The Path of Perspective

A sermon on Matthew 24:1–14.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash.]

Today’s gospel is what biblical scholars call “apocalyptic literature.”

And it’s what I call anxiety-inducing.

I mean… Jesus’s disciples express their awe at a space constructed for God’s glory, and Jesus says “O, don’t be that impressed. This is all getting torn down.”

And once they process this and realize Jesus is actually talking about the end of the world and ask for a little more clarity, Jesus… goes a non-consoling direction.

He basically says, “yeah, you’re gonna need a solid sign of what to look for because a whole lot of people are going to try to gaslight you into believing that they are actually me coming back, but it will all be lies.

And also: war! Like, everywhere. And also famines and plagues.

But that’s just the beginning! It’s going to get personal too. You are going to be tortured. And killed. And, also, everyone is going to hate you, on an international scale.

So, some of you are going to give up and just join the side of betrayal and hate. And some of you are going to want a softer message, so you will follow the people who tell you what you want to hear. And some of you are going to just get mean… even if you stay faithful it will be about self-righteousness not love and that’s not what I’m about.

But… as long as you endure all that, it will be fine.”

On the chance that some of you might feeling a shade of the panic that flutters in my gut after hearing all of that, at a moment in history when “wars and rumors of wars” are not a conceptual problem, I want to invite you to join me in one of my favorite distress-tolerance skills.

This skill uses the five senses to pull a person out of anxiety spirals and into this present moment. So, we’ll start by naming 5 things you can see. Just shout them out.

Great. Now 4 things you can hear.

3 things you can touch.

2 things you can smell.

1 thing you can taste.

Thank you. What I just led you through is a validated grounding mechanism that works to calm rising panic by leveraging how our brains process information.

Put simply, our thoughts stimulate neural pathways in our brains, but our conscious mind cannot travel on multiple pathways at once, and ruminating or anxious thoughts activates a different part of our brain than sensory processing does.

So, when we tell our brain to focus on sensory inputs, it redirects our energy and attention to that less-emotion-based data processing, and away from spiraling fears.

Or, on an even more basic level, it’s a tool that literally shifts our mental perspective by changing the importance we give to different brain functions.

As a personal fan of mental health resources, I think this is just a good tool to have access to, but I shared it today because it is specifically relevant to today’s gospel… and not just because this reading seems designed to raise anxiety.

The relevance is about of where Jesus is sitting when he delivers his apocalyptic message. (Let me explain.)

Did you notice that the reading starts just as Jesus is coming out of the Temple and his disciples are trying to direct his attention to the massive, grandiose buildings that have them in a state of awe?

Jesus responds briefly with his prediction of the Temple’s destruction… but then there is a change of scene to the Mount of Olives.

And I feel certain that this physical shift is supposed to shift the way we read the story…. It is a literal change of perspective for Jesus and his disciples, and we are supposed to notice that.

You see, within the walls of Jerusalem, the Temple mount is on a mount, a point of elevation. You walk up to get there, making the huge stones in the foundation and the size of the building even more sensorily impressive.

But the Mount of Olives is located outside of the city.

It’s not a far walk, but you have to exit the city’s east gate, near the foot of the temple mount, pass down through the Kidron Valley, and then up another steep climb to the Mount of Olives, which overlooks the Temple from above.

And it’s not that the Temple is unimpressive from that lookout, but it’s just not the only thing you notice.

You see the Temple, but you also see the rest of the city, and the city walls, not to mention the peaks of the other mountains that surround and look down on Jerusalem, because the Temple is not the highest elevation in the area.

And removed from the crowds and bustle that are inescapable in the capital, the noise quiets, so you can hear birdsong, and feel the wind swirling through the valley and up the hill, and find space for your own thoughts.

And everything is just less overstimulating. The clashing smells of market spices, and urban waste, and too many people get left behind. And the air feels cleaner. And there’s expanse in which to breathe.

And your leg muscles may be protesting the journey (it is a legitimately steep climb up the Mount of Olives), but even in the ache you get the reminder of your body’s strength, it’s capacity to move you away from the center of the overwhelm to a place where you can get some perspective.

And it’s not until they get to that place of shifted perspective—where the sensory overload has been turned down, and they’ve reconnected with their bodies and have space and distance to process his words—that Jesus continues his teaching.

Jesus has a hard lesson to convey to those who are committed to following him.

He has to tell them that following him is not a silver bullet that will solve all their problems. In fact, it will do the opposite.

Because Jesus’s mission is to change the world—to disrupt the patterns of deception and violence that foster enmity, and confusion, and untold suffering.

But a world controlled by coercive force, and lies, and the abuse of power will not change willingly.

So, things will get worse before they get better, and because Jesus actually wants them to get better he can’t just counteract force with greater force. That would just continue the pattern.

Instead, he counteracts force… with self-giving love.

And for those in the middle of the chaos that sounds like a horrible idea, because fear is a powerful tool of control, and appealing lies are seductive, and when the world around us is echoing with hate and vitriol we just want to scream back.

Which is why we need a shifted perspective.

A perspective that reminds us that God’s love is what drew us in in the first place.

That we want to follow a way that is not just more of the same.

That we want to be part of changing the world so that violence, and abuse, and deception finally lose their control.

And the way we do that is by not letting them control us.

Jesus’s final warning to his disciples was much less apocalyptic than the rest (in the popular usage of that word), but it uncovers the heart of the issue:

“because of the increase in lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.”

That’s the ultimate danger. The danger that feels just theoretical, and maybe irrelevant, when we are surrounded by the overwhelm and just want everything to stop.

But the danger is that we will lose ourselves in that response. We will lose the love that grounds us, and gives us hope, and makes us people of the way of Jesus.

In his brief commentary on this week of the Palm Sunday Path,[1] Professor Matt Skinner asks the poignant question:

“What do we do when the stress of this world becomes too much to bear?”

And he answers from Jesus’s own words, “For some, loving others becomes too painful, too risky, or too costly.”

But then he asks us to shift our perspective… away from how we feel and toward who we are called to be: “What is the church’s role in the midst of all the chaos? That role is not to allow our love to cool, nor is it to withdraw and be concerned only about our own survival. It is, rather, to continue proclaiming the gospel in our words and deeds.”

This is what we are called to do when we confront the chaos of violence, and lies, and abuse of power in our reality.

When we feel overwhelmed, and feel tempted to shut down, and to stop caring about anyone outside our own circle because it’s all just too much.

We are called to intentionally shift our perspective… away from fear and toward the one thing we know that is ultimately more powerful than all the rest: Love.

Because the key issue is not about our circumstances. It is about who we are.

We are people of love. And when we hold onto that, we are saved.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Professor Matt Skinner, Walking the Palm Sunday Path in Lent, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching-series/walking-the-palm-sunday-path-in-lent-a-sermon-series-for-2026