John is the most pedantic of gospel writers, and I don’t mean pedantic
in the usual, negative sense, but in the sense of wanting to teach us
something. He wants to make sure we get
it, so he’s always explaining what Jesus is doing and why Jesus is doing it. Here in this passage, when Jesus says
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” the religious
authorities—whom John, as always, calls simply “the Jews”—the religious
authorities are dumfounded, and rightly so.
Here he is, standing in the temple, and he says he’d build it back up in
three days? “We’ve been building this
temple for forty-six years,” they
say, “and will you raise it up in three days?” The religious authorities misunderstand, but
we don’t, because John spells it out for us: “He was speaking of the temple of
his body,” we’re told, just in case we don’t get it.
And, on the surface of things, anyway, it’s a prediction of his death:
according to John, the religious authorities would collude with the Romans and
destroy that temple of his body, and then three days later it would be raised
again. Pretty simple, eh? And John’s congregation, his audience, the
people to whom this gospel would have been read aloud, knew about this already,
they knew that this signified the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
And the question is: is that all it is?
Is it just a prediction of Jesus’ death, a little early foreshadowing of the passion that we
acknowledge at this time of year? There
is no passage like it in any of the other gospels, the closest reference to
something like it are the accusations before the high priests in Matthew, Mark
and Luke, accusing Jesus of threatening to destroy the temple and then build it
back up, but only in John do we hear Jesus say anything like that, and only in
John is it made explicitly clear that it’s his body he’s talking about.
Another thing that’s unique to John is that it’s coupled with the story
of the cleansing of the temple: its Passover—not the final Passover before his
death, as it is in the other accounts—but the first Passover, near
the beginning of his ministry, and he goes up to Jerusalem and enters the temple, as every
Jewish male is required to do at that time of year. And in the temple he finds people selling
cattle and sheep and doves, and he sees the money changers seated at their
table, and he makes a whip of cords, and drives out all of them from the
temple. And although it was probably not
at all like this, I imagine it like a stampede of calves and sheep and doves,
or a western round-up snaking through the streets of Jerusalem, and he spills
out the coins of the moneychangers and overturns their
tables.
And when Matthew, Mark and Luke tell this story, Jesus says “It is
written ‘My house shall be a house of prayer'; but you have made it a den of
robbers,” and the emphasis is clear: he contrast worship—prayer—with commerce,
making it a den of robbers. But here in John there is a different emphasis: he
doesn’t say anything about prayer or worship.
On the contrary, he says “Take these things out of here! Stop making my
Father's house a marketplace!” and so, it’s been preached from time
immemorial: God’s house is not a place
for buying and selling. Look at all the
bible versions, all the money that’s been made off of them over the years: the
woman’s bible, the men’s bible, the under 13 but over 12 bible. Then there’s all the merchandise, you’d call
them “tie ins” if you were promoting a movie.
Only instead of little Luke Skywalker or Obi Wan Kenobi action figures
there are “what would Jesus do” bracelets, fish car-decals with little crosses
for eyes, which always makes me think of a dead fish, and every kind of cross
you can imagine. My personal favorite of
the lot are the edible artifacts Pam and I saw when we visited a bible store in
Franklin Tennessee, rolls of candy called “Testa-mints,” and each of them had a
bible verse on it. We bought some and
ate them . . . and it was good.
And that’s a good
enough lesson to get out of Jesus’ overturning of the tables and driving out of
the money-changers, or at least it would be, if John hadn’t put Jesus’ saying
about destroying the temple and raising it up right next to it. And one of the cardinal rules of analysis of
the scripture is that stories are placed in a given order for a reason, so if
John put this story about mistaking Jesus’ body-talk for temple-talk—a story
that of the four gospels, only he tells—if he puts this story right next to one about cleansing that very
temple, then hmmmm . . . Maybe one story about
Jesus and the temple modifies the other?
Here’s another question for you: Jesus says—only here in John, where the
two stories are coupled—“Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!” So a fair question would be: if it’s a
marketplace, what were they selling? The
easy answer would be calves and sheep and doves, of course . . . and that’s why
there was money-changing going on, exchanging the money of foreign Jews—all in
town for Passover—so that they could buy the calves and sheep and doves. But why were they buying the animals in the first
place?
The answer is
simple: sacrifice. Sacrifice. During Passover, sacrifices at the temple
went on day and night. Thousands of
Jewish men—returned to Jerusalem to fulfill their Passover duty—waited in line
to sacrifice those calves and lambs and doves.
The Temple gutters—specially installed to channel blood out into a
neighboring valley—were overflowing, running swift and red. The council probably had to put on second and
third shifts of priests to handle all the sacrifices, there were so many. The money-changers and livestock-sellers were
all part of an intricate sacrificial system, laid out in the Torah, and Jesus
overturned their tables and drove it all out.
