No Stone Left on Stone
“There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.”
This relief appears on the triumphal arch that Titus erected in Rome, in honor of his own imperial majesty expressed in quashing the Jewish rebellion and sacking Jerusalem in AD 70. Depicted is the carrying away of the treasures of the Temple, carried in procession to bring glory to the victors and shame to the vanquished.
More modern depictions of the destruction of the Temple are sympathetic to the tragedy of the experience of the Jews. This is Francesco Hayez's Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (1867). With his good dose of romantic realism, we can feel the despair and the tragedy endured by the people of God. The fighting has come even to the giant stone altar at the heart of the temple precincts.
Whoever’s perspective we’re looking at the moment from — victor or vanquished — we see most certainly that the prophecy of our Lord in this week’s Gospel lesson has indeed come to pass. The people among whom Jesus walked were indeed dispersed and all but destroyed, their temple and their monuments with them. But, even still, God did not abandon them, and all was not fully lost …
The day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.
— Malachi 4:1
Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people, that bringing forth in abundance the fruit of good works, they may be abundantly rewarded when our Savior Jesus Christ comes to restore all things; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Lo, he comes!
We haven’t broken out the purple yet, but it’s not too early for Advent. The themes of judgement and destruction with the Lord’s impending appearance in his Temple anticipate the themes of our winter season of watching and waiting, trembling in awe and uncertainty.
Here are the Choral Scholars of St. Martin-in-the-Fields singing the classic Charles Wesley hymn to kick off the Advent season … only last year! It’s hard to believe, but just a year ago, we were still very much in the thick of pandemic uncertainty, and doing things like tuning in to see choirs spaced twelve feet apart, rather than attending big choral moments in person. And the coming of our Lord will happen even more suddenly than all of this.
