“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.
Along with foreseeing the end of the Temple, Jesus Christ warned His closest followers in the days before his death that there would be “wars and rumours of wars” but these should not be mistaken as signs of the end of the world, but understood as the birth pangs of something better. As Christians we should believe that the troubles of human history are, on a grand scale, the birth pangs of the new heaven and a new earth that will be when Christ returns.
So what should we, as ordinary Christians, do if we are witnessing the end of an era? In many ways, nothing different than we would do at any other time. We are called to be constant in our faith in good times and in bad. I see in our reading from Hebrews four pieces of good advice that hold whatever circumstances lie before us.
The first is this—trust that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross was enough to wash away our sins and the sins of the whole world. The world is not some sort of great cosmic exam that we need to try desperately to pass and need fear the possibility of failing. At the heart of the Christian faith is that God saves us not because we are good, but because He is love. When we accept that, we can let go of our need to justify ourselves and trust that God, who goes in front of us in the Holy Spirit, wants good for us and not ill.
The fate of the world lies entirely in God’s hands. One of the great illusions of the early 21st Century is that we can be in total control over our own lives if we try hard enough. It is only when we allow that illusion to be shattered and place ourselves in God’s hands that we are truly free.
Secondly, and I think this is a wonderful phrase, we should “provoke one another to love and good deeds”. No healthy community can avoid disagreements; a group of Christians who never argue isn’t a church—it’s a cult where problems are undoubtedly being glossed over. Indeed, at the root of the chain of events that led to Justin Welby’s resignation was the temptation to gloss over difficult problems. As well as the usual run of parish disagreements we’ve all been involved in, this is a time of deep disagreement within the Church about some profoundly important questions. While disagreement is inevitable, at times the way in which this disagreement is expressed is profoundly depressing. I wonder how the world would react if, instead of mistrusting and attacking one another, Christians used our disagreements to provoke one another into doing good deeds?
Thirdly, it is important that we meet together. According to the author of Hebrews, even 2,000 years some people seem to have thought they could live a Christian life entirely on their own. But the Christian life isn’t meant to be lived alone. From the start Jesus called groups of people to follow him together. This is more important than ever, as we live in a time when communications technology and a culture of individualism are weakening all sorts of communities and institutions, and more people than ever before live lonely lives. Gathering here together matters, even if we’re considered unimportant by most people. Part of what we do here every week is to reject the modern conceit that true freedom is freedom from having to bother too much with other people.
Fourth and finally, this passage of Hebrews urges us to cultivate the three abiding things that will last forever – faith, hope, and love. In a world where we are obsessed by what we can count and what we can measure and how we can make our mark on a world of power and money, it is these intangible things that are in fact eternal, as Scripture tells us not just here, but in a famous passage from St Paul’s letters. These are things whose importance can be missed because we can’t put them into a graph or a chart, but they are also things without which life would hardly be worth living. Faith, hope, and love lie at the heart of being human, and are things through which we perceive that human nature is, for all its faults, indeed made in the image and likeness of God’s own nature.
Temples will crumble. Empires and nations will rise and fall. Institutions will always be prone to failure and sin—and that certainly includes the Church of England. Each of us ourselves will often find that we sabotage our own most noble aspirations and best-laid plans.
No matter whether we live in good times or in bad, however, the things that make life worth living are faith, and hope, and love. And if the times are set to be bumpy, then let us have hopeful faith that Christ has indeed done or that is necessary for us to live in God’s love for eternity; and let us meet together here to provoke one another to good deeds as we await the return of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. And if we can do all that, we will be a sign that something better is indeed waiting to be born.
And now to that Saviour, and His Father, and the Holy Spirit, be glory, honour, power, and blessing, now and in the world to come. Amen.
Top banner image: Evening Twilight Behind the Christian Quarter, Jerusalem, 18 November 2022 © Gerry Lynch
