Earlier this year some a small furor erupted when the private diaries of Mother Theresa were published. It was discovered that Mother Theresa, the champion of the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India, the tiny woman who had given her entire life in service to God and God’s children, had struggled to sense the presence of God throughout her life. She once wrote to a spiritual confidant, “"Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."[1]
It is so hard to think that such a faithful person would struggle so much with her faith. There is a constant desire within us to eliminate all struggles and alleviate all discomfort. We want our security assured, our lives to be constantly improving without sacrifice, and our institutions to be permanent and everlasting. We like our saints clean and our sinners clearly identified, so that we can be found with the first and avoid the second. But like my friend Nate’s dad always says, “wish in one hand, spit in the other and see which one fills up first.” Wishing for security and permanence in the stuff we create ourselves just isn’t going to work – and Jesus knew this was true. He never pretended otherwise, and neither should we. Let us pray: Loving Savior, you remind us that the things we create, even in service to You, are not eternal: only You are eternal. Forgive us when we follow astray, when we wish for things that cannot be, when we put our hopes for eternity in stuff that will wither and die. You also promise us fulfillment beyond everything for which we could hope: keep that hope alive in us today, and help us build our endurance and our trust in you. Amen.
When we read the gospels, we would do well to know and remember that each of the gospels were written many years after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and each of the gospel writers addressed their audience in their own way when writing their accounts of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. They were a few generations removed from the actual eyewitnesses who lived with and learned from Jesus, and in those generations other world events happened which needed explaining. The destruction of Jerusalem was one of those events.
The Jewish people revolted against Roman rule in 66 A.D., after a group of Greek citizens sacrificed birds in one of the Jewish synagogues and the local Roman commander did nothing to stop them. The Romans sent Vespasian, who would eventually become the emperor, to put down the revolt, and he did so quickly and with great destruction.
The siege of Jerusalem, the capital city, had begun early in the war, but had turned into a stalemate. Unable to breach the city's defenses, the Roman armies established a permanent camp just outside the city, digging a trench around the circumference of its walls and building a wall as high as the city walls themselves around Jerusalem. Anyone caught in the trench attempting to flee the city would be captured, crucified, and placed in lines on top of the dirt wall facing into Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of crucified bodies encircled Jerusalem by the end of the siege.[2] This is how the Jewish historian Josephus described the final destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple:
The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims; and, owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought that the whole city was ablaze. . . . With the cries on the hill were blended those of the multitude in the city below; and now many who were emaciated and tongue-tied from starvation, when they beheld the sanctuary on fire, gathered strength once more for lamentations and wailing. . . . Yet more awful than the uproar were the sufferings.[3]
The gospel of Luke was written about thirty years or so after the destruction of Jerusalem. Many people reading Luke’s account remembered the second Temple’s destruction, or had heard about it from their parents or grandparents, so when Jesus said, “the days will come when no one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down,” they knew it was true; they had lived in such times.
There is a fair amount of debate as to what Jesus was actually saying when he warned his listeners about the times that were coming. Was Jesus actually talking about the end of creation and the coming of the kingdom of God? Was Luke inserting a discussion of the First Jewish War in the story of Jesus?
However, we find, if we are honest with ourselves, that such questions are a distraction at best and a leading astray at worst. Whatever the circumstances may have been when Jesus said these words, and whatever the circumstances may have been when Luke set them within his narrative of Jesus’ life, the words ring true for all of us, including we ourselves in our present circumstances. Has there ever been a time in humanity’s history when nations have not risen against nations? Has there ever been a time without earthquakes, famines and plagues? Whenever we look at our history, we find bloodshed, persecution and death written into the very story we live, and if Jesus was right about these things, then we must admit that He was right about the rest of His warning as well. “They will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to religious authorities and prisons…You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.” This is what happened to Jesus himself. It is what happened to the disciples who followed Him. It is what happened to believers in Luke’s time and in all the years since. It is what is happening today. Why? Because these are signs of the end? No: because we cannot live without persecuting one another. Because we are both martyrs and executors, religious authorities and witnesses, those who testify and those who cannot bear to hear the truth spoken.
