Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost
“This is the Good News?” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 12/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 21:5-19/NRSVUE)
This is the good news. And I really mean that.
I’ve uttered this five-word phrase at the conclusion of every single gospel reading I’ve ever done, but I assure you that I do so with great intention.
The liturgical purpose of this statement is to mark the end of God’s word and the beginning of this particular preacher’s interpretation of that word. It also reminds us that what we just heard is, quite literally, the “good news” because that’s the modern English translation of the Greek word evangelion, which is used in the Bible to refer to the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. In the English language of yesteryear, evangelion would have been translated as “Godspell” (you know, like the musical from the 70s), and often shortened to “Gospel.”
Truth be told, there’s actually a wide variety of ways used to conclude the gospel reading in Christian worship, though they all get us to a similar place. For example, in the Catholic church, a priest will typically say, “The Gospel of the Lord,” which is met with a congregational response of “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” The leader’s call is the same in the Episcopal church, but the people’s answer of “Praise be to thee, O Christ,” unsurprisingly, sounds a bit more… English.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong way of doing this but, since all of those other ways sound kinda formal for the UCC I decided a while ago to go with, “This is the good news” (because it’s both true and straightforward) and I’ve stuck with it ever since.
Now, most of the time this works out just fine, but every once in a while you come across a gospel passage where it seems like a stretch to say that the news in it sounds all that good. You probably figured out, when you heard our second reading a few minutes ago, that today is such an occasion.
As the story begins, Jesus is at the Jerusalem Temple — the very same one that the prophet Haggai was speaking about last week. Some who were there with Jesus “were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God.” The Second Temple, it seems, had come a long way since reconstruction on it started back in the days of Haggai five hundred years earlier.
The temple in which Jesus is speaking was the result of an incredibly ambitious building project initiated by King Herod in 19 BCE. Herod more than doubled the size of the original Temple Mount in a mere eighteen months, and work on the temple’s numerous courtyards and ornate decorations continued throughout Jesus’s lifetime and for several decades thereafter. It’s magnificence came to be known throughout the world.
But less than ten years after work on the Second Temple was finally complete (long after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected, but before Luke wrote down his version of the Gospel), the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. They took all the things they’d plundered from it back to Rome and paraded them on carts through the city streets for all to see. It was a humiliating defeat for the Jews and for the first followers of Christ who, of course, still understood themselves to be Jews. The Temple — the very center of their community’s identity — had been completely annihilated once again; the people of Israel must have felt as though their very soul had been crushed.
The earliest Christians considered the destruction of the Second Temple the fulfillment of a prophecy that Jesus had made during his lifetime — one that Luke tells us about in today’s reading. As those gathered with Jesus stand there admiring the Temple’s splendor, Jesus rains on their parade a little; he says, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” And, sure enough, this is what eventually came to pass.
After Jesus tells the people around him that the Temple will be destroyed, the follow-up questions they ask him are no big surprise: they want to know when it will happen; they want to know how they will know that it’s about to happen. And you can’t really blame them for wondering about all of this; it’s human nature to wonder about such things.
But Jesus doesn’t give them any concrete answers: he doesn’t tell them exactly when the Temple will fall, and he doesn’t point to specific events in specific places that will signal the Temple’s impending demise. Jesus speaks in only the most general terms about the terrible things that will occur before the Temple falls — some of which he says will actually happen to the very disciples who are standing there listening to him. You will meet false prophets, but I’m not going to tell you who they are; you will be arrested and persecuted and betrayed, but I’m not going to tell you when that will be; there will be famines and earthquakes and wars, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. They must have been really thrilled to hear all this.
And every one of the things that Jesus says would precede the Temple’s destruction actually happened — they are well-documented in the historical records of the time. There would be false leaders claiming to be the Messiah; there would be wars and famines and earthquakes and plagues; there would be arrests and persecutions and betrayals among Christ’s first generation of disciples before the Temple fell. Luke wants us to know that Jesus was right about the things that he predicted; Luke is presenting to his readers Jesus’s credentials as the greatest of prophets. This is all pretty impressive but, like I said earlier, it doesn’t exactly sound like good news. And yet, it actually is good news.
You see, while Jesus does present his listeners with an awful lot to worry about, he also gives them hope. Sure, awful things are going to befall them, but the difficult circumstances they face will also be an opportunity for them to testify — to proclaim in word and in deed all that Jesus has taught them about loving God and neighbor.
Basically, Jesus is telling them not to sit around feeling sorry for themselves and worrying about things to come, but rather to go and actually live the lives they’re called to live. When this is hard to do, Jesus will be right there with them, supporting them in their work. And by their endurance they will gain their souls. To Luke’s audience, which was living in some really trying times, this had to sound like pretty good news.
We need to remember the broader sequence of historical events into which this story fits. Jesus died around 30 CE, the Temple was destroyed forty years later in 70 CE and Luke was writing both his version of the gospel and the Acts of the Apostles (which are, fun fact, one book) sometime after the destruction of the Temple — possibly as late as 95 CE. In other words, all of the events of Jesus’ life and all of the events about which Jesus speaks here have already happened by the time Luke puts pen to paper.
All of the terrible things that Jesus said would happen have happened: the Temple has been obliterated; Jesus has lived, died, been resurrected, gone to be with the God and promised to come back to our world at some future date; the Romans are still in charge and Christians are still being persecuted.
Luke’s first readers desperately need to be reminded of Jesus’ abiding presence despite his obvious absence; they need to be inspired to do the work that God wants them to do in the meantime, before Jesus’s eventual return. Truth be told, two thousand years later, we probably need to be reminded and inspired about these things too.
And so by actually telling this story, Luke is doing for his readers exactly what Jesus is doing for the disciples in the story itself: he’s trying to help them change their entire focus. Jesus wants people to stop worrying about the future, and instead concentrate on living the kind of lives God is calling them to live in the here and now. This was true for the people Jesus spoke to in the Temple; it was true for Luke’s early audience; and it remains true for us today.
There’s always been a tendency for people to read this story and then to go looking all over the place for all signs of the impending rapture, to try to pin down the precise date and time at which the world will end. But, here in Luke, Jesus isn’t necessarily making some sort of proclamation about what the end times will be like; he’s telling his disciples what will happen during the days leading up to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.
But Jesus isn’t saying this in order to scare the life out of them; he’s not trying to get them to go start a checklist of pre-Temple annihilation events; he’s not trying to motivate them to stockpile food and water as doomsday approaches.
Jesus understands that what we really want to know is that we fit into God’s plan somehow, that our lives actually have meaning in the grand scheme of things. And so that’s what he’s striving to make clear here.
This particular story from Luke’s Gospel fits into a type of writing that is called “apocalyptic literature.” Now when we hear a word like “apocalypse” most of probably envision wailing and gnashing of teeth as the earth opens up to swallow us down into a blazing pit of fire; we tend to think of the apocalypse as being the very end of the world. But the word “apocalypse” really just means “revelation,” as in the disclosure of some big truth.
Apocalyptic stories have always been really popular at times of great political and social upheaval (like the times in which Jesus lived and in which Luke was writing) because they enabled people to make some sense of a tumultuous world, because they helped people to put all of the crazy things that were happening to them and around them into some larger frame of reference, because they let people know that things would be better someday.
Luke includes this apocalyptic scene in his version of the gospel because he wants his readers to know that God has a plan and we’re a part of it; he wants us to know that Jesus, the greatest of prophets whose predictions all came true, promises that our experience here on earth, with it’s many sorrows and difficulties, is not the end of this; and he wants us to know that he will be with us through it all, from the very beginning until the end of the age (whenever that may be).
This is the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. And it is most definitely good news.