This prophecy is a thunderclap

Second Sunday of Lent 2025
Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. Luke 13.35

In late July AD 70, Titus, who was the son of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, and in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn. The next day happened to be the very day on which Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem over 500 years before.

The Temple was a building of numinous glory. It was higher than a fifteen-storey building and made of god and white marble. The historian Josephus who wrote an account of the siege wrote, “At the first rising of the sun,” its gleaming courts and gilded gates “reflected back a very fiery splendour and made those…[who] looked upon it to turn their eyes away.” When strangers — such as Titus and his Roman legionaries — saw this Temple for the first time, it appeared “like a mountain covered with snow.” Pious Jews knew that at the centre of the courts of this city-within-a-city atop Mount Moriah was a tiny room of superlative holiness that contained virtually nothing at all. This space was the focus of Jewish sanctity: the Holy of Holies, the dwelling-place of God Himself.

Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within a walled city. But Titus commanded an army of 60,000 soldiers. He had an arsenal of siege engines and catapults.  Ballistae stones, fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall. These stones testify to the intensity of the Roman bombardment. Legionnaires stormed the walls. They set fire to the gates of the Temple, melting their silver casing. Titus proceeded through the burning Temple to view and so to profane the Holy of Holies, which only the High Priest was allowed to enter. His aides pulled him back to safety as an inferno rose around them.

This is the terrible event that Our Lord prophesies in our Gospel today when He says to the people of Jerusalem, Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. Their house is the Temple.

In chapter 19 of the Gospel of St Luke He laments over Jerusalem again, and prophesies… they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another. This prophecy is a thunderclap. This is a shocking, and subversive thing to say. It would be like a new prime minister coming to the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey in the midst of a crowd of his supporters and saying, “All of this will be destroyed.”

This is precisely what Jesus does here. But He is saying something that belongs to the heart of the Gospel. He is using this terrible tragedy to make a point that He repeats over and over again. Nothing in this world lasts – not even the Temple made of gold and white marble containing the Holy of Holies. Nothing in this world should, therefore, be the object of our deepest longing or of our most intense commitment.

The Temple represented the pomp of this world. It represented the best the world can offer; and the people standing around Jesus and looking at the Temple, stand for all of us who stand staring at the goods of this world, goods we can possess but that we must lose one day. Jesus teaches us that we must free ourselves from worldly attachments and live for God alone.Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This is the teaching that He gave to the rich young man whom He invited to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor, and then to come and follow Him. Jesus taught the necessity of detachment from whatever it is we love the most – from riches, or even from our own families. In the next chapter of his Gospel St Luke tells us: And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple…whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

To be His disciple Jesus tells us that we must learn a radical detachment from the world. Only detachment will allow us be in the world but not of it. Only detachment will allow us to say not my will, but thine, be done. Only detachment will free us to hope for heaven. For amidst what Jesus calls the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in we should aspire to higher things. We should seek the fulfillment of our deepest longing in heaven, in an ocean of infinite love where we will be overwhelmed by joy.

This teaching about our need for detachment belongs the heart of the Gospel. This teaching was repeated by Jesus when He prophesied the destruction of the Temple. And this teaching was beautifully evoked by sixteen centuries later in a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney:

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.

Draw in thy beams and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.

O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evil becometh him to slide,
Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath.

Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see:
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.

Amen.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson,
St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 16/03/2025