And so what Jesus was symbolically doing was—this is a sign, remember,
every bit as much as feeding the five-thousand—was destroying the Jewish
sacrificial system.
And so, back to the original question: if they
were a marketplace, what were they selling? They
were selling calves and doves and Judean coin, all right, but if it was all in
the service of the sacrificial system, what they were actually selling was propitiation. They were selling the means to purify
themselves, to make themselves clean and acceptable to the Lord. In other words, they were selling forgiveness. The Torah specified that if a Jew is unclean, if he or she is not right with God, they are
to offer bloody sacrifice to appease God.
Back in the old days it used to be human sacrifices, but in Jesus’ day
it had “evolved” to animal sacrifice.
When Jesus says “do not make my father’s house a marketplace” what he
means “don’t
use my father’s house to sell forgiveness.”
Now. Back to the second part of
our story: Jesus says “destroy this
temple and in three days I will raise it up,” the religious authorities think
he’s talking about the temple that he’s just thrown all the money-changers and
livestock out of, but John assures us that he was talking about the temple of
his body. But what if they were both
right? What if Jesus was talking of both
the temple and his body? Maybe that’s
what John is trying to telling us, placing these two stories back to back,
that his body and the temple are somehow intertwined.
But how could that be? Jesus says
it right out: he calls his body a temple, the religious authorities think he’s
talking about the temple, they mistake his body for the temple, and
suddenly it’s clear—that’s what it’s about.
Jesus cleanses the temple, he symbolically destroys the sacrificial
system, and what does he replace it with?
Himself. His body. The sacrificial system—the system that says
you take an unwilling animal or person or entity and sacrifice it to appease a
bloody god—is being replaced by the body of the Son of God.
So you can see why this might make some folks nervous. The sacrificial system was the font of all culture—the
entire ball of wax, the whole enchilada—for the Jewish people. It provided the focus of their worship, but
also the focus of their society: it was all built around that sacrificial
system centered around the temple. And
here Jesus was, about to replace it all, replace all of the apparatus that kept
them safe, indeed all of the mechanics that gave their lives meaning, with his
own fragile body. No wonder Caiaphas
said “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the
whole nation destroyed." Lamb of
God, indeed.
And that’s all well and good, you might say, and thank God that we don’t have
sacrifices up here on the podium, but what does it have to do with us? Well, critic,
philosopher and historian Rene Girard, argues that all worldly, human
culture is based on sacrifice. We can
see what he means by looking at a society like that of Jesus’ time, where there
was no middle class, just a tiny upper class and then everybody else, and the
labor of everybody else supported the lifestyles of that tiny little wealthy
ruling class. And if we back up and look
at today’s passage from a larger vantage-point, you can
see how that works in the case of the temple apparatus. The sacrifices that appeased their conception
of God were administered by a class of people—the priestly caste of the house
of Levi—who were well-off, compared to their fellow Jews. Over them were the high council of priests
and the high priest himself—at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, at least, it was
Caiaphas. It was a theocracy, or at
least it would have been had there not been the Roman occupiers, who
by-and-large left the religious apparatuses of their conquered peoples in
place, because they knew the power of religion to mollify the people.
The temple sacrifices not only placated their God but they
appeased the people themselves. If they
thought God was the ultimate author of everything, and they could buy him off
with their sacrifices, then it kept their eyes off their real
oppressors, their own ruling class who were bed with the Romans.
Thank God we don’t have a sacrificial economy! Thank the Lord that in our society, we don’t
have the wealth of the few built on the backs of the many who are poor . . .
Thank goodness that everybody is paid equitably, that all who work a full eight
hours a day are paid a living wage, where they can support their kids and pay
their light bills. Thank God that when
corporations go south their managers don’t sacrifice their workers by laying
off tens of thousands of them, rendering them unable to keep their houses and
put food on the table. Thank God that
when the economy collapses because of the greed of a few at the top that the poor and middle class are not scape-goated, that their money
is not funneled to the perpetrators as if it were a reward. Thank God we
don’t have a sacrificial economy!
Well. Jesus came to
exchange his body on the cross for the sacrificial systems of the world, to
absorb the their blows with his own self, and here at Lent we acknowledge that
fact. We acknowledge our complicity in
systems that marginalize people, in systems that sacrifice some for the comfort
of others. Walter Breuggemann once said
that the true philanthropists are the countless poor who make minimum wage,
work two jobs, so we can have cheap clothing and lattes. This Lent, I challenge you to consider your
place in the sacrificial systems of the world, and to prayerfully contemplate
what it means that Jesus absorbed the blows of that system with his own
being. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment