Jesus came to do many interwoven things.  Jesus came for one reason.  We get it when people aren’t interested in Jesus despite our efforts—half-hearted or whole-hearted—our attempts to share Jesus with them.  We chalk it up to our clumsiness, timidity, our ignorance, maybe to our weak faith and mediocre discipleship.  We’re ready to blame ourselves, which can be a healthy sign of humility.  We may not consider enough that when Jesus offered the Good News, he was rejected.  No, not in every case, but in many, in most.  If Jesus himself was rejected, it should come as no mystifying surprise when our attempts are rejected.

          Jesus leaves the Temple, having just pronounced seven woes on the religious authorities, the rock stars of the faith.  They wouldn’t listen.  They wanted nothing to do with him.  They saw quite clearly that he would overturn everything they had worked so hard to establish: power, authority, prestige.  He leaves so quickly that his disciples aren’t sure where he’s gone.  When they catch up with him, their concern isn’t for him.  People talk about empathy: I’ve yet to see much of it.  Part of the heart-crushing beauty of the hymns of Good Friday in particular is how the music and the words work together to evoke empathy for Jesus.  When the Spirit gives you true empathy for Jesus, I tell you, that will change your life.

          The disciples aren’t seeing Jesus; they’re seeing the Temple, wanting him to marvel at it with them.  It’s like a trip to New York or Washington: all the buildings you’ve heard about, seen in pictures and movies.  Now you’re standing there, and nothing really prepared you for the fact, the reality.  Would you just look at that!  Can you believe it?!

          Jesus has been talking about facts and reality for three years, talking about belief.  He doesn’t seem to have made much progress.  Oh, he has disciples: many had left, one would deny him, another would betray him.  All would abandon him, and yes, some would turn back, when they had come to their senses.

          Have you ever said just the wrong thing at just the wrong time?  Like me, the disciples had a knack for it.  They want to talk about the Temple, the dwelling place of the presence of God, the most important place on earth.  Jesus has some news: “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down” (24:2).  Within their own lifetime, what he said happened.  Put your amazement and awe where they properly belong, Jesus is saying.  What is the Temple?  A structure made by human hands, where people worshipped what they did not know (Jn 8:19).  Through His prophets, God had already pointed out this problem some five hundred years before.  The problem goes back earlier than that, through the times of the kings, the judges, back to the times of Moses and earlier.  Part of Jesus’ condemnation of the religious authorities and powers, the rock stars of the faith, was that they were worshiping what they had made.  Therein is sin, worshiping our works.  This remains an ongoing trial to our faith.

          Who can tell us the facts?  Who will help us see the reality?  What are we to believe?  How shall we escape this trap of worshiping the works of our willful hands, our wandering hearts?  Jesus goes out to the Mount of Olives, his followers following.  In those last days, Jesus spent much time on the Mount of Olives.  There was something there, something about the place, that soothed Jesus’ soul.  Maybe you have a place like that, too.  I hope you do.  I’d be glad if you would tell me about that place, sometime.

          Under those trees, the disciples want Jesus to tell them about the end.  They’re eager to hear; they want the restoration of all things.  Do we?  They want that restoration, that revolution, now.  Jesus tells them not to be in a hurry.  They want to hear about his return.  Jesus has been speaking often of his going, yet his followers ask about his coming.  They know he will be returning, yet they don’t seem to have understood, they don’t even seem especially curious, about his going.  I guess they will have to live through the going to begin to understand.  It’s not a return without a departure.  The returning depends upon the going.  The celebration depends upon the suffering.  That’s a hard thought.  Jesus says some hard things; how can we hear them?

          Don’t be deceived.  We know well enough we can be!  We have been.  How foolish we have felt, how betrayed and ashamed, once we figured it out, once the truth was forced upon us and we could no longer make excuses!  Jesus would spare us all that, if we would listen to him and treasure up in our hearts what he has to say.  I wonder if, most often, the reason why we’re deceived is that we want to be.  We want to believe the deception, to want the deception to be the truth.  If this is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.  O, our wayward hearts!

          Jesus warns that there will be many false teachers of false ways, all claiming the way of Jesus, some proclaiming to be Jesus, returned.  We aren’t likely to buy that last part, but as for those who claim the way of Jesus yet teach a false way?  They’re out there; they have their followers.  They aren’t all Jim Joneses or David Koreshes.  No, they seem so nice; the way they proclaim seems so nice, good and right, better.  Didn’t all the false worship recorded in the Bible claim the same?

          “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed” (24:6).  Rumors of wars, strife, violence, conflict, people at each other’s throats, filled with anger and lust for destruction, to tear down, burn down.  How often have we seen it, here and there, in our own lifetimes?  I want to say to our youngest disciples to pay attention to these times, remember them.  Don’t be surprised, and don’t be alarmed: the anger and the violence that you may be hearing about, may even be seeing on the news—such things happen and will happen in a fallen world.  Jeremiah saw and heard the same things in his day (Jer 51:46).  “There will be famines and earthquakes in various places” (24:7).  All the things that lead to despair and leave you feeling like the end must be near, that it couldn’t possibly get any worse—none of these are the signs of Christ’s coming, any more than the magnificent stones of the Temple were a sure sign that there was the dwelling place of the presence of God.

          What Jesus does tell us is that chaos, calamity, and catastrophe are signs of the “beginning of birth pains” (24:8).  The beginning.  I haven’t experienced the pains of childbirth.  I was there with Devon, seeing and hearing her pain, as she delivered both our sons.  And what I remember just as clearly was Devon’s eagerness to see the baby, the immediacy of her need to see the child to whom she had just given birth, to hold him to her, feel him upon her heart, experience the amazement.  The pain wasn’t forgotten, the danger wasn’t entirely past, but the joy, the joy of new life, stood alongside the pain.

          So Jesus tells his disciples about some of the pain they will have during their pregnancy with new life in Christ.  Handed over.  Persecuted.  Put to death (24:9).  Yes, even today.  Africa.  Pakistan.  Nepal.  India.  France.  Hated by all nations because of Jesus  (24:9)?  Beloved, where in the world would you be truly, warmly welcomed, if you came as an emissary of Jesus Christ, rather than as a tourist, or a student, or a worker?  Perhaps a few places in Africa, praise God!  Besides there, though?  The world, this angry, violent world, is set against Jesus Christ.  It rejected him when he was here among us.  No surprise, then, that the world and those enslaved to the ways of this world reject him still when you and I half-heartedly, fumblingly attempt to share him with them.

          Jesus says something that saddens me greatly, not only as a believer but especially as a pastor, because pastors see this and feel it.  Jesus says, “many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other” (24:10).  Drift.  Drifting away.  False teachers and the false ways they teach, that seem so nice, so much better.  People don’t necessarily turn from the faith to no faith.  That can happen.  I’m left wondering, then, whether the faith ever actually took in them.  I think of the Parable of the Sower.  More often, in my experience, the drift is from the faith to another faith, another way that seems right to them.  And they end up hating those who stay: we’re so clearly not nice, so clearly not good, so clearly worse than the way they have found.  There are those who will argue that faith shapes culture, and I don’t say that’s wrong, but I am increasingly convinced that it is culture always seeking to shape and reshape faith.  Too often, it does.

          “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (24:12).  Jesus isn’t telling us happy things, today, beloved!  Only let us remember, the followers asked!  Is wickedness on the increase?  Lostness—people trying to find happiness according to rules they want to make for themselves within the framework the culture tells them is acceptable, possible.  Churches aren’t immune.  The world is always beckoning to us, always displaying all its luscious wares.  Our love, our zeal, the fire of our discipleship, our Great Commission commitment, grows cold.  We aren’t as excited as we were.  Not as eager.  Maybe the big faith thing we were waiting for hasn’t happened yet.  We wonder when.  Then we wonder if.  We drift.  The world’s attractions become even more attractive.

          In Revelation, Jesus addresses seven churches.  He says to one, “You have forsaken the love you had at first” (Rev 2:4); he warns two against their drift into false teaching by false teachers (Rev 2:14, 2:20).  To another he says, “You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead!” (Rev. 3:1).  I wonder what that means.  Another he warns this way: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot.  I wish you were either one or the other!” (Rev. 3:15); “You say ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’  But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev 3:17).  When you have an abundance of the good things of this life . . . when the culture has richly rewarded you . . . Yet to another church, Jesus says, “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name” (Rev 3:8). “Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown” (Rev 3:11).  This is also what Jesus says, that day, under the sun under the trees on the Mount of Olives: “the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (24:13).  Stand firm.  To the end.  Saved.

          It may not feel as if we have much strength, not in the face of the world and all that’s happening, all that will happen, yet we do have some strength, beloved.  What Jesus seems to be saying is that even a little is enough.  In Jesus, even a little can be more than enough.  What walls were stronger than the walls of the Temple?  What walls so magnificent, glorious, opulent, brilliant?  Yet the strength of the Temple was not in its walls, because the Temple was not the dwelling place of the presence of God; therefore, the Temple was not the most important place on earth.  Where was that place?  Where is it, that place of strength, the strength of the presence of the Lord?  Your heart.  Your heart broken for Christ.  Your heart filled, fortified with grace from the Holy Spirit.  Your heart made strong enough, just strong enough, for salvation, in Jesus Christ.  Stand form in Jesus.  Stand firm in the Word of God, to the end.  You will be saved.

          And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.