On Desolation of the House

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Second Sunday in Lent  (Reminiscere), March 16, 2025]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

Translations can be a problem, particularly for the Church. Our foundational documents are in the dialects and languages of people thousands of years dead and gone. In the English tradition, great care, effort, even suffering have gone into taking these older documents and rendering them into an easily understood format. Language, however, is a very changeable thing, as anyone who has ever dealt with a teenager can attest, so periodically squadrons of scholars gather to pump out yet another translation or adaptation of Holy Scripture.

I am in the unenviable position today of telling you that the scholars of the New Revised Standard Version got today’s Gospel wrong. As in, “How did you ever pass your Greek exam?” wrong.

As we read it today: “See, your house is left to you.”[1] The Greek reads: “’Ιδοὺ ἀφίεται ὑμῖν ὁ οἶκος ὑμῶν.” The problem here is that “left to you” is not the proper rendition at all of “ἀφίεται ὑμῖν.” Other English translations render the verb as “is forlorn” or “is forsaken,” but everyone seems to have trouble fitting in the “you.”

“Why,” may you ask, “Does that even matter?” It will matter more if I provide this translation: “Behold, your house is being ripped away from you.”

Now that we have a better translation, let us set it in context. Some Pharisees had come to Jesus to warn Him that He has attracted unwanted attention from Herod Antipas, Tetrarch over Galilee and Perea. Our Lord told them to relay the message that His fate lay in Jerusalem, not in Herod’s territory, a verbal slap that said that while Our Lord would indeed suffer and even die for His works, it would not be at Herod’s hands. This leads then to Jesus changing the subject slightly, lamenting over Jerusalem’s stubbornness of heart and its complicity in the deaths of prophet after prophet, and uttering this statement, “Behold, your house is being ripped away from you.”

Jesus has in many cases delivered parables aimed at the religious establishment of the day. If we take a look at the chronology of the Gospel of Mark after Our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, we see the account of the destruction of the fig tree,[2] the driving out of the money-changers,[3] the challenge over His authority,[4] the parable of the vineyard,[5] and most chillingly the prediction of the Desolation of the Temple and of Jerusalem as a whole.[6] While Mark clusters these all within the week after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, they all are mentioned as well in Luke. All of them revolve around a theme: the Treasury of the Household of Faith has been entrusted to those who have betrayed that trust, and all that they hold dear will not only be taken from them, but cast into utter, smoking, absolute ruin.

Consider if you will, God had reached out thousands of years ago to build a covenant, a peace treaty of sorts, with humanity to be brokered by the nation of Israel. Moses spent forty days in prayer and fasting to prepare to receive the terms of the Covenant. Israel spent forty years in the wilderness learning to live the Covenant the hard way. Over the centuries Israel struggled with living with the Covenant, eventually settling on Jerusalem as the spiritual centre of the effort. Jerusalem was destroyed six centuries prior to the events in the Gospels only to be rebuilt and re-established to weather storm after storm. Yet the Tradition holds that the Covenant was honoured more in the breach than in the practice, God sending prophets repeatedly to bring them back on track, often with disastrous results for these prophets. In our Gospel today, Our Lord reminds his listeners of all this in a few, short, weighty phrases, and sums it up that the final reckoning of their treatment of the Prophets and the Covenant itself would come due with utter desolation, with the City on the Hill a heap of smoking rubble, myriads of the population dead, and the remnants scattered.

At this point, supercessionists, those who claim the Gentile Church has completely supplanted the House of Israel as the keeper of the Covenant, indeed, has become Israel, proclaim loudly what they consider their Divine Right, that they are the final successors of the Covenant and the keepers of the Oracles of God.

What staggering hubris! St. Paul in his letter to the Roman Church goes on at some length to stress that Gentile believers are only grafts into the larger tree and that if God did not spare the original keepers of the Covenant for their sins, then the Gentile add-ins would not be spared in their arrogance either.[7]  While the household of faith has built hospitals, shelters, food relief agencies, medical advances, human rights advocacy, others have in the name of the same God conducted genocide, oppressed the poor, stifled voices, and killed the prophets sent by God to bring them back to the Covenant, this time sealed in the blood of Our Lord. Even our beloved Episcopal Church has silenced reformers, participated in slavery, managed residential schools (those type of residential schools designed for the oppression of the First Nations), stood by during Jim Crow, and have denied mercy. What desolation awaits us, not just our Church but these United States, or Western Civilization, or Christendom as a whole? What ruin of Jerusalem have we stored up for our sins and offenses? What horrors await us now that our land has fallen away from its purported witness and has shed any pretense of seriously upholding the Covenant between God and Man?

These are serious questions demanding serious answers. If we are serious about upholding the Covenant we signed on for in Baptism, then we need to consider truly what that entails for each of us as individuals and as a body. We are not called only to shun the Seven Deadly Sins in our persons, but to embody God’s mercy to all around us. We are called not only as a body to become examples of personal cleanness of living, but also as a collective of sacrificial giving to all around us. Our Lord was clear that personal righteousness was worthless without love for one’s neighbour, that love for God is not possible without it. Looking at our past and present, our only serious response can be repentance, not just of our personal sins as some would have us do, but of our collective sins, not just of our collective sins as a group, but our personal sins as well. We are called to repentance, to turning away from our selfishness that harms ourselves, the Image of God within us, and those around us, and by showing God’s mercy and generosity and by accepting the grace and indwelling of the Holy Spirit to lead us in these efforts.

This is no easy thing. It takes effort to love your neighbour. It takes effort to love God. It takes effort to adhere to the Covenant. It takes effort to kerb our egos and listen to the voices of the prophets and to the urgings of the Holy Spirit. It falls on each and every one of us to encourage each other in these efforts, to shore each other up when we flag in our zeal, to support each other when the World, the Flesh, and the Devil ravage our defenses, to guard each other in prayer, to assist each other materially if necessary. If we do not do so, if we wall ourselves off from each other and from God, then our internal houses themselves become desolate and forsaken, which in turn infects our collective houses, our Churches, causing them to become desolate and forsaken. In time, after so much neglect, these houses are ripped from us, collapsing in smoking ruin due to negligence and even malice. The shuttering of our places of worship are only a symptom of the shuttering of our hearts, our abandonment of each other, of the abomination of desolation within each of us. When we stop caring, when we stop associating with each other, when we start biting at each other, when we turn inward to the exclusion of others, then our communities die, they rot from within, they collapse inward on themselves, and finally they are supplanted, ripped away from us.

Stop. Listen. Heed. The prophets call out to us. Our Lord calls out to us. The Holy Apostles and all the Saints call out to us. Heed their words, nurture the Covenant, remember mercy, stand up for righteousness’ sake. Let us use the Treasury of the Household of Faith for what it is intended, to invest in the Kingdom of God to bring souls to a saving knowledge of him, to the relief of the poor, the orphans, the widows, the prisoners, the captives. Let us not become a desolation with our House ripped from us, but a living embodiment of the Body of Christ. Remember the promises of the Baptismal Covenant:

• Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?

• Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

• Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

• Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

• Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?[8]

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Lk. 13.35a

[2] Mk. 11.12-14, 20-26, cf. Lk. 13.6-9

[3] Mk. 11.15-27, cf. Lk. 19.45-48

[4] Mk. 11.27-33, cf. Lk. 20.1-8

[5] Mk. 12.1-12, cf. Lk. 20.9-19

[6] Mk. 13.1-37, cf. Lk. 21.1-36

[7] Rom. 11.17-24

[8] “Holy Baptism: The Baptismal Covenant”, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church together with the Psalms of David, Church Publishing Incorporated: New York (1979), pp. 394-395