I’m convinced that Jesus warned his listeners about what was to come knowing full well that at some point in the future we would read these words and realize that we have both suffered for our faith and caused suffering because of our lack of faith. Jesus didn’t give these warnings as a means of knowing when God would bring about the end of the world: Jesus gave these warnings because He knew the sinfulness within us and the consequences of living a life of faith in opposition to that sinfulness. Jesus could see the grandeur of the Temple, but He could also see the emptiness within us that drives us to find faith and hope in things that perish instead of the true faith and hope found in a relationship with the living God. So Jesus warned His own listeners, Luke’s audience and we today that buildings crumble, that nations make war upon nations, that religion can easily become intolerance and persecution, that families turn upon one another, that life is always a struggle between what is right and what is easy. Jesus also made a promise: true life comes as a result of living faithfully and with great trust in God and in God alone – that the Spirit comes to strengthen our faith for the long haul, wherein we become truly human and more real than we could ever hope to be on our own.
When I was in seminary, I was required to spend a summer working in a hospital as a chaplain, a program called Clinical Pastoral Experience. For me, and for most of my fellow chaplains, the growing edge was learning to endure with our patients as they lived through their experiences in the hospital. Our supervisor described it as “descending into the depths” with our patients, alluding to the psalmist in Psalm 130 who writes, “Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord.” Sometimes we were called to help people go further into the abyss than they wanted to go, because as we avoid the struggle and pain we experience, we prevent ourselves from truly being healed. It is impossible to be fully healed while pretending we were never sick in the first place, and it is the same for those who seek signs to escape or explain away suffering: until we stop trying to escape our pain, we will never know what it means to be fully healed.
When Jesus told His listeners that the days would come when the Temple would be destroyed, He was asking them to be willing to live in faith through whatever would come. This is why He said, “make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance.” We’ve all seen and heard enough public speaking to know when a particularly eloquent phrase or well-parsed statement can cover the ugly truth hiding beneath the words. But Jesus doesn’t want us to hide from the ugly truth: He asked his listeners, then and now, to look the present square in the eye and trust that God holds the future in control and that no present darkness can take the light of the kingdom of God away from us. Will life be a struggle? Absolutely. Will things ever be permanent? Not ever. Will friends turn against us, will loved ones leave, will we hurt and suffer and wonder where God is in all this mess? Without a doubt. But, Jesus says, this is how we know we are truly living: when we can see the suffering all around us and remain confident that God will have the final word, that pain and sorrow and even death cannot take us beyond the reach of our loving Creator, who sent His Son to show us the enduring way through suffering and death to a life that is truly life.
In 1944 a young Jewish boy named Eliezer Wiesel was taken from a Jewish ghetto in Sighet, Hungary to the Auschwiz-Birkenau death camp, where he watched his mother and sister walk off into the night and never saw them again. He wrote a book, Night, which describes those days in harrowing detail:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never."[4]
Wiesel has gone on to become one of the world’s foremost peace activists and one of humanity’s most eloquent witnesses to the ongoing work of surviving the worst of what we do to one another. We think of people like Elie Wiesel and Mother Theresa as living saints, yet we see how they struggle with faith and God in the worst and darkest times of their lives. Should it be any different for us? Let us, then, live this life with enduring souls, confident not in our temples, our strength, our security or our wealth, but confident only in the lovingkindness of God our Creator, the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ, our Savior, and the constant presence of the Holy Spirit, living and moving and breathing within us even when we can barely live and move and breathe for ourselves. Endurance is the willingness to go on in faith, sisters and brothers: let us endure together and find hope for our future in Christ alone. To God be the glory and honor and praise, now and forever: Amen.
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