Realistic Hope
Christ and the falling down world
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, “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.”
They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
When I was not a Christian in my twenties, I remember being excited to read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Here was this utterly realistic look at the world, criticizing all religions as backwards and unreasonable. I wanted something that was unflinchingly realistic, and thought I’d found him in Paine. “My own mind is my church,” he said. I wanted that too, and many American individuals have since. Eventually, though, despite being a key figure in the American Revolution because of his soaring rhetoric, Paine’s intellectual pride was alienating. Despite being a visionary of the revolution and then later slavery and suffrage, he became quite insulting to contemporaries, had an increasingly unrealistic utopian view of the power of reason, and alienated more and more friends because of his views and personality. That is how the man who helped light the American Revolution had six people at his funeral.
Years later, when I came back into Christianity, I was still trying to be a reasonable man, whose mind was still my own church. As one of many rationalist approaches to spirituality, others and I looked at Christianity from a utilitarian lens. I thought, “This is the way to help me really be a spiritual person. Maybe it’s not realistic, but it’ll help me become a truly transcendent human. I won’t be like Paine and only have six people at my funeral; I’ll be beloved.” It’s a good marketing message. It’s a reasonable approach to Christianity.
This might be good marketing, but it is also wrong. Following Jesus is not really reasonable. As Jesus tells us in our gospel reading today, following him will cause us problems.
We are paradoxes. We want to say we are being utterly realistic while really wanting things that are unrealistic. We want reason to be the only thing that rules humanity, which itself is unreasonable. We want to feel morally superior to others while knowing deep down we aren’t. We want to be popular while doing the right thing. We want to believe that people would love us if only we could act more Christ-like. While many people will love you if you’re more Christ-like, Jesus also tells us that following him sometimes means people will hate you. Not for saying you’re a Christian, but for following Jesus (and there is a difference).
When we read this gospel passage in 2025, hearing Christ tell his disciples about all the awful things that will happen in the world and to them, we might be in another paradox. Christians have wrestled with this for thousands of years. On the one hand, we hear the way Jesus was talking to his specific disciples in that place and time in history, speaking of calamities that would befall Jerusalem and then Rome. But also, it is hard to read passages like this and not have a part of you sometimes feel like we are in the end times. This is why every couple of decades, a new preacher loudly predicts The End, crying, “This is the big one!” like a bad theological weatherman.
As bad as things are now and were then, Jesus was describing patterns that are woven into our human nature. Wars, insurrection, nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom, disasters both natural and manmade, all eventually coming to a head. While the cycle of historical violence ebbs and flows, it does flow towards perpetual conflict.
Jesus was also describing the patterns that are woven into his nature, calling believers in every time and place to do likewise. Remember that being “in his name” is not simply signing “Jesus” on the end of a prayer, nor is being “in his name” just wearing a cross, but to God, his name invokes his nature; his nature is within his name. His name carries the very force and truth and fullness of who He is.
Followers of Jesus are not people who claim his name, but are actually in his true essence; Jesus points this out, “Many will come in my name” who are false leaders, but also, “You will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. And this will give you an opportunity to testify.” Throughout the tides of human history, it is those who live in his name who will inevitably stand against how the historical forces of church and state want them to go.
Wars and uprisings and rebellions, both for good reasons and bad, will always keep happening as long as humans want opposing things, which is to say, as long as there are humans. But when there are two people who want two different worldly things, where does Christ stand? Outside of it. And what ought Jesus followers want? We are called to want what he wants; “Thy will be done,” not ours.
To follow Jesus means you will inevitably be in conflict with people who want kingdoms of this world. This means you may find yourself in a historical time where you seek life in the Church more than the world outside of it, and at times it means you have to stand at odds with the Church when it aligns with the kingdoms of this world. To seek Christ in his name is to want a taste of the kingdom of heaven he offers and tells us about, to participate in that by helping others participate in it, not by being a “more spiritual person,” but by listening to where the cross is pointing and carrying it so that your neighbor is not crucified on it, but maybe you will.
When Jesus was alive, Jerusalem was a flashpoint of a brewing, ongoing war between the Jewish people and Rome. It was at a bit of a lopsided ceasefire we call “imperial occupation,” which is never peace, but stable injustice. This is the world into which Christ entered, and rather than picking to be a fan of Rome or the religious leaders, he actually did the impossible and made them briefly friends with each other. Just two chapters after our reading today, we are told that Herod and Pilate became friends the day Jesus was executed after long being enemies.1
Why did they become friends? Because in Jesus, they found their common enemy: the man who stood outside of human wars and power games and contentions and said “The only way I can help both of you is to be the sacrifice for each of you.” For God so loved the world, the only way out of the game was for all the powers of the world to hate God in his love. The only way to do that was to show them all judged, but also, all died for.
That brings us to us aspiring Jesus followers. How often are we able to sacrifice ourselves to help other people in a way that they will hate us, and doing so in a spirit of love? Are we up to that task? To be like Christ in being hated by the factions of the world by being in his true, self-sacrificing love, and loving all the factions of the world while we are doing this?
For most of us, most of the time, probably not. To make it worse, we take this very idea that we are so special and exceptional because the world hates us and turn it into a form of pride, forgetting that sometimes the world doesn’t hate us for our Christianity, but for our un-Christianity. It is like Thomas Paine thinking the world hated him for being the only reasonable man, when they hated him because his pride betrayed a deep-down lack of mature reason. Someday, we may realize our Christianity isn’t as mature as we thought. Like Paine, maybe people aren’t skipping your funeral because you’re like Jesus, but because you’re a jerk.
Then if you’re like me and some other folks I know, you realize how much we utterly cannot live up to the billing of Christian, and while you may not be at war in the world, you become at war with yourself. Like Peter on the night he betrayed Christ, sometimes it means tears and pain and embarrassment at how much of a spiritual failure you are—neither reasonable, nor unreasonably spiritual, just a sinner.
But Christ, in his mercy, sees all this, all of us. And rather than us being at war with ourselves or each other, he says put down your weapons. Put down the weapons with your neighbor, put down the weapons with yourself, and enter into my rest. Know my mercy. Turn back away from everything that isn’t me and realize that my very name is mercy. And yes, if you follow me, you won’t stop being a sinner, and you won’t suddenly become popular. But you will know me, and I will give you everything you need.
In a time when it seems like the world is tearing itself apart, Jesus tells us that following him is not blind or dumb or unreasonable faith, but very realistic hope. It is realistic that the world will be at war with itself for all of time. It is realistic that most of the time, we will feel the pressure to pick a team and probably will. And Jesus is also realistic that following him won’t make you suddenly an enlightened person. You will be a sinner in need of grace. But it’s also realistic that you can grow in holiness, that you can follow him more nearly all the days of your life, no matter what age you are, that it’s never too late to change. There’s not just second chances, but seventy times seven chances—for starters.
Jesus is most realistic when he says that if we really follow him, we will not be popular. Following him runs perpendicular to human nature, because he runs perpendicular to human nature: the shape of a cross.
We are given moments. In the moments when our team asks us to do something we know we can’t and so we don’t, that's when we’re close to Christ. The moments where we sacrifice the popular thing with our tribe for the right and loving thing are another. The moments of choosing reconciliation where hatred would suffice, because that is often the world’s currency. Eventually, everyone who follows Jesus’s nature will be hated for it at some moment.
But you don’t have to plan for it, and you don’t need to worry about it. For you will always have Jesus Christ. He said, “For I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”2
As the Lord said on his last night with his friends, even though the world will fall all around you, “I have overcome the world. Take heart.”3 Amen.
Luke 23:12
Luke 21:15-19
John 16:33