Sermon: The Coming of God's Kingdom

Last week, I travelled on an early morning train down to London.  It was one of those wintry dawns we have had recently: thick mist hanging over frosty fields and clinging to rimed hedgerows; glimpses of a fitful sunrise reddening the encircling gloom. It was surreal to be hurtled along under a cloud cover at times only a score of feet above us, shrouding tree tops as if they were mountains.  And looming out of the mist, apparitions of the great churches that line the East Coast Main Line: York Minster, St George’s Doncaster, Newark, Grantham, Peterborough. 

These churches were built as if to last for ever, yet in this eerie, unsettling light, they seemed to be insubstantial, evanescent, dissolving into air. Like Prospero’s vision at the end of The Tempest, you could imagine that they were but the stuff dreams are made on.  I thought, not for the first time, about how fleeting are even the most permanent monuments of human civilisation. On the recent Friends’ pilgrimage to Burgundy, we stood at the ruins of the once vast abbey at Cluny and pondered how the grandest Romanesque church in the world could be reduced to so little.  We read there the words of Jesus that stand as the introduction to this morning’s gospel.  The disciples are admiring the splendour of Herod’s temple: ‘Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’  And Jesus says to them: ‘Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another: all will be thrown down’.

It’s as a consequence of this alarming prediction that they question him further: ‘Lord, when will these things be, and what will be the signs of the end?’  The warning of this ‘little apocalypse’ is clear: be ready, for you do not know the day or the hour’.  This extended tract of Jesus’ teaching in the 13th chapter of St Mark’s Gospel is held by some to be the core of this tense, edgy gospel.  But what occasions this dark and difficult passage is, let me remind you, a question about a building. Even the temple, says Jesus, will not last forever. And when you visit Jerusalem and place your hands in the crevices of the western wall which is all that is left of he temple, and pray, you cannot help being reminded that man’s grandest designs are subject to the same law as everything else: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

In Advent, the church traditionally reflects on the four last things: death, judgment, hell and heaven.  It is difficult to do this when the Christmas lights are on in the market square and we are subjected to ‘Away in a Manger’ in every store and shopping mall.  Yet Christianity is about coming to terms with the facts of our human condition, and in Advent we should not flinch from doing so.  But mortality is a fact not only of our personal human lives but also of our institutions. And that includes cathedrals.  So what does it mean for us here at Durham that one day, inevitably, but hopefully not soon, not one stone of this great building will be left standing upon another?  I think that the monks who put up this cathedral 900 years ago knew that while they built as if forever, it was not forever. They built for God and his kingdom; they knew from the rule they followed that his kingdom was not of this world.  In this, it stood in sharp contrast to the earthly kingdom to whose ruthless power this cathedral was also a monument: the Norman conquerors.  Like Herod’s temple, like the cathedral in Williams Golding’s novel The Spire, even the buildings that stand most powerfully for spiritual aspiration can also represent ambition, power and hubris. 

I think this ambivalence is good for us.  Listen to the voice of the New Testament. ‘The things that are seen are transient; the things that are unseen are eternal.’  ‘We have here no abiding city, but we seek that which is to come.’  In today’s passage from St Mark, we are faced with the stark realisation of how provisional everything is: our possessions, our relationships, our institutions, our achievements, our lives. All this, says the apocalyptic Jesus, will be swept away at the coming of God that will wind up history and bring in the reign of his kingdom.  And even if we step back from the imagery and ascribe it, as we must, to the feverish, end-of-the-world milieu in which 1st century Christians believed they were living in, we can’t escape the vividness of Jesus’s teaching, its urgent summons to look afresh at things and consider what we rate as truly important in this life. 

I entertained a group of freshers from St John’s College here last week.  We stood by St Cuthbert’s tomb, and I quoted from this challenging, disturbing chapter of St Mark.  I said it was very good for deans in marvellous places like this to be reminded every so often that there will come a time when not one stone will be left standing upon another.  I pray that you and I never see it.  And yet, doesn’t that prayer betray the possibility that I might love these stones too much, the symbol rather than what it points to, the creature rather than the creator?  A Prayer Book collect prays for the grace to love thee above all things, if we are to obtain the promises that exceed more than we can desire.  It’s especially necessary to pray that prayer when so much beauty surrounds us, and when the thought of being parted from it is almost too much to bear.

The coming of God’s kingdom exposes to his just yet loving scrutiny all our fears and longings. Advent is our opportunity to cultivate what the gospel calls ‘purity of heart’.  This means willing the one thing necessary for our happiness, for the salvation of our race, for the healing of our world.  That one thing is God’s kingdom. It is the only hope we have.  If we are true to the One who is not only in all things but above and beyond all things, then we shall have understood our great building aright, and shall cherish our stones all the more because of him for whose glory and kingdom they, and we, exist.  And if one day tower and temple fall to dust, it is to make way for something greater, when death and hell have fled before the presence of Light and Love, and the holy city, the new Jerusalem has come, of which it is foretold: ‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the almighty and the Lamb.  And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light.’