Insights
Rev Gav
How do we endure hardships?
Luke 21.5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “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.”
They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 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. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Reflect
Luke’s gospel was penned a decade or more after the destruction of the temple in AD70, and he was writing to Christians — a marginalised and persecuted religious group of second-generation Gentiles that had formed from a sect within Judaism. Luke goes through great lengths to spell out that the Temple in Jerusalem, in all its grandeur, was a giant red herring and a false religious artifice — that God, like Elvis, had left the building! The Temple was the locus and focus of Judaism, and now, with its disbanded Sadducees and its stranded Jewish colluders, it lay in ruins. All hopes of its restoration — and with it, the redemption of Israel through the reforming of the twelve tribes — was gone.
In today’s Bible Reading we have Luke, recounting the story of how Jesus predicted the fall of the Temple, and how placing one’s hope in physical fortresses and palaces, would ultimately lead to both pain and disappointment for those who had placed in it their unwavering support and trust. The readers or listeners of Luke’s gospel heard this prediction in the light of its destruction taking place within living memory. It was a way of saying, “See that path and where it leads? Jesus said what would happen and look at the evidence!” But why did Luke communicate this message to his readers?
If you were those early, marginalised, and oppressed Christians, it would feel like your faith had been misplaced. Your Lord and Saviour had been crucified a couple of generations ago, and things were not going as you hoped they would. You were of low social status, your contemporaries were enslaved, and you were socially excluded for your religious beliefs. This ‘Jesus’ in whom you had put your unwavering support and trust did not seem to be delivering the goods!
But then, think on the fact that God had heard your prayers and Luke, inspired by the Holy Spirit, penned his Gospel to you and all the other marginalised and oppressed ‘God lovers’, to provide you with encouragement, comfort, and inspiration. Luke’s gospel was and is for the downtrodden, and Luke selected his stories to show how God’s enemies — including death itself — would be defeated in and through Christ. Luke’s Gospel was and is the ultimate pep talk, designed to encourage his readers not to give up and to continue to hang their hope on Christ.
The temptation, when you are marginalised or oppressed is to become militant, and I think, this was why Luke included this story about the predicted destruction of the Temple. The Temple was destroyed by the Roman army after a rebellious Jewish uprising was brutally quashed, and through the telling of this story Luke was saying that neither colluding with the Romans, nor taking up arms in rebellion, were God’s way. By looking at how the early Christians had survived the destruction of the Temple, and how, “not a hair of their heads had perished and that by their endurance they had gained their souls,” Luke’s readers could be assured that God had their backs too — if they stuck to the way of Christ.
Today, some members of FAB Church are part of marginalised and oppressed communities. We might not be enslaved by an empire, but, like those early Christians, we can find ourselves socially excluded because of our relationship status, race, age, ability, sexuality, or gender. Human nature hasn’t changed and for many in, for example, the LGBTQ+ community, the answer is to become more militant — to fight governments and cultures with ‘pride’ — but fighting and militancy is not the way of Christ.
So, are we to simply lie down and take it? No! We are to challenge injustice wherever it is encountered, but the way to do this is not with arrogance, insolence, or violence. The way of Christ is to never stop loving — commending and proclaiming the way of love or being God’s loving presence — even in the face of persecution, brutality, harassment, intimidation, unfairness, and injustice. And, my goodness, this is no easy task — to, as Jesus put it, “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.” (Luke 6.27-28) No, being a Christian is not easy, but we trust not in our own abilities but in God’s love, expressed in the person of Jesus Christ — and we believe that love will win.
It is normal and right to feel anger when we witness or experience injustice, in fact that is the very definition of anger — a feeling or emotion we experience when an injustice has take place. It is what we do with that anger that matters. Our thoughts, moods, behaviours, and emotions are all connected, and feeling anger affects our thoughts and behaviours. The world teaches us to retaliate, to ‘get our own back’, and ‘get even’, but we must learn to listen to our feelings, harness the anger, own it, and express it in ways that are positive, for ourselves and for others, and for the Christian, we do this through expressing defiant love.
Loving in the face of injustice is a bit like sticking two fingers up at the haters, accept that our fingers make a heart shape. When others remove our choices, loving in the face of injustice is to regain the power of choice. To love is to express freedom from oppressive governments or religious authoritarianism. They might take away your dignity, your rights, and disrespect your humanity, but they will never be able to take away your choice to proclaim and bear witness to God’s love.
Today, resolve to be Jesus in the situations in which you find yourselves and to the people you encounter — whether at work, or in the organisations (including churches) in which you serve. Never stop being courageous and fabulous to one another.
Amen.
and then