This is the final week of the liturgical year, that's why we have such strange readings every day. Anything coming to an end reminds us of our mortality. This is a week for meditating on the impermanence of all things. Because we do it with the Liturgy it’s not a dreary or terrible subject; it’s about life and death together – the inseparable mystery.
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas the disciples said to Jesus: “Tell us how our end shall be.” Jesus said: “Have you then discovered the beginning, that you seek after the end? For where the beginning is, there shall the end be. Blessed are they who shall stand in the beginning, and they shall know the end and shall not taste death.’ The beginning and the end are the same question, and it is a question that we can't think out fully, because it takes us beyond ourselves. Death is unthinkable. We can say we are thinking about ‘it’, but that’s not the real thing. That's why we tend to see others as mortal, but not ourselves really.
The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was not like the destruction of a church building. There are countless churches but there was only one Temple. To destroy that Temple was to destroy the identity of the Jewish people. So when Jesus said, “The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down,” he was saying the unthinkable.
Jesus wasn't being a soothsayer when he warned that the holy temple would get torn down. He was talking about the here and now of his interaction with the disciples: The Messiah had come and therefore the stone temple was no longer needed.
His words can also apply to our own here and now: Our bodies, which are temples of the Holy Spirit, will die and decay, but our Messiah has come. If we follow him, we'll reach heaven. Our flesh and blood temples cannot save us; we need the Messiah. Living in him and through him today will secure our future in the kingdom of God, even if the Second Coming of Christ does not occur in our lifetimes.
This temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This prophecy continues to
be fulfilled in history. It is the destruction of the kingdoms we have founded within ourselves which is founded on our plans and ambitions. They can be destroyed any time by carelessness, by the indifference of the other or even by natural disasters. They are precarious. Our house is built on sand as Jesus mentioned in Matthew. "Rain came down, the floods rose, gales blew and struck that house and it fell." But anyone who listens to the Word of God and acts upon it, that house is built on rock and nothing can destroy it. What are the “costly stones” that we placed in our temple or in our lives that we think should not fall.?
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