Progressive reflections on the lectionary #90

Monday 10th November 2025

Luke 21:5-19: Never mind the temple - here's the apocalypse

This story, found in all of the synoptic gospels, is reshaped in the gospel according to Luke to offer comfort to his readers - people who were enduring marginalisation and betrayal at the hands of their own communities. Luke retells the story in a way designed to encourage faithful endurance and prophetic witness amid the appalling hardships of the time.

In 70CE the temple in Jerusalem, the theological and national centre of Jewish life, was destroyed. The destruction came after a failed uprising against the occupying power (Rome) - and intensified the displacement of Jewish people around the ancient near east.

It was a seismic, cataclysmic, event. It shattered the hopes of a people who had expected the fall of the Roman regime, and the arrival of a saviour, a messiah, who would not only overthrow Rome and restore the honour of the house of Judah, but also reunite them with the ten tribes lost centuries before.

This threw a real spanner in the works for those who had messianic expectations - among them the rapidly expanding Jesus sect (followers of ‘the way’) - a movement growing among the enslaved and low status people around the region.

So how to deal with the sudden shift in the story? The temple’s destruction came, of course, decades after Jesus’ brutal execution, so now not only did the writers need to continue to address the problem of Jesus’ death (as Paul had in his letters), but also the destruction of Jewish eschatological hopes.

The story found in this week’s lectionary gospel passage goes some way towards addressing this. Here we have the telling, in Luke’s gospel, of the time that Jesus visited the temple and foretold its destruction.

It’s a story or passage (pericope) that is found in all three of the ‘synoptic’ gospels, a fact that puts it in a specific category. There are between 230 and 250 pericopes that we can say fall into this category, and it’s one of the criteria used to determine how authentic a story is. “If all three evangelists include it,” many scholars reckon, “it might well be based on a story from the early days of the Jesus’ movement.” It probably came, in other words, from the oral tradition of early Christianity.

Even when a pericope has this gold standard ‘triple attestation’ though, the writers take particular approaches to their interpretation of events, and in that way the accounts begin to differ.

In this instance, the approach taken by the writer of ‘Luke’ diverges from that found in the books of Mark and Matthew in tone, structure, and in theological emphasis. What is, elsewhere, a scene of impending catastrophe becomes, in Luke’s telling, a source of comfort for an early Christian community grappling with multiple traumas.

While all three Synoptic Gospels recount Jesus’ dramatic prediction of the Jerusalem temple’s destruction and the challenging times ahead, it is Luke alone who reframes the narrative to speak directly to the pastoral needs of a Gentile-inclusive audience living in the shadow of Jerusalem’s ruin.

The earliest version of the story, found in the gospel according to Mark, is characteristically urgent and cosmic. That’s how the writer liked it - punchy, pacey and dramatic: the Raymond Chandler of the ancient world. The writer of ‘Matthew’ significantly ups the apocalyptic ante with moral warnings and judgment imagery, leaving the author of Luke, alone, to temper the tone.

We don’t get the talk of “birth pangs” here, and the cosmic signs that originate in Mark are delayed, in Luke’s telling, until later in the chapter. Instead we get a focus on political unrest, persecution, and the opportunity these present for testimony. Luke is keen to offer his readers some sense of, if not quite comfort, hope.

A question we have to ask of this, and of any text, is ‘who is it for?’ In this case the writer was communicating with ‘second generation’ Christians, at least one step removed from the earliest Jesus followers. They were Gentiles, in the most part at least, living in places like Antioch, and were forced to navigate a social and political reality that took in the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, a decade or more before hand.

To some extent they now faced social exclusion within their own communities - particularly challenging given that they were already socially excluded due to their low status. Early Christians were largely from the lower social ranks.

So Luke’s audience is not awaiting imminent judgment so much as it’s enduring the ongoing effects of imperial violence and intra-community conflict. This is a people dealing with trauma on a large scale.

So to these traumatised people Luke’s Jesus offers reassurance: “Do not be terrified… not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

And not only does Luke offer comfort, he also seeks to expose the temple for what it was - a site of imperial complicity. Luke’s slightly sniffy critique of its grandeur (“adorned with beautiful stones and gifts…”) echoes his broader theme of God siding with the lowly and downcast. Not for Luke the Magi with their trinkets and baubles, he’s with the shepherds in the fields.

Writing for this post-temple, gentile-inclusive audience of low status people enduring suffering at the hands of their own community, this is not just historical commentary but theological consolation. Divine presence isn’t defined by buildings built by the Herodians or other empire collaborators, but revealed in faithful endurance.

Luke’s narrative of the promise of divine presence and protection, even when things get sticky, recasts the suffering his community was going through as something profoundly meaningful. In contrast to Mark’s telling, here Luke has Jesus tell the disciples: “I will give you words and a wisdom,” emphasizing divine empowerment of those who suffer.

So here, in this story that appears in all three synoptic gospels, Luke re-narrates Jesus’ words to offer comfort, not induce panic. He writes to a traumatized church learning to live without the temple, without any recourse to political or economic power, and often without any kind of social acceptance. Through calm prophecy and the promise of divinely-enabled testimony, Luke’s Jesus is cast as a companion in suffering.

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Image: Comfort in a time of devastation. Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash