The stones are still massive. So large, even after the destruction of the temple, they did not move far. You can still see them, repurposed in walls throughout Jerusalem. The stones Herod used to build the temple were made to impress, some of the largest building blocks ever hewn. We can understand why the disciples are impressed.
Today, against the backdrop of Jesus’ prophecy, I want to talk about the architecture of desire and power. We are living through our own great upheaval, a moment when the powers and principalities of the world are rattling. There are rumors of war, political earthquakes, and many purporting to lead in the name of Jesus.
The job of the church, at times like these, is not to tell you to stand on a mountaintop and to wait for the rapture. I know, it’s a little disappointing. I like a good hike as much as the average New Mexican, but moments like this in the Gospel, are not really about the end of times so much as what to do with the end what we know. The word apocalypse itself doesn’t mean “end of the world,” it means revelation. Prophecy is about uncovering, Prophecy is about uncovering the dynamics of power at play in this moment, less about the future.
So today, I’m not going to prognosticate about the end of days, about the destruction of our planet. As tempting as that is. I want to ask instead, how do we measure the days we have? How do we navigate through a great sea change of power?
Talking about Desire
The theologian James Alison argues this story is a critical moment to understanding Jesus. He says the temple was built as an object of desire. The stones were meant to impress, to evoke desire. Alison is a follower of the French philosopher René Girard, whose primary contribution to philosophy is called “mimetic theory.” Mimetic has the same root as the word “mime.” Girard taught that we borrow our desires from others. We learn to want what we want, but watching others want. We begin to want a watch, a car, even a certain lifestyle, by watching others who have them. The social media advertisers have really figured this out. Their algorithms can calculate what I might desire next and serve us options, always with a link to purchase. They learn what we desire.
The Temple, Alison argues, was designed to be the center of desire. Herod the Great, massively expanded the Temple in the years just before Jesus was born, more than doubling its size.
Today we find the disciples marveling at the stones, at the decorations. Alison says, underneath their admiration is an I intentionally constructed desire. As they admire the stones, they imagine themselves standing within the glorious Temple. Jesus has come to rule, and his followers will have newfound power in that powerful building. They will be secretary of state and attorney general in the new regime.
But Jesus interrupts their expectation. He says, “the days will come when not one of those stones will be left upon another, all will be thrown down.” Don’t desire that seat of power. Jesus says, “don’t put your energy there.” Don’t spend your energy admiring the stones of the temple, they’re about to be torn apart. When we want to cling to symbols of status, when we imagine power over others, Jesus says, “let go.” Jesus is upending the usual patterns of desire.
Scapegoats and El Paso Immigration Shelters
Before we leave Girard, given our political reality, we need to talk about scapegoats. Girard was also known for discussing scapegoats. He said social memetic desire has an awful power: it causes a great number of people want what they can’t have. The point of those hideous new Tesla cyber trucks is to make us notice them, to notice what they cost, and to know that most of us can’t afford them. The inability for many to realize desire, following Girard, builds up pressure in a society, builds up resentment. When that resentment reaches a fever pitch, society starts looking for someone to blame.
The scapegoat is the one we blame. You don’t need to look far at the moment to see scapegoating. Immigrants are blamed for taking away jobs or wages. Latinos are blamed for voting the wrong way. Watch out for the blame-shifting that occurs when a society doesn’t realize the power it wants. Scapegoats often become a focus for persecution and violence. I think Jesus is interrupting his disciples’ desire today, because he knows the consequences.
A group from our church spent this past week in El Paso, at an immigration shelter, one our Las Familias team supplies each month. We were asked to sweep, to paint, to help cook, but really the chores were an excuse to listen and to be with folks newly arrived from across the border. We heard stories of families fleeing incredible violence. We played with kids whose parents had just walked them hundreds of miles through jungles and deserts. You don’t undertake the awful journeys these families have faced unless you are motivated by fear, unless you are simply trying to survive. This week was a tough time to be in El Paso. I wish I knew better how to interrupt the scapegoating, the drumbeats of hatred for immigrants. I wish I had better answers. I wish the people making future decisions about immigration in Washington would spend more time listening to the families we met in El Paso.
Deep Imagination
The only way through the days ahead, I believe, will require listening and imagination. Another theologian, Willie Jennings, likes to describe today’s story in the Gospel as a crisis of imagination. Jennings points out that the disciples, if they got what they asked for, would have received a tiny amount of power. The followers of Jesus, left to their own devices, would have temporarily become minor government bureaucrats. Willie Jennings says that the problem, the real problem in this story, is that Jesus’ followers imaginations are too small for God’s Spirit.
As Christians, we have to ask ourselves, when we see displays of power, whether we believe in the story behind those displays. Is power really the ability to enforce your will on others? Is that power? Is power the ability to control and manipulate and blame? Is power the capacity to accumulate wealth? Is power the ability to force immigrants out? Is that what Christians mean by power?
Or could power, for Christians, be something else entirely? Could we imagine power to be subversive? Could we imagine the power to say “stop,” to stoop, to listen to someone living on the street? Could we imagine power be as capacity to lift up the lowly?
Willie Jennings says, writ large we Christians still don’t know how to imagine power. We’re still too busy admiring the temples. We risk missing what the Spirit is offering. We miss what is possible because we are to busy lamenting the positions of power we thought we were owed. So how do we learn instead to imagine with God?
Of all the questions I’ve heard asked in recent days, that question gives me the most hope: what can we learn to imagine with God?
A Word about Hope
A final word before I sit down, a word about hope. Did you notice how Jesus ended his prophecy? “These are but the birth pangs.” Even talking about war and rumors of war, even naming the possibility of disaster and division, Jesus points toward hope.
One of my favorite contemporary theologians and contemplative teachers, Barbara Holmes died last month. May she rest in peace and rise in glory. Dr. B, as she was known, wrote this about how we learn to hope, when the world we are faced with is terrifying. She said:
“The way into a future that is not yet on the horizon is through the performance of imagination and hope, watercolor and oil, choral attestations of faith and resistance to the status quo…We will not pick your crops while you cage our children. We will not accept your truncated view of reality or your disbelief in the connectedness of life. We cannot predict the future, but we can take a transcendent leap toward the unknown. We will strengthen one another and heal ourselves, our communities, and our planet.” -Dr. Barbara Holmes
Dr. B sees the work ahead of us as deeply spiritual work, trusting work, imaginative work. We must imagine ways to protect one another and to build our future. We cannot stop the temple stones from falling just as we cannot stop earthquakes, but we can decide how to interpret the signs. Dr. B says,
“despite all evidence to the contrary, I insist on seeing our current state of affairs as the rupture of one state of being that will prepare us for another reality.” Dr. Barbara Holmes
Yes, are living through a time of great upheaval, but don’t lose the horizon. Don’t forget that Christians are a people of hope, and often joy is our best protest. Don’t forget to imagine ways of surviving, and thriving, and defending our neighbors right to survive and thrive.
My friends, it is not the desire for the power of the past, but the prayers for the future that make our world holy. Not all of the temple stones were torn apart. The Western Wall in Jerusalem today is made holy not by what they carried in the past, but by the paper prayers that are jammed between them today. PIlgrims’ prayers for a future not yet realized literally mortar the wall of Herod’s stones today. Prayers for a peace that must still be, a peace with justice, a peace with room for all God’s children. It is not a longing for the past, but imagining what can still be that will carry us through.
Prayers for justice, prayers for peace. These are the only holy responses we have to a world that is undergoing great labor pains. Don’t be distracted by the desire for power as the strongmen of our world define it. Don’t give in to scapegoating. Instead pray for joy, and courage, and love even in the midst of suffering. Those prayers may be all we have. But with a little imagination, and trust in the Spirit of God, those prayers are enough, they will always be enough.
Mike Angell 