Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:
2 Thes. 3:6-13 Luke 21:5-19
Lectionary Link
In terms of geo-political power, what did the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year seventy mean?
It meant that the Roman had political and military power in Palestine. They would not tolerate local revolts by zealots who believed that they were called to be in a holy war to rid their homeland and holy city from foreign occupation.
What happens when one loses a holy war? Lots of forced issues like mourning the loss of life of those who died in battle. There is the practical issues like fleeing harms way for family, for children and the elderly and without the ability to take much of the familiar things into exile.
Then there is the emotional, the psychological, and the theological. There is doubt and disillusionment. Were we wrong to resist the Romans? Were we wrong to have faith that God would fight for and with us in miraculous ways to save us and our homeland, and especially the holy Temple?
And if God did not intervene to save the divine dwelling place the Temple itself, what does this say about our understanding of God and God's purposes for us?
The retroactive channeling of the words of Christ within a narrative of Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple gives us a picture of the early communities of the Jesus Movement coming to grips with the reality of the destruction of the Temple.
The Jews had before been in exile from their land and Temple in the past and so they had previous dealt with the loss of the Temple as the center of their ritual and liturgical life. The locus of God's presence had to become understood as decentralized and found in the gathered people who gathered to both collate and read the holy words of divine presence in the texts of the Torah and the writings. The people in exile had to format their very identity as one that could be known and perpetuated in the Holy Texts, read and continuously commented on within their gatherings, their synagogues.
The presentation of Jewish heritage was taught as once having a traveling tabernacle with a traveling divine presence which went with the ark of the covenant. And then when Israel got their land and city, the Temple became what was to be the permanent residing place of God's presence. But what if the Temple lost its permanent status and was destroyed and the people of Israel were carried away from their homeland into exile? What would that say about their God? Could their God still be crucial to their very identity? In exile, would they become assimilated into foreign cultures and religion? Would they intermarry and lose their ethnic identity.
The Jewish people were kept together in exile by their sacred text tradition; they found the divine presence within the holy writings as they gathered within their foreign setting. What was born was a new Judaism which could provide people with an identity without being in the homeland with a Temple. The Jews had been forced into a new paradigm in the time of exile and the loss of their most important architectural symbol, the Temple.
How did the early Jesus Movement then understand the destruction of the Temple? They understood the time to be a time of crisis. Crisis time is a time of change. It can be a time of loss, suffering, pain and community conflict.
The year 70 meant for both synagogue and the Jesus Movement, an exile from Jerusalem and home bases in Palestine. It meant disagreements among the parties within Judaism, even severe disagreements such as the ones which impelled Saul of Tarsus to persecute the followers of Jesus.
Pain and suffering can make us suffer so much that we use our imaginations to visualize the end of suffering. In our pain and loss we can generalize the importance of our pain and loss to the entire cosmos. We can come to believe that all creation is taking note of our suffering and loss. This generalization is the apocalyptic imagination of visualization comfort and end of suffering. We should be careful about literalizing a discourse which is essentially an analgesic discourse.
What is the Gospel for us today as we are experiencing the diminished importance of some familiar edifices of identity within our faith communities.
We are encouraged to endure. We are encouraged to visualize new paradigms of faith strategies to prove that God's omnipresence is adjustable to new situations. The Gospel today is that temples and holy edifices cannot exhaust God's presence because each person's body is a temple of Holy Spirit.
May God inspire us to derive new strategies and paradigms to bear the winsomeness of the grace, love, and peace of the message of Jesus Christ. May God give us grace to accept our bodies as dwelling places of God's Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment