'Not one stone will be left upon another'

Calling time on temples of doom

It’s a couple of weeks since the church’s weekly lectionary gave us the passage from Luke’s gospel, chapter 21, in which Jesus’ followers are seemingly awestruck by the size, scale and beauty of the Jerusalem Temple, and Jesus astonishes them by saying it will come tumbling down - ‘not one stone will be left upon another.’ But it has been staying with me because of its end-of-the-world flavour. Watch out - temples can fall! In fact, bring it on …

Of course, biblical scholarship tells us that Luke was written after the fall of the temple, so it’s not really a prediction, but is a reflection back on the traumatic event that unfolded in AD 70, when the Romans brutally responded to the Jewish uprising, even demolishing their beloved temple. And it wasn’t the first temple to be destroyed in Jerusalem: the Babylonians had smashed the first one when their colonialism had been challenged. Empires strike back with ferocious violence - even dismantling what civilisations hold very close to their heart.

Even though it wasn’t a prediction, it’s also perfectly plausible that Jesus would have said that such a thing could, or even would, happen - because crucially it’s the sort of thing that had happened before … and what we learn from history is that it’s well practised at repeating itself. Even big things recur. Temples fall, so they might fall again.

But of course, people don’t like to believe that their most treasured symbols might not endure. We’re socially conditioned by each other to imagine that certain things will last. Especially big things. Especially things that, by their very structural nature, seem exactly like the sort of thing that shouldn’t come tumbling down. We like to imagine, instead, that the Big Stuff will go on and on and on.

The thing is, though, that permanence is an illusion. It is an act of imagination to cling to the endurance even of big things. They’re just not as stable as we suppose. Even empires fall. And then the next one. And the next one. So a temple isn’t so big, after all …

And yet there’s a paradox here: empires may fall, but Empire never seems to die, because it keeps recurring, just in a new form, with a new face, and new window dressing. Big things may tumble, but the sheer power of The Big Thing continues to hold sway. We may know, deep within us, that Things Don’t Last, but we keep making the mistake of clinging to Big Things and investing so much in their supposed permanence.

And there is constantly this double-edge to the whole thing: we want big things, but we also want their demise. We like big things, because they give us some security, but they also prevent us from flourishing in new, healthier ways. We remain enthralled by big things, even as we try to replace them with new, shinier big things. We are restless for something different, even as we seek sanctuary in the current Big Thing - or nostalgia for the Old Big Thing that seems lost somewhere.

But we should remember: this is a story of hope. It’s part of what’s sometimes called the Mini Apocalypse towards the end of the gospels, where an apocalypse is a political unveiling of reality, a pulling back the curtain to reveal the truth: the emperor has no clothes, the illusions are illusions, the Big Things are not so fixed after all, and God is the sort of mischief who does new things, right under our noses, even in strangely deviant and defiant ways.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

Mischief and deviance abounds - when God rolls up God’s tiny sleeves and creeps in under the radar, to do something so offensive in the face of a world which takes The Big Thing for granted.

It may seem like it will last forever - but it won’t.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

Authoritarianism.

Colonialism.

Racism.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

An unjust economy.

A system skewed towards the wealthy.

The denigration and exploitation and scapegoating of the poor.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

The desecration of Earth’s holiness.

The desecration of human bodies by systems which exploit, judge and sexualise.

The objectification of people; the hatred towards the Other.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

The reliance on militarism.

The justifying of violence as salvific.

The violence of structural inequalities.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

The unstoppable repetition of history.

The failure to learn the lessons.

The denial of empathy and true neighbourliness.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

Of course, from this position right here and now, it can sound too ridiculous - to imagine that a world could come, in which all such temples tumble; but that is what hope is for: to help us to imagine differently, rooted in an appreciation of history (how permanent things have proved to be temporary) and oriented towards the mischief and deviance of what God imagines with us.

Not one stone will be left upon another.