On the Destruction of the Temple

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, November 16, 2025. For the readings assigned for this Mass please see https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/proper-28c/]

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

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.[1]

Our Gospel today begins what is called “The Little Apocalypse,” a series of predictions outlining the destruction of the Temple, the levelling of Jerusalem, and the beginning of the end of days before the Son of Man returns. Luke’s account is paralleled in Matthew’s, and many scholars believe that both derive from Mark’s source. Many scholars use this prediction of the destruction of the Temple to date the accounts beyond 70 CE, after the actual destruction of the Temple, because, as anyone knows, predictions are just superstitious hokum and the passage was used to cement the idea of Jesus being more than a mere mortal in the eyes of early Christians.

My thought in the matter is that anyone familiar with the political climate of Judaea and Rome’s track record with troublesome provinces could have made that prediction in 30 CE. Even my cat, Yogi, could have done so. The subject of which came first, the prophecy or the event, however, is another discussion for another time.

Instead, I want to draw your attention to the larger context within which this teaching of Jesus falls. In this account, Our Lord has already made His triumphant, and to Roman eyes rather insulting, entry into Jerusalem. He has already wept over Jerusalem’s manifest fate, driven the money changers out of the Temple, faced down the Temple Hierarchy over His authority and their gross mishandling of theirs, neatly thrown their trap regarding taxes back into their faces, and delivered a decisive smack-down with the Sadducees over the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. He was soon to be betrayed to one of His inner circle, tortured and slain, then beyond credibility rise from the Dead. “The Little Apocalypse” is Luke’s lynchpin for Holy Week, the midpoint, even the account’s driving force, because it refers not just to the Second Temple and the fate of Judaea, but to a much greater temple than the one rising above Mt. Zion.

There can be no doubt that Jesus’ words would have shocked His listeners. In the minds of faithful Jews, the Temple in Jerusalem was the unparalleled Atonement Engine and nothing could replace it. Not only was it Judaea’s architectural glory and the gem adorning the House of Israel, but in their minds, it was only the offerings in the Temple that could effect the forgiveness of sins and once a year at Yom Kippur render reconciliation between God and His Chosen People. Gone were the days of hill shrines, the Temple at Mt. Gerizim was a cheap and ineffective Samaritan counterfeit in the eyes of all Jews, and the synagogues throughout the land and indeed the whole world provided only a supporting role. Only in the Temple could sins be forgiven, only in the Temple could Humanity be reconciled to God, only in the Temple could the People of God find common expression and common identity. When the First Temple met its end in 586 BCE, the identity of Israel took a devastating blow. It was a certain sign of Israel’s loss of God’s favour and the assurance that God would not forgive their sins, alleviated only by the building of the Second Temple some decades later. The thought of losing the Second Temple would have filled Jews all over with a crippling existential dread. If that were not enough, Our Lord then went on to describe the horrors confronting the Faithful, where they would be hauled before the authorities, betrayed even by close friends and family, and afflicted and even killed on account of the Kingdom of God. The only rays of light He provides is the promise that God would provide the necessary words and wisdom at that hour, and that by their persistence they would gain their souls, that is, life everlasting.

What Luke does not mention, but the other three Gospels do, is Our Lord’s prediction that when this Temple is destroyed, another will take its place, one that will be built in three days.[2] No one need be surprised that this statement, when made in the other accounts, caused many to question Jesus’ sanity, several pointing out that Herod’s rebuild of the Second Temple took decades to complete. Here, Jesus made a statement shaking the core of Jewish identity and then stated it would only take Him three days to undo the damage. Although Luke’s account is conspicuously silent regarding this point, in four different passages prior to the Passion[3] and in two post-resurrection passages[4] Luke makes reference to Jesus completing his work in three days. In the other Gospels the rebuilding of the Temple in three days is explicit, but in this one, it is implicit in the claims that Our Lord’s work, namely the rebuilding of the Temple, would be completed on the third day.

