Luke 21:34-38 Commentary

34"Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap. 35For it will come upon all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man."

37Each day Jesus was teaching at the temple, and each evening he went out to spend the night on the hill called the Mount of Olives, 38and all the people came early in the morning to hear him at the temple.


Dig Deeper
When I was in the tenth grade in high school I was moved into an advanced English class. The class seemed to have a little more work that was required in comparison to the regular classes but it was apparent that one of the big differences between this advanced class and the normal classes was that we were given much more independence in getting our work done and in the ability to do it with more creativity. But with that independence also came the responsibility of getting the work done. Our teacher would not coddle us and make sure that we got the work done. She would assign it and then it was up to us to finish it off well.

On one of the very first days of the year, she told us that we would have to keep a writing journal. Each day we would write on a topic of our choosing but we had to fill up a page. It was up to us to find the time to do it and keep it up. She reminded us about the journal each week for the first few weeks but then it was up to us to keep it up. It was one of those things that wasn’t very difficult if you stayed alert and on top of things and did it each day. It just required a little discipline and the occasional self-reminder that the teacher had promised that she was going to grade these things at the end of the year.

But as a school year wears on, you don’t realize just how long it can be. I started out quite disciplined with my journals. I wrote with energy and creativity and sometimes went over the required page. I actually was enjoying the writing and kept up with them well into November and December even though I knew that many of my classmates had already started to fall off the pace. Eventually I began to make little compromises. I lost my fervor and would miss a day here and a day there. I comforted myself that many others were much farther behind than I. Before I knew it, it was May, we had one week before we had to turn our journals in, and I was over 40 journal pages behind what I needed to get an “A” for the journal assignment. I had not stayed prepared and alert and the due date had snuck up on me like a thief.

I cannot begin to imagine the excitement and energy that the very first Christians must have felt. It must have been simply enthralling for Jesus’ followers to hear this promise that he would be vindicated as the Son of Man just as Daniel had promised so long ago. One of the great struggles of the first century for early Christians, though, was to hold on to the belief that they were truly the people of God. That was not such an easy position to maintain in the face of public opinion. The Jews rejected Jesus’ Messianic claims outright and could easily dismiss a so-called Messiah who had died at the hands of the very pagans that, in their view, the Messiah should have been defeating. Plus, they still had the Temple and it would have been easy to point to the many Scriptures that spoke of the importance of the Temple in worshipping God. Christians could claim that Jesus was the true Temple but what did they possibly have to back that claim up other than the cherished words of a dead Messiah? The sledding wasn’t any easier with the pagan world. The message of a crucified Messiah who died the most shameful of deaths was utter foolishness to most in the pagan world. They considered those who did embrace Christ as “atheists” who denied the existence of their long-cherished gods.

The thrilling excitement of coming into the family of God and hearing the promises that Jesus would judge those opposed to God and bring their Temple down could easily fade into the long march of days, months, and years. Year after year the mocking questions of where this Messiah was had to wear on the early Christians. Where was he? When would he return? Take a look, the Temple was still there and the world was marching on just as it always had. Conditions in Israel had gotten bad for the first few years following Jesus’ death, but then Agrippa, one of Herod’s sons was given power over Judea and things seemed up. But through the convening decades of the 40’s and 50’s AD, things in both Israel and Rome went up and down, but nothing seemed like anything different beyond just the normal twists and turns of life for most people. The Christian communities, however, faced constant persecution and pressure from the pagans, from the Jews, and even from their own physical families.

The very real danger, then for the Christian community in the middle of the first century was to get weary. Jesus knew that it would be so easy to get bogged down with life. The temptations could be many. They might lose discipline and begin to slip back into the routine of a normal life that would be much easier if they just made small little compromises to fit in with their neighbors better. They might start to lose heart and faith as days melted into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, and it would be easy to start to doubt that the Messiah was ever going to come in the clouds of judgment or that the Temple would ever be destroyed as Jesus had promised.

There were many things that could cause them to become sleepy and lose their grip, forgetting that they had a mission to constantly announce and expand the kingdom of God. But the judgment of the Messiah would come. They must never lose heart, even though many would and many more would be tempted to. Jesus’ warning was intended to head some of that off. Losing faith or falling asleep and returning to their regular lives, especially for those Christians that were Jewish could wind up being disastrous when the Son of Man did come in judgment through the Roman armies as they finally descended upon Israel and destroyed the Temple. They should pray, then, Jesus urged them that they would be able to stand faithfully before the Son of Man when all that he prophesied about actually did happen. When the people of God were finally vindicated along with their Messiah, the true Temple, and the rival Temple stood in ruins, woe to those who had fallen asleep and didn’t keep up their faith in the Messiah and his family.

It is important to remember that Luke’s first readers would most likely have been reading this Gospel in that very time that Jesus had warned of. They were several decades removed from Jesus’ death but had still not seen the Temple fall. They were the very ones that needed to take to heart Jesus’ words and not fall asleep at the wheel. To drive this point home well, Luke gives one more reminder of why those early believers or those that were reading his Gospel many years later after the Temple had fallen should continue to cling to Jesus and his family as the true Temple in the true kingdom of God.

Each day throughout that final week, Jesus would do what so many other pilgrims at Passover time did. He would go into the Temple during the week but then, because Jerusalem was so overloaded with visitors, he would go into the outlying areas at night to bed down for the evening. But each day the residents of Jerusalem and the Passover pilgrims from all over Israel could find Jesus teaching in the Temple, warning them of the crisis to come for the nation of Israel and revealing the will of God for all of the people. Jesus was, Luke once again makes clear, fulfilling the role that the Temple itself should have but had failed to because of the rebellious and faithful people of Israel, especially the religious leaders. He was serving as the place where all people could come for the revelatory words concerning God’s kingdom and his promised family. The fact that Jesus was doing this in the physical structure of the Old Temple only heightened the irony and highlighted the fact that the Old Temple must eventually go so as to clearly vindicate Jesus as the true Messiah and demonstrate that he is the true Temple of God. He was the place where the fullness of the presence of God could be found. It was no longer in that building.

This passage is so intimately relevant for us today because the malaise of sleep and stupor can often be often be the greatest enemy of the Christian community in our time. We all want to fight the glorious spiritual battle and there certainly can be many exciting moments when we engage in the mission of continuing to spread the message of reconciliation around the world, but much more often than some ongoing, adrenalin pumping battle, is the slow and steady work of building community, praying together for the same things day after day, and the slow but rewarding work of digging into God’s word and learning more and more each day. Building a Temple of living stones is, after all, long, slow, and difficult work. But we must always remember that Jesus will return one day regardless of how easy it might be to forget that. We need to be patient and stay alert.


Devotional Thought
Has the grind of the daily Christian life come to make you feel more like you’re falling asleep sometimes? Jesus tells us to keep awake and to pray constantly, and Luke follows that up with the picture of Jesus teaching at the Temple. The implication is that constant prayer and devotion to the word of God are two major components in keeping us awake and alert. Are you awake and alert right now? Are you ready? If not, what do you need to do to get that way?