The Grand Entry (Mark 11:1 - 11)

I am old, though not so much in body as in spirit . . . I mean that literally, in spirit, en pneuma, as the Greeks say, for that is what I am, a spirit long plying the air of Galilee. I could be anywhere—again, literally—but I continue “here,” where my sojourn in space-time begins and ends . . . I know that you cannot hear the quotes around “here,” but they are there, because I am outside space-time, where there is no here or there, no has-been or will-be, but somehow, though I have no problem with the no-time thing, I’m anchored—by what? Desire? Unmet obligation?—to the place of my embodiment. Although others disagree, I like to think it is a grace of the divine, a favor from God to comfort us as we continue our voyage through the infinite.

At any rate, there is no time—no space, either—and so I see it all bunched together, one action, one scene, really, superimposed “on top” of one another, and I hope you felt the quotes around “on top” as well. And I have to hand it to ol’ Einstein, he had it right, everything that ever happened happens “simultaneously,” and that’s why I think it’s a grace of God that I retain some sense of the space-time continuum . . . and memory—actually the now—is overwhelming, and language is anchored in space-time, sentences have a beginning and an end, so there’s no way I can use them to describe how it really is, so I’ll just use what you call the “present tense”—again with the quotes—to describe our last journey with the master.

And that day I’m thinking that there are one too many Bethanys as we trudge up the Wadi out of Jericho. Our trip begins in Bethany—the one on the Jordan—and passes through Bethany, the one just two miles from Jerusalem, and Bethphage of course, and I’m thinking all this at least in part to keep my mind off my aching bones. Of course I am getting to be an old man, I’m over thirty after all, and though my arms are strong—all those fishing nets, you understand—my legs, not so much: I’m here to tell you that sitting in boats does nothing for the quads. So I struggle a lot the last couple of days, as we first climb up out of the Jordan valley from Bethany number one to Jericho perched above the river’s fertile course. For those of you along the space-time continuum, in it’s on the West Bank, and you know that that means . . .

Anyway, if the climb out of the valley is brutal, at least it’s short, but the one now, between Jericho and Bethany number two, and on to Bethphage and Jerusalem, is eleven miles of pure, trudging torture up the Wadi Qilt—in your time, there’s a highway going up, takes about fifteen minutes—trudging up the Wadi Qilt, sweat adheres the clothes to our bodies, dust clogs our pores, feet bleed from sandal-strap blisters, and have you ever been up the Wadi? There’s no shade or water or anything, just rocks and soil, so it’s a distinct relief to stop in the Bethany home of the two sisters, friends of the master, where I sink down into the shade of a date-palm and fall immediately to sleep—one of the talents I cultivate on the boats, sleeping any “where” any “time.”

And in my sleep, I dream about the few days before: the master’s final, devastating prediction that we go to Jerusalem to meet his horrible death. Those idiot Zebedee brothers jockeying for position before the body’s even a body, much less cold. Jesus’ final healing: giving Bartimaeus sight, as if to say that none of us students can see now but we will, in time. Yes, I’m sad to say, at that “time,” it’s all about us.

My sleep—and dreaming—are short-lived, because there’s Jesus, standing patiently beside me in the sun, who knows how long he’s there, and he says to me “Go into the village ahead of you, and just inside the gate, you’ll find a colt that’s never been ridden. Bring it here.” And I raise my hand to protest “but what if he’s . . .” and the master knows what I’m going to say—he does that a lot—and says “If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ tell ‘em ‘The Lord needs it and he’ll send it right back.’ ” So we go, one of the Zebedees and I, and there’s the colt, and here’s some by-standers who ask us “what in God’s name are you doing?” And we say “the Lord needs it; we’ll bring it back straightaway,” and they let us take it. In other words, it’s just as Jesus predicted. And I think, not for the first time, “how does he do that,” although quote-now-unquote I know it’s all about space-time—or his being outside of it, that is, or one foot in and one foot out, whatever . . . it’s all about his perceiving everything all scrunched together.

Anyway, we get the thing done, and bring the colt back, and we throw our cloaks on it—by now, it’s obvious he’s going to ride it—and I think “If it’s gonna be a donkey, instead of a white stallion or unicorn or something, at least it could have been an adult donkey . . .” I know, I know, it’s silly, right? His kingdom is outside space-time . . . But at that time—at that point in space-time, that is—I am just as clueless as everybody else. And up on the baby donkey he goes—is there anything less kingly than that?—up on the donkey he goes, and we head into Jerusalem, his feet almost dragging on the ground, and I and the others are mortally embarrassed, but our shame turns to amazement as everybody along the way—and there are a boat-load of there for the holiday—everyone along the way seems to know who he is, his fame has apparently preceded him, they’re throwing their own cloaks down in homage, spreading leafy branches they’d cut from nearby fields—I’m glad I’m not a local farmer—and they’re shouting out “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” And a shiver runs up my spine, because its from that Psalm—Psalm 118, as your Bibles number it—complete with branches thrown on his path. Goosebumps rise on my arms runs because the people know it, they have made the same connection we disciples have, and they’re applying that old Psalm about the coming of the Davidic king in Glory to Jesus of Nazareth, making it a fulfillment of prophecy, even though in the end, it’s both less than that and more than that, all at once.

We arrive at the Temple, and Jesus steps gravely down from the donkey as if from the finest steed on earth, whispers in the little animal’s ear, and it trots off toward home as if it’s just another day at work. We proceed into the Temple grounds, where Jesus looks around, taking everything in as if he’s the world’s greatest tourist, or maybe a landlord checking up on his property, and sorrow is etched on his features, and I get the sense he’s somehow saying goodbye . . . It’s grown dark by the time we leave the Temple, the torch-lights of the city flicker in the night, and bats swoop through the crowds of insects attracted by them, and the brutal heat has grown just a tad cooler. The crowds have dispersed, grown restless waiting for their hero to leave the Temple grounds, and we leave the city on foot, quietly, returning to Bethany and the sisters’ extravagant hospitality. Anointing with nard, indeed.

And I know what happens next—I’m there, remember— but at the time, of course, I didn’t, even though Jesus had  warned us, just days before. But our confidence in a glorious ending blinded us or, I don’t know, maybe we knew deep down that it was true, but suppressed it, as Sigmund Freud says, because we just couldn’t face it. We just couldn’t bear to see our excitement turn to dust and our hope to ashes. Who would? Amen.

The Hour (John 12:20 -33)

      Have you ever just felt it was time?  That the moment had come?  That whatever you’d been waiting for, or whatever you had to do, its time had arrived?  That’s happened to me before . . . when I began thinking seriously about seminary, Pam and Mike and I went to one of Columbia Seminary’s Inquirer weekends, where they clean up the campus, trot out their best-looking students and put on a dog-and-pony show, and we were duly impressed and all, but when we came back, we’d decided that we’d have to postpone it indefinitely, that we weren’t in a position to do it right away . . . and then, that Summer, I went to Africa, and everything changed, and when I came back, I knew that it was time, that we should go sooner, rather than later . . . and looking back on it, I can see the things that propelled us forward, though it was harder at that time . . .

      Jesus had a keen sense of the moment, a keen sense of when it was time . . . back at the wedding at Cana, when his mama came to him and told him “They have no wine,” Jesus said “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?  My hour has not yet come” . . . and Mary – I imagine with a heavy sigh – said “Do whatever he tells you.”  And the hands of people plotting against him were stayed twice because, as John tells us, his hour—his Kairos, his time—had not yet arrived.  But now, Jesus can see the writing on the wall, he knows that it’s time, that in his words “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” and as usual, the disciples didn’t have a clue, but looking back on it, we can see what must have prompted him . . . things were closing in:  the temple authorities were planning to kill him and just ten verses ago, they’d planned to put poor old Lazarus to death because he’d been raised from the dead by Jesus.  At the same time, increasingly large numbers of people were coming to him, and we know it wasn’t supposed to happen that way, that his glorification wasn’t until after the cross, that it didn’t mean earthly crowds following him around and praising him – not just yet, anyway.  Even the Pharisees were aware of it – they’d iust said they could do nothing because “the whole world has gone after him.”  And as if to prove them right, along come some Greeks – they represent the nations, those who are other-than-Jewish – some Greeks come to worship at Passover, and they ask to see him.  They’re not satisfied with just the signs, or hearing about him – they want to experience the man himself.  And the coming of the Greeks, the flocking of the nations to him is the final sign that things are coming to a head, and he tells them the hour has come.

