Sects and the City
Reflections on the Lectionary for November 17th
I grew up in a town of about 1,000 people, and our town was the second-largest one in the county. When I was a kid, I thought that the kids from the other side of the county—the ones who lived in the largest town in the county—were impossibly sophisticated big-city dwellers. It was only when I was grown up and moved away that I checked the census numbers and discovered that that city—the one I had thought of as enormous—had a population of about 4,000 people.
That pattern continued throughout my life. When we took field trips to the big city in the neighboring county, Winston-Salem, I felt like I was in an endless urban landscape; that city, in hindsight, had a population of about 150,000. When I went to grad school in Nashville, that city felt enormous, even though when we lived there it was only a little over a half a million people. And Denver—the largest city I’ve ever lived in—is a long way from my hometown of a thousand souls. But even Denver is only about 750,000 in the city proper and 3 million in the broader metro area—barely top 20 in the United States, and nowhere near the top 100 in the world. According to Wikipedia, there are 81 cities in the world with populations of greater than 5 million.
My life, then, has been a long process of adjusting to new urban scales. What felt like a large metro area when I was a kid now hardly qualifies as a city at all. I have spent time in some of the world’s largest cities—Mexico City, Istanbul, Los Angeles, London—and I have realized that even my “big city” of Denver is dwarfed by their size. I am still, at the heart of things, a kid from the country, and I will never quite get accustomed to urban mazes of concrete and crosswalks and skyscrapers.
All of that is a long way to say that I resonate with the opening scene of the gospel reading from the lectionary this week. In the passage from Mark 13:1-8, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, and one of the disciples seems to be taken aback and taken in by the scale of the city. “Look, Teacher,” the disciple said to Jesus, “what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus and his disciples all hailed from Galilee, which was (and is) a region to the north and east of Jerusalem. Scholars still debate exactly what Galilee would have been like in the first century, but it seems clear that it was a more-rural area full of natural beauty and a nearby to a few Greek-speaking cities (collectively known the Decapolis). The disciples were men who—like me—probably came from very small towns or villages, or at the very most they came from small cities. The wonder and awe of Jesus’ disciple in this passage, surveying the urban landscape of Jerusalem, was probably very real. This was a kid from the country seeing the big city up close, maybe for the first time.
The Jerusalem temple—the so-called “Herodian” temple, the one rebuilt after the first temple was destroyed by the Babylonians and renovated by Herod the Great in the period leading up to Jesus’ lifetime—was enormous. Jerusalem itself was not one of the larger cities in the Roman Empire, but the Jerusalem temple was a grand and imposing structure. The stones that comprised the temple platform routinely topped a hundred tons, and some were much larger than that. The temple itself would have gleamed white in the sun, and it would have dominated the landscape from most viewpoints in the city. It’s not surprising that this disciples, coming from a rural village and seeing the grand scale and imposing beauty of Jerusalem and its temple, would have marveled at the sight.
What is a little bit surprising to me is Jesus’ response to this disciple’s wonder. “Do you see these great buildings,” Jesus asked. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Jesus, too, was a kid from the countryside, so I think we have to understand his words here as a form of hyperbolic wonder. Even all of this, Jesus is saying, even something this enormous, will pass away.
This chapter of Mark and the parallel chapters found in Matthew and Luke are really the only sustained gospel accounts of an apocalypse. Today we use the word “apocalypse” in a few different ways, to describe a big catastrophe, a societal collapse or destruction, or a systemic disruption. But the word has specific meanings when it’s used to describe biblical literature and the social movements that produced biblical texts. Apocalypse comes from the Greek word that means revelation or unveiling (which is why the Apocalypse of John is often called Revelation). Apocalyptic literature was not uncommon by Jesus’ day; you can still read a number of Jewish apocalypses that have survived from that period. As a group, apocalypses tend to share some characteristics. They often involve a heavenly guide or messenger that shows a human being visions of the divine realm, the future of the world, or both. Apocalypses are often fantastically and extravagantly imaginative, with lots of symbolism. They can be quite violent, imagining the defeat of God’s enemies and the kinds of suffering the world can be expected to endure. Apocalypses often play with time and space, making them difficult to understand. And perhaps most importantly for this passage, apocalypses engage in fantasies about power, imagining how God will intervene in and against earthly systems of power to bring about a change in the world, or sometimes even the destruction of the world.
The selection in the lectionary this week—Mark 13:1-8—is only the first part of a longer apocalyptic chapter. If you’re curious about the rest, you can check out this commentary I wrote on Mark 13 for the Visual Commentary on Scripture, where I play out some of the themes of violence and power found in the passage. But even these early verses of the chapter are enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. After the disciple’s observations about the grandeur of Jerusalem and Jesus’ response to them, a quartet of disciples pulled Jesus aside and asked him to elaborate. “Tell us when this will be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished,” they asked. Jesus’ response was evasive, in some ways. He told them that they couldn’t necessarily trust people who were predicting the apocalyptic moment, and he told them that there would be “wars and rumors of wars” before “the end” eventually came. Earthquakes, famines, conflict—all of that, Jesus said, was only “the beginning of the birthpangs.” Scary stuff.
