Pentecost 23C (Luke 21:5-19)

​Following the way of Jesus is to experience our world upside down. The world we are taught to interpret—the one structured by strength, dominance, and rivalry—is overturned in the gospel. In Luke 21:5–19, Jesus announces that even the most stable and sacred structures will fall: “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.” It is as if Jesus invites us to see not an apocalypse of ruin, but a revelation of truth—when what seemed solid and unquestionable is suddenly fragile, and what seemed marginal becomes enduring.

Following Jesus is not merely about believing differently; it is about seeing differently. The turning over of stones mirrors the turning over of our hearts and imaginations. It is the unsettling recognition that what we thought was faith may have been fear; what we assumed was loyalty may have been blindness. Such transformation inevitably disturbs relationships—“You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends.” To live in this new orientation is to walk through misunderstanding, to be seen as disloyal, even dangerous, because you no longer live by the logic of the world as it is, but as it shall be.

When I took Theo to his friend’s birthday party about a month ago, I watched How to Train Your Dragon—a movie that unexpectedly gave life to this gospel inversion. The young hero, Hiccup, grows up in a world that fears dragons. His father, Stoick, leads their Viking village in a centuries-long war against them. To be a good son, a good leader, is to hunt dragons without question. But Hiccup begins to see differently. When he looks into the eyes of an injured dragon he had trapped, he senses not a monster but a living, feeling being. The world, for Hiccup, turns upside down.

In one of the film’s pivotal moments, Stoick tells his son, “You are not my son.” To his father, Hiccup’s friendship with a dragon is a betrayal—an offense against the family’s honor and the memory of his mother, who was lost to a dragon’s attack. Yet it is precisely in this rupture—this painful breaking of inherited certainty—that a deeper truth emerges. Hiccup’s way of peace, seen first as weakness and treason, becomes the very path to save both the dragons and his people. The world that must collapse—the world of fear, battle, and vengeance—gives birth to a new one, where riding a dragon replaces killing it.

This is not far from the world Jesus envisions. The temple stones—symbols of religious certainty, social stability, and divine favor—must fall for the kingdom to rise. The path of faith no longer lies in defending what is sacred but in discerning what is real. Faith, then, is not about preserving walls but crossing distances; not about fighting enemies but recognizing them as kin. To follow Jesus, like Hiccup, is to imagine a life that contradicts the logic of survival and embraces instead the vocation of reconciliation.

We may not face fire-breathing dragons, but perhaps the fire we fear is the light that reveals our own illusions. The way of Jesus, as Hiccup learned in his own world, is not safe, not even necessarily welcomed. It is, however, the only way where true sight is possible—a way of love that turns the world upside down so that it can finally stand upright.