Summary
Impressed
Human beings are easily impressed by what is large, costly, and ornate. The Taj Mahal required twenty-one years and a thousand elephants to build. The Eiffel Tower holds together with two and a half million rivets. The Burj Khalifa rises more than 160 stories and takes a crew of 36 workers months simply to wash its windows. Herod's temple, in its day, was no less stunning—fifteen stories tall, faced with white stone, with foundation blocks nearly forty feet long. When the disciples walked out of it, they did what any of us would do: they gawked. "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" Mark 13:1.
Jesus, however, was not impressed. "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down" Mark 13:2. It is worth noticing that this was the last time Jesus would ever enter or leave that temple. The most spectacular structure of its age was, in His sight, already passing away. The disciples, now impressed for a different reason, pressed Him privately on the Mount of Olives: when will this happen, and what will be the sign? “Impressed” 4-3-22
Strikingly, Jesus does not give them a timetable. He gives them a warning. "Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name… When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place, but the end is still to come" Mark 13:5-7. Whole branches of Christian thought have built their theology around being impressed by signs—reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, trying to crack the date. Jesus calls that distraction. The Christian is not called to decode the calendar; every one of us is already in our own end times, and the day of our death is the day Christ comes for us.
What should impress us, then, is the good news that "must first be proclaimed to all nations" Mark 13:10. And here the contrast deepens. Jesus did not die an impressive death. He died bleeding, humiliated, hung as a curse outside the city Galatians 3:13. The grandest temples and the greatest charitable deeds cannot remove a single sin. But on that unimpressive cross, Christ took into Himself the nastiest words that have crossed your lips and the basest thoughts that have run through your mind, and He carried them away forever. Unlike the temple, which fell and was never rebuilt, Christ rose—triumphant, victorious, never to be destroyed.
And then He built something more enduring than any monument: His Church. As John Donne wrote, "The Church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all… when she baptizes a child, that action concerns me, for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and engrafted into that body whereof I am a member." This is how Christ builds: the good news proclaimed to the nations, sinners gathered into one body through the waters of Baptism. Paul reminds us that "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you" 1 Corinthians 6:19—the true temple is not made of stone.
The end will come when "they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory" Mark 13:26. Until that day, the mission is unfinished. "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" Romans 10:13-14. Do not be impressed by towers. Do not be alarmed by wars and rumors of wars. Keep your eyes, ears, and heart open to the one truly magnificent thing—Christ's act of redemption—and to the people God places in your path who still need to hear of it.
Video citations
- “Impressed” 4-3-22 — If you would open your Bibles to the Gospel of Mark 13, chapter, it's on page 43 in the Pew edition of the Bible that is Mark 13 on page 43. The Taj Mahal. It took 21 years to build. It was…