If, by this point, you are a bit confused and are wondering what sort of point or teaching we can dredge from this passage, you are not alone. Jesus’ closest disciples were both frightened and confused by this revelation. Our Lord, however, does not intend for us to lose heart or look forward to the future in dread because of this passage, no more than He intended His followers to use this as a tool to further ratchet their anxiety to fever-pitch. Instead, He is informing them and us that the rules of the Covenant between God and His People were transforming, radically and even violently, in response to a radically and violently escalating of the Powers of Darkness brought about by the Incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ Our Lord. Every horror revealed by Our Lord is merely a replay of a very old playbook. As God enters into Covenant with Humanity and offers reconciliation and forgiveness to those who adopt it, the Powers of Darkness come out of the woodwork, so to speak, to drive a wedge between God and Humanity. People are enticed to turn away from God to follow much more exciting or alluring objects of worship. Places dedicated to honouring and worshipping God are ransacked, desecrated, or destroyed. Those devoted to God are enslaved, oppressed, dispersed and scattered, or even hunted and killed. Every attempt to secure the salvation of His People met Hell’s active opposition for Hell’s express purpose of the eternal destruction of souls.

So, when God sets up with His covenanting people the Temple in which the Rites of Atonement occur, it should surprise no one that the Kingdom of Hell would do everything in its power to disrupt that. Our Lord spelled out clearly to His listeners what exactly they should expect the Powers of Darkness to do, because that tracks exactly with the previous record. Yet Our Lord tells His followers that, despite the Atonement Engine’s apparent destruction, those who endure to the end will win eternal reconciliation with God and life everlasting, even though every last stone of the building is wrecked. This is because the Second Temple was only a copy and an image, for it was the One Temple not made with hands that was about to be destroyed and rebuilt, and the Darkness would not be able to overcome it.[5]

Oh, that’s not to say the Darkness did not try. The Passion and Crucifixion were all about the Darkness trying to wreck the best Temple of the Lord to date, the Incarnation of the Word in the person of Jesus Christ Our Lord. The Darkness tried to destroy Him at Herod’s hand, destroy His unity and obedience with the Temptation in the Wilderness, and then finally destroy that perfect Union of the Human and Divine upon the gibbet of the Cross. Yet at the moment He died, the Curtain in the Temple ripped in two from top to bottom, because in destroying the Temple of Jesus’ body, Death, that permanent curtain between God and Human, which only could be drawn aside each year on the Day of Atonement, was itself ripped in two when the Deathless one manifested inside it and voided it. Death is the absence of Life, and when the Light that is the Life of the world entered it, it could neither comprehend nor overcome it and vanished in the bright light of the Presence. Where reconciliation with God was only temporary and the veil could only be drawn aside only once a year, suddenly the veil was just GONE and Reconciliation and Forgiveness of Sins filled the void.

You see, the copy of the Temple was what was destroyed in 70 CE. The true Temple had been destroyed almost forty years earlier upon a cross on the hill of Golgotha outside Jerusalem, only to be restored later on the third day, incorruptible, indestructible, eternal, fully God yet fully Human, the true Atonement restoring us to full fellowship with God and the true Passover shielding us from eternal Death. The horrors and atrocities and sorrows that followed and that continually stalk His followers are merely the continuation of the Darkness’ attempt to tear us apart, the final paroxysms of Satan’s attempt to destroy the Image of God on Earth, the failure to admit that the Powers of Hell have lost, decisively, permanently, and completely.

The time will come when everything we have built as copies of the true Temple will crumble and fall to dust, when temples to the Lord Our God built by human hands cease to be. The Powers of Hell will do their utmost to destroy those who would dare covenant with God. They will enlist close family and friends to discourage us, to demoralize us, to demean us, even to kill us. Our Lord has promised, however, that He would give us the words and wisdom to meet those challenges, even to the bitterest of ends, and that these efforts by the Darkness would finally be of no use, because the Temple has been rebuilt, the Curtain is no more, and the Word has been made Flesh and dwelt among us. A former Presiding Bishop once referred to us as an Easter People. We are indeed, because we are a people of the Temple Restored, the Atonement eternally present, and the everlasting Passover feast. Satan has lost, those who follow the Devil have lost, despite what they would have us think. Encourage each other with these words, for Our Redeemer lives, Our King reigns for evermore, and the Gates of Hell cannot prevail against His Church.

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

[1] Lk. 21.6

[2] Cf. Mt. 26.61, Mk. 14.58, Jn. 2.19

[3] Lk. 9.22, 13.32, 18.33, 24.7

[4] Lk. 24.21, 24.46

[5] Jn. 1.5