “Nothing will happen to us,” they said. “We are God’s chosen people. We have the temple, right here in the midst of us. Look! As long as God’s house stands, we are safe. ‘The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord…’” It is the lesson we read from Jeremiah. “Who do you believe, asks Jeremiah, “God or the building?” Babylon rode into town and crushed their temple and them. It was 400 years before they would return.
And now Jesus stands looking at the hope of Israel, this magnificent temple and says, “These stones will all be thrown down…” In other words, “You have again misplaced your trust Israel. Hope is not found in a house made with human hands, no matter how magnificent, no matter how large the stones are.”
“So,” you must be thinking by now, “What does all this have to do with us? We don’t build such temples for God to dwell in, do we? We don’t really believe that because we have a building, we have God boxed in?” Probably not…
But this word from Jesus is not really about this building where we worship and meet. We are and will be Christ’s church even without this building.
What I am aware of as I listen to these verses, however, are temples we tend to build in our own lives – holy places that we believe will keep us safe.
Perhaps you have heard of the “Protestant Work Ethic?” If not, Google it. In short, Protestants are non-Roman Catholic Christians, all of those who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church many centuries ago. The Protestant Work Ethic came to this country with the Pilgrims and Puritans and many people believe it helped to build our country into the great country that it is because it made our ancestors work very very hard…for good reason!
Basically, the teaching of the day was that when you were born, your life was already decided. You were already destined for heaven or for hell. The big word for that was “Predestination.” It meant that your eternal destiny was already decided. But how could you know where you were headed? Well, you could look around at the things happening in your life as an indicator of whether God had chosen you or not. If you and your family experienced health and prosperity, if your business was good, it was a sign that God was with you. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The result was that people worked very hard to make sure that those good things happened in their families: success, prosperity, health. The belief was that if you could show God’s blessings in your life, you could prove that God had chosen you. You could build a glorious structure that showed that God was with you. The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”
But what then if the Temple falls? What if the structure breaks? What if your business hits hard times? What if you lose your job or a member of you family becomes seriously ill? Where is God then? Where is your hope?
You see, I get very nervous when tragedy strikes a community and those whose homes are spared say things like, “I guess the Lord was with us.” Or when that final field goal sails through the uprights and someone on the winning team says, “The Lord smiled on us today.” I get nervous because does that mean, then, that God isn’t with the losing team, that God isn’t with the family that loses their home in a fire, or the parents whose child is born with Down’s Syndrome?
I believe that Jesus has something quite different and powerful to say to that. In fact, in today’s gospel, Jesus is describing the possible life of a believer, and says that it may indeed get rough out there. Believers…believers…may suffer in wars, persecutions, droughts, floods and famines; believers may find themselves alienated from their families, hated and despised – precisely because they are followers of Jesus! Incredible!
That in itself is certainly not good news! But what we have here this morning is not all Jesus has to say on the matter. His words, his cross, his death and resurrection, tell us that even in suffering and death – in fact, precisely there – God does not forsake Jesus or us. Jesus is the one, the true cornerstone that cannot be cast down. He alone is the solid rock upon which to build our lives!
There is a challenge in the lesson here…a challenge to all who heard Jesus long ago…and a challenge to those of us who hear him in this place today. The challenge is this: “Where do you find your hope?” For the future? For the present? Is it in the Temple – that great and marvelous structure built by human hands? Is it in the great and marvelous structures that we build by our own hands? Our beautiful houses? Our full garages? Our ample pension accounts? Our good health? What happens then when they fail or are taken away from us?
Or is our hope found in God’s cornerstone…the one not promoted by the advertisers of this world?
God says to us in God’s word, “I have sent you a sure cornerstone upon which to build your lives, and that one is my Son. Trials will come even to you who build your lives on this gift. There will be wars and rumors of wars. There will be storms and lean times. You will be laughed at for daring to trust my word. You will be tempted to find other teachers upon which to depend. Yet stand firm. Stand firm on the stone that builders rejected. I will bring you through the trials to a new birth. I will bring you through the trials to eternal life in a kingdom that cannot be thrown down stone by stone. I will bring you to a kingdom built on the eternal cornerstone, the rock, Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray…
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