Mark 13:1-8
When I arrived at the Park Church a little over three years ago, I was surprised to see Roger Williams and Albert Schweitzer enshrined in the stained glass. They are not normally among the dead white guys in the gallery of dead white guys you’ll find in every church in the Congregationalist tradition.
I mean, Williams was a leading Baptist, and the Baptist Church was across the street! And Schweitzer played an important role in how United Church of Christ pastors think about Jesus, but few outside of the academy would know that.
Then I was told that while he was an important religious thinker and a Nobel Peace Laureate, Schweitzer was there for his contributions to music. Which makes sense given Bach on the opposite side of the sanctuary. Still, you’re going to hear about the Jesus part, not the music part, because I am definitely a pastor and definitely not a musician.
Schweitzer was an early leader in what is sometimes called “the quest for the historical Jesus.” New discoveries have been made since that quest started over a century ago, new ways of thinking including postmodernism have risen to prominence, but the fundamental question has remained the same. If we strip away all of the later theology and dogma, who was the real man who led a religious reform movement in Galilee and eventually died in Jerusalem?
This is difficult because we have no first hand accounts of Jesus, and only two brief mentions of him outside of Christians texts, one in “The Antiquities of the Jews” written by Josephus in 94 C.E., and one in “Annals” by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus around 116 C.E. Neither has much detail, and Josephus is notoriously unreliable, an ancient and self-serving turncoat. And we know how unreliable turncoats are, people who criticize demagogues one moment and praise them the next
The gospels themselves were also written decades after the execution of Jesus. What we think is the earliest of the four canonical gospels, the Gospel According to Mark, may have been written around 70 C.E., and tradition tells us the author was a follower of Peter, writing down the stories with no certainty about the chronology, and possibly little knowledge of the geography.
Since Mark serves as a source for Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew, any errors in that text are likely duplicated in the other two. And that is before you add on decades and eventually centuries of theological interpretation, in which people see in scripture what they have been told they will see in scripture, whether it is actually there or not, or translate the ancient languages based on what they want them to mean.
When Mark was written might matter, especially in regard to today’s text. In 66 C.E., Jews rebelled against Rome. This was the third time Jerusalem was the center of a violent rebellion against an occupying power. The first, against Babylon, was a disaster, resulting in the destruction of the city and Temple and the period we call the Babylonian Captivity.
The sequel, a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, resulted in a surprising victory, though the rural outsiders who took over as high priests and kings proved corrupt and inept, and their independent Jewish state would soon fail, for nations don’t always survive their bad rulers.
This third installment was much like the first, no victory, not even in the short-term. Jewish factions kept bickering among themselves, failing to focus on Rome, the common enemy. They even managed to burn their own food supply in a besieged Jerusalem. In 70 C.E., the city fell yet again, the Temple once again destroyed, never to be rebuilt.
It is possible that Jesus did predict this second destruction of the Temple. After all, there was precedent, and the situation was at a breaking point. In the years after the execution of Jesus, the region suffered severe drought, reported in both the Christian Testament and the historical record. That was one of the sparks that lit the conflagration, along with greed in an unjust economic system and unhinged leaders in Rome.
If Jesus did not predict the destruction of the Temple, if Mark is looking backwards post-rebellion, then this is an example of what is called post-diction. It is easy to predict things that have already happened!
Scholars in the Historic Jesus movement debate whether or not Jesus leaned into the apocalyptic, the violent reversal of a Day of the Lord, or was leading a movement of local and immediate non-violent reform.
We wrestle with his self-awareness through the lens of later theologies and based on decades of oral tradition before anything was ever written down. Did he predict his own death? Or simply view it as a possible and probable outcome?
All of these questions step back from later claims that Jesus is fully omniscient and omnipotent as the Second Person of the Trinity, a concept found nowhere in scripture and giving us a god that would not be good. It steps toward something useful to us: how do we operate faithfully in a system that is immoral and unsustainable, one where both government and religion are malign actors, and how do we build a real alternative right now, maybe not so much one more sequel, but an alternative reality. Why not? They have their own alternative reality, where horse dewormer cures Covid and commercial airlines serve as cover for biochemical mind control.
In nerd circles, the abbreviation “alt,” spelled A-L-T, designates an alternative version, unauthorized or funky, a term that might rightly be applied to any understanding of what Jesus was doing in his own context, building an alternative community and an alternative to other movements in Judaism in his time. His Kingdom of God was an alternative to the Empire of Caesar.
His extravagant love, known by the Greek term “agape,” was an alternative to the transactional, for everything was transactional, rules and keeping score, and Jesus did not keep score. He loved first, acted second, and dealt with the details later, if he dealt with them at all.
His arrival in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is a reversed image of the Roman cohort riding into the city, pomp replaced with humility.
He may have predicted the destruction of the Temple, but Jesus did not sit around wringing his hands. He denounced evil, sure, but then he did good.
More importantly, scripture tells us that he created a structure for belonging, a community that could and would continue after him. That would plant the seeds for alternative communities in Corinth and Philippi, and even in Rome, where a mad caesar would accuse Christians of causing a fire he himself was accused of setting, yet those gathering in Christ’s name carried on.
Jesus built a community that survived the Jewish War, and the pile of rubble and an empty mount where once stood a Temple.
American fundamentalists are clamoring for a sequel with a Chuck Norris Jesus, with the U.S. embassy in the modern apartheid-state of Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during the first Trump presidency. They even sometimes call quite openly for the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the reconstruction of a Jewish Temple as if we are going to revert to primitive ideas about a god who lives in one place and requires a steady diet of livestock entrails.
Jesus moved on, his alt-Judaism taking a new name, even as Rabbinic Judaism emerged from the ashes of Jerusalem.
I know Christian history is littered with disputes over the nature of the Trinity and incarnation, but I don’t have time for all that. I’m not interested in how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I’m interested in how many angels can dance in Beecher Hall, how many children we can save from corporate greed and the hatred of so many who shamefully use Christ’s name. I’m not interested in a Temple in ruins. I’m interested in the sequel, when Philip baptizes a eunuch and a pharisee named Paul has a change of heart and Bach writes music for the church and Schweitzer, in his spare time when he was not being a doctor running his own hospital in Africa or being a Lutheran minister promoting a reverence for life, went off on a scholarly quest for a man from Galilee who changed the world.
The historic Jesus may be hard to find, but the eternal Christ is not. She, He, They are with us, in the pews and in the streets and crying in a dark bedroom. Our job, our only job, is love in action.
Amen.