“When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.”
Herod’s Temple as imagined in the Holyland Model of Jerusalem; public domain image by Berthold Werner used with thanks.
There have been times recently when it feels like the anchors of our society and culture have come loose, and we are hopelessly adrift. In the last fortnight alone we have seen both the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the re-election of Donald Trump—the latter being another of those things that the “experts” had assured us wasn’t going to happen. The war in Ukraine is by far the most serious conflict in this continent since the end of the Second World War, while the Holy Land has seen no war remotely as long as the current one since long before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. These two conflicts have revealed terrifying new possibilities that advancing Information Technology is bringing to wars, and both are taking place in regions where the danger of escalation is real.
All sorts of things that we have taken for granted about the world since at least 1990, and often for long before that, no longer seem to be true. It probably isn’t the end of the world, but it is a worrying time, and perhaps even the end of an era.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, in the last days of his earthly life, Jesus looks down on the enormous Temple in Jerusalem and predicts its destruction. This did indeed take place in AD 70, a generation after Christ’s crucifixion, and it came during the brutal Roman suppression a Jewish uprising against the Empire. From the written accounts of it that have survived, that Jewish-Roman War seems to have been as horrific as anything happening in Gaza or the Donbas today, and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans was indeed the end of the Jewish religious world that had existed for a thousand years. After that, the Jewish religion had to reinvent itself entirely.
Our first reading this morning, from the letter to the Hebrews, was written anonymously to a group of Jewish Christians and draws heavily from the system of animal sacrifices that took place at the Temple until it was destroyed. Instead of animals being sacrificed by priests as an offering to take away sins, as at the Temple, Jesus Christ, the great high priest, gave Himself to death as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole human race for all time. God had come down to us and paid the ultimate price for the rift that human sin had opened up between God and humanity—that’s the central message of Hebrews.
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