March 15, 2009
(Third Sunday in Lent)
The Wrecking of the Temple
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Ezekiel 2:1-7 - Psalm 123 -
2 Corinthians 12:2-10 - Mark 6:1-6
(From
The Lectionary Page)
The French have an elegant term for the rocks, pottery shards, and driftwood that sit on the windowsills of my office: Objets trouve. Sounds so much better than “stuff I’ve found,” don’t you think? One objet in particular that I’m very fond of is an oblong piece of sedimentary rock, split in two like a layer cake. What lies within are the fossilized remains of an ancient fern that lived near the Great Lakes however many glaciers ago that was. The outlines of its stem and leaves are clearly etched and embedded in the rock, evidence of life passed into oblivion ages ago, a small monument to the endurance of the substance of death.
I've been thinking about that fossil all week long, as today's gospel passage has rumbled around in my brain. The so-called Cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem is one of only a handful of passages that appears in all four of the gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all place the event following Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. John, whose version we heard this morning, takes a different route. John places the event at the very beginning of his gospel and makes it clear that it transpired during the Feast of the Passover.
By the time of Jesus, Passover had become a pilgrimage festival. The people were in Jerusalem to worship in the Temple, and the Torah made clear that cattle, sheep and doves were to be used as burnt offerings. What you offered had everything to do with what you could afford, but what the Torah made clear was that the animal had to be completely unblemished. Now ask yourself, what were the odds of driving or schlepping your sacrificial animal from the hinterland to Jerusalem and having it arrive in perfect condition? Not terrific. So of course sacrificial livestock was sold on site. It was a way of empowering the people to worship; not that much different than the Church Pension Group selling prayer books and hymnals for use in the pews in Episcopal Churches. As for changing money, the temple tithes could only be paid in the Jewish coin. Why? Roman coins bore the images of the emperor, identified as a god, and therefore could not be used inside the Temple without violating the first Commandments we heard in our reading from Exodus. Besides, selling animals and changing money provided a livelihood for people who were (and this is important) good people. This kind of system had worked for centuries, ever since the Temple was rebuilt following the return from Exile in the 6th century BC. It continued to work even during Herod’s renovation begun years before Jesus was born. If someone were to ask a native of Jerusalem why the forecourt of the Temple looked like a marketplace during festivals, he or she would probably respond with seven very familiar words: "Because we've always done it that way."
So why the cleansing? And by the way, doesn’t that very phrase make it sound like Jesus was just tidying things up? Why do we not name it the way the devout Jews would surely have named it – the Wrecking of the Temple? What got Jesus so worked up? Some commentators suggest that it was the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the livestock sellers and money-changers. Could be. Jesus certainly criticized economic injustice on more than one occasion. But I suspect that it has more to do with what was embedded, if you will, in the bedrock of the people's hearts. The Passover, after all, celebrated God's victory over the status quo, where bondage had been transformed into freedom and the death that was slavery had been transformed into the life of the Covenant. Passover celebrated a God who acts. A living God who delights not in the burnt sacrifice itself but in what the sacrifice points to: hearts lain open to God and to the newness of life God each day offers. What got Jesus worked up was the misdirected energy of the people that had caused them to lose sight of what worship of God was supposed to be all about. What got Jesus worked up was the way in which the institution of the Temple had set in stone ways of worshiping God that had little or nothing to do with doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with God – the favoring of fossil remains, if you will, over life itself.
What got Jesus worked up was his understanding that God neither needed nor wanted sacrificial blood to be spilled. In the chronology of the 4th Gospel, Jesus will, in 3 years’ time, be crucified on the day in which the Passover lambs were ritually slaughtered in the Temple. Passover celebrated life triumphing over death, the Angel of Death passing over the homes of the Israelites who smeared the blood of the slain lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their homes. Life over death. The crucifixion of Jesus will bring the Wrecking of the Temple full circle. It will be as though Jesus will say, “You’re bound and determined to shed blood? To do violence in the name of God? Fine. Do violence to me. And let my death bring an end to the power of redemptive violence.”
The sacrificial practices of the Temple were part of the bedrock of faith, at least in Judah. In wrecking the temple, Jesus threw down a gauntlet and ensured that public opinion will move against him. More to the point in John’s gospel, it foreshadows the seismic movement that is to come. The imagery that the gospellers will use to describe the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus -- earthquakes, tombs being opened – are all ways of describing how newness and transformation lie at the heart of God’s salvific work.
We speak of the transformation power of Christ’s resurrection. What we underestimate sometimes is the shockwaves that radiate outward from that epicenter, that continue to radiate still. What things have we, as a people, enshrined as sacred that perhaps should be dismantled? What religious fervors of our own seem to be more about misdirected energy? What truly forms the bedrock of our own faith? Can our often-stony hearts withstand the power of Christ that seeks to split them open? What fossilized patterns within our own lives might be revealed?