Comfort in Changing Times
Well, this is different. And if you were to ask me, “Different from what?" I would have to answer different from everything. None of us have ever lived through anything like what we are experiencing now. What our day to day lives look like today and for the next few weeks (months?) is completely unlike anything we have ever done before. The world has changed definitively and unquestionably and yet I want to suggest that that is not necessarily a bad thing. Now please understand I’m not saying it’s necessarily a good thing, I’m not trying to put a positive spin on something that truly is serious and severe, but I take comfort in the fact that the world has changed before. Calamity has visited the earth before, and yet through it all God has remained God, firmly seated upon his throne – and I find great comfort in that.
In Luke 21:5 Jesus is in the vicinity of the temple in Jerusalem and some from the crowd take it upon themselves to point out the beauty (and probably the enormous size) of the stones that make up the building. At this point we might expect Jesus to agree. We might expect him to say, “My Father’s house will be a house of prayer." Of course he has already said this though in a very different situation! Now what he says is, “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" (V. 6). I don’t know if we can accurately put ourselves in a place to understand how surprising these words must have sounded to the disciples. Or at least, I don’t know if we would have been able to last week, maybe this week we can. Because what Jesus is saying is, everything is going to change. The way you do your daily life is going to change. The way you worship and where you do it is going to change. That which you are tempted to look at (the government, the stock market, the day to day routine of school, work, errands) as unchangeable is going to change. Jesus goes on to explain that Jerusalem is going to be attacked. The temple is going to come down and with it the Judean’s way of life.
There have been many attempts over the years to make Jesus’ words here about the end times. We look at texts such as V. 26 “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world," and we may even be tempted to say that what Jesus was talking about then is happening today. But that’s simply not the case. Jesus is talking about the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. He’s talking about something that happened in history 1,950 years ago, not in the year 2020 but in the year 70. And if there is any doubt about that, we have Jesus’ words in V. 32 that what he is talking about will happen in the generation of those who are listening to him; some of those who heard Jesus’ words in Luke 21 saw with their own eyes their fulfillment not 40 years later. Jesus told that generation that life was going to change, and it did. And throughout history, again and again the story has been repeated. That which seemed impenetrable, eternal, indestructible came tumbling down.
So here we are today. Many of us rocked to the core as the way of life we assumed could not be shaken has been toppled in one fell swoop. Is it scary? Yeah, a little bit. Are there unanswered questions? I won’t answer that (see what I did there?). But even in this time of uncertainty I find hope. Because throughout human history there have been two constants; change, and God the Creator of the Universe. Life has changed again, but God remains who he was, who he is, and who he will always be. You can’t go to the temple in Jerusalem to worship God today. You maybe can’t even go to your church down the street. But wherever you are, at this very moment, you are in the presence of God Almighty. He is with you. He loves you. And that is never going to change.