Mark 13.1-8- imagine you are the stones
The reading we have for today is a really well known one and it’s easy to just let its words roll over us without really taking them on board. So before I read it, to help us get a handle on the reading in a way that might be a little unique. I want you to imagine you are something and that all the people around you are these things too.
Ready?
I want you to imagine you are a big block of stone!
You heard me! An immovable block! A heavy thing. Hard as iron, ungiving, totally solid and dependable. Cut and shaped or rough and ready, either way, you have the ability to weather hundreds of years of sun and night, winter cold and summer heat.
You imagining that yet? And everyone around you is to be a big block of stone too.
I know! We’ll never see each other in the same light again! But run with me on this one, trust me, and let’s see where such a quirky sense of imagination can lead us to. Here we go:
Read Mark 13.1-8 (The Message)
We’ve heard this before haven’t we, about the temple being destroyed as a sign of those mysterious and not understood end-times that crops up in the bible from time to time. Jesus doesn’t dwell on the temple the disciples are fascinated by, so much, he goes on and spends more time talking about the troubles that could fall upon the world. And that’s not something we generally like to dwell upon.
I don’t know, perhaps I’m unusual but I tend to scoot past this passage, if I’m truly honest. What about you?
But we might be able to find more meaning, by putting ourselves into the story. There’s no helpful characters for us to imagine stepping into the shoes of, but, there are these stones of the temple, and elsewhere in the bible St Peter in his letter to the believers called them all living stones, to be built into a spiritual house. So let’s take that imagining we started with, and let ourselves be one of the stones as it were.
Can you imagine, what it would be like if one of the stones were to fall out of the walls? The building might stay up but there’d be a huge hole and a sense that surely the elements would get in and loosen the stones around.
Imagine stones tumbling out over time, because of that, and the end result being almost like one of the greek ruins that we can get to see in holiday brochures.
Jesus places the destruction of the temple very clearly into the context of human hatred: nation will fight nation, he says, its the very antithesis of God and their word.
We would hate it if a stone were to fall from the spiritual house we of All Souls have been built into, wouldn’t we. As an image, we might read that idea of losing one of you wonderfully carved living stones in several different ways, but using the context that Jesus has set for us; the idea that that old temple was destroyed through the ability of humans to hate, we get some interesting thoughts about what it is we, as a group of people coming to church, are.
I would like to think we might find a wonderful motivation for us from this story, as God’s living stones, to just ensure the mortar around each one of us is doing ok. That we know what kind of building we have been built into. One that stands for something- for the absence of corruption and the mis-use of power over fellow humans, the genuine absence of hate, and even that even more hateful thing, indifference to other humans.
The living stones that we are, have been gathered to stand for something. And the building we are built into only stands when the human beings that we are, live for God’s word, and not for the downfall or the trashing of any other human being.
When the worldwide church finally learns this, I think we might find a renewal of interest in the wonderful building that God has been trying to build all these years- a temple not made of hands but of hearts.