Apocalyptic literature and apocalyptic thought, like the prophetic literature and thought to which it is closely related, is a way of talking about power. It’s not surprising that apocalyptic rhetoric spiked around Jesus’ lifetime, because that time was absolutely buzzing with power and geopolitics. A few generations earlier the Roman Empire had taken control of Judea and made it a province, and Jesus lived his whole life in the literal and figural presence of Roman power. A friend of mine, the scholar Maia Kotrosits, has written (with another scholar Carly Daniel-Hughes, in chapter 4 of that book that’s linked above) about how power was projected in Roman provinces. It wasn’t always the literal presence of Roman officials or legions of Roman soldiers. Roman power could just as easily be felt and experienced through what Kotrosits and Daniel-Hughes call a “fantasy life,” the set of imaginations about power, and through the kind of built environment that Jesus’ disciple was marveling at. Someone like Jesus didn’t need to get hauled into Pontius Pilate’s court to encounter the reality of Roman power; they could feel it in many ways, maybe especially keenly in a city like Jerusalem, where so many symbols of religion, culture, ethnicity, and imperial power were gathered together in one place. The impressive scale of the temple, the bustle of the city, the subtle reminders of who was in charge—all of that made a city like Jerusalem a dizzying place to be if you were a Roman subject from the countryside.
So when Jesus began to speak about the destruction of Jerusalem, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Even if you think that Jesus had divine powers of prediction, he didn’t necessarily need them to stand in Jerusalem and foretell conflict and destruction. Already in his lifetime Judea and the surrounding regions were hotbeds of dissent and minor rebellion; the whole area was known in Roman imperial settings as a trouble spot. Jesus’ own teachings were full of glances and gestures toward Roman power—the word “legion” to refer to the demons possessing the man (or men) in the tombs, the presence of centurions and soldiers in the stories of Jesus’ travels, the paranoia of Herod about John the Baptist, to name a few. You get the sense, reading the gospels, that things were coming to a head. And that is exactly what happened—things came to a head, in a couple of different ways.
First, of course, Jesus himself was executed by the Roman state. This might be the best indication we have that tensions were high in Judea in the first half of the first century. At least the way Jesus is depicted in the canonical gospels, he was a popular preacher and folk healer who had gathered a following. But even that seemingly modest profile was enough for the Roman authorities to seek to eliminate him. The trial scenes near the end of the gospels all paint a picture of a powerful but paranoid Roman apparatus, balancing order and chaos on a knife’s edge, and Jesus’ public life was too much risk for the state to take on. So they killed him. For the story of Christianity, Roman power came to a head in the death of Jesus.
The second way things came to a head, though, was on a much larger scale and had much more dire consequences for human life. The Jewish War, fought a generation after Jesus’ death between 66 and 70 CE, was catastrophic. Many of the things Jesus predicts in Mark 13 came to pass in the Jewish War, so much that many scholars think that Jesus’ words in this chapter were written after the Jewish War—a memory of Jesus’ predictions of conflict, fleshed out with details remembered from the actual war. The Jewish War was a time of horrific suffering and widespread destruction of life and property. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed along with much of the city and the surrounding countryside, tens of thousands (or more) of people died, and tens of thousands (or more) were taken into slavery.
We are living through our own apocalyptic moment, aren’t we? Although it’s very different from the time and place and moment that Jesus and his disciples were living in, we all live in an age of conflict, contested power, and uncertainty. Wars rage around the world, many of which involve the United States in one way or another, and we have sharp disputes about power and its uses. Meanwhile the United States’ own political life is complicated, to say the least, with phrases like “civil war” being thrown around on both the right and the left. The “wars and rumors of wars” that Jesus predicted in Mark 13:7 are alive and well, and we might resonate more than we wish with this apocalyptic chapter of the gospel.
When I think about that scene in Mark 13:1-2—the one where the disciple was marveling at the grandeur of the big city of Jerusalem, and Jesus was predicting its destruction—I think about power. For that unnamed disciple, like me, it was easy to be impressed with a big city, and it was easy to imagine that such a grand place was permanent, durable, and almighty. Likewise, it’s easy to imagine that any political regime is here to stay, and that its grip on power will never loosen. I think Jesus, in his response to the disciple, was talking about both power and grandeur, and he was suggesting that neither is as permanent as we might think. Even hundred-ton stones can be cast down, and every political power is always temporary. That might be discomforting for those of us who live comfortably inside the structures of power. But then again, for those of us who find ourselves on the underside of power, Jesus’ words might sound less like a threat and more like a promise.