      Last week we read about Jesus “being lifted up” – as in on a cross – and exalted, and we said a key to the whole thing, at least here in John, is people seeing for themselves the word of God, and even though the disciples didn’t understand the double meaning of being lifted up and displayed like the bronze serpengt, we do . . . and we know that Jesus’ glorification is a double-edged sword, that for him it entailed being nailed to a cross and suffocating to death . . . and he goes on to explain it with agricultural language – “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  Although we know different, the ancients believed that a planted seed actually dies before it germinates, so what he’s saying is that unless a seed is planted, unless it dies, it will not bear fruit.  And of course, he’s talking about his own death, which he now knows is eminent.

      But what does he mean by “fruit?”  Carrying the metaphor further, a seed produces a tree or a grapevine, which produces generation after generation of fruit . . . and the fruit in each generation are connected to every other fruit by branches, via their connection to the central stalk or trunk . . . and later on in John, Jesus likens himself to that central stalk, and so the picture of what Jesus’ death produces is a tree, or a vine, bearing fruit, with Christ at the center of it all . . . and notice that fruit on a tree are not independent, all are connected to each other through the stalk, all are connected through Christ.  Notice that this is a picture of the church, not individual salvation.  What Jesus will produce by his glorification – by his lifting-up/exaltation – is the church.  And we in the church are like the individual fruit – we are in relationship one with another, in communion with one another, and we’re all held together by Christ.

      But what is the mode of operation of this community?  How are they to function in this arrangement?  How are Christians to live in a community centered on Christ?  Well, the first hint is in Jesus’ next line, that those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . . here the Greek word for life is psyche – and does that ring a bell?  It means more than just physical life, it means “self” or “soul” or “being,” and so participation in this connected community of Christians entails not loving yourself, not being self-centered, or psyche-centered . . . and it makes sense, doesn’t it?  How can our lives be centered in Christ if they are centered upon ourselves?  How can we be Christ-centered if we are George-centered or Kate-centered or Rick-centered?  And those who would serve Christ, and not the self, must needs follow Christ, and they will be with him wherever he goes . . . they will be with him eternally . . . and God will honor them . . .

      And so the promise of Christ is the promise of relationship with Christ and through Christ—who after all, is the glue, the divine core of all creation—the entire created—and uncreated—realm.  And it’s no less a relationship with our fellow Christians, our fellow fruit on the branches of the Christ-tree. . . we are caught up together in the eternal, Trinitarian dance of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Creator, the Redeemer and the One Who Comforts and empowers, weaving and bobbing in a resurrection two-step, in the intricate romp of life . . . but there is pain there as well, there is pain and grief and heartache . . . for loss is our constant companion – and is it God’s as well?  Surely Jesus felt it, we hear his pain in the Garden – take this cup, father – and right here in our passage as well . . . his soul, his psyche is troubled . . . “shall I say:  Father, save me from this hour?”  Save me from the agony to come?  But no, he says, no it is for this hour that I have come . . . and acknowledging the necessity, he cries out to heaven: “Father, glorify your name.”  Immediately, there is booming, crashing . . . and the people say that it’s thunder, or an angel, but Jesus knows better . . . Jesus knows that it’s God, affirming God’s will . . . I will glorify my name, says the thunder, and Jesus’ knows it’s a death-knell.

      From the death of Jesus, comes the life of the church, the life of Christians everywhere, and this tension, this sublime paradox of life from death, from pain and suffering, is at the center of the Christian walk, and perhaps all of human existence, as well . . . and we’ve all been there, we’ve all felt so low, so depressed that no matter what we did, no matter how we acted, we couldn’t pull out of it.  T.S. Elliot called these times the “lesser deaths”; theologian Teilhard de Chardin called them “diminishments.”  Sometimes we’re so down it’s almost physically painful, and our inclination is to keep ourselves busy, to frantically get involved with something, to get to work, to take our minds off it . . . but that just prolongs the pain, and it sneaks up on little cat’s feet and smacks us with claws extended, full in the face . . .

      Little deaths almost always involve loss – loss of a loved one, loss of face, loss of our own sense of self, of who we are . . . the ancients tell a story of a mother whose little boy dies, and she is wild with grief, just inconsolable with it, and all her friends try to help her, they try to comfort her, but she tells them that unless her son is brought back to life, she cannot be consoled.  So she goes to the doctor, but he can’t help, and she goes to the village elder, but she sends her away, and finally she comes upon the hut of an old monk, living deep in the forest, and she asks him if he can bring her son back to life, and he says “Certainly,” and she cries out “What do I have to do?” and the monk says “Go back to the village, and bring me a cup of milk from a family that has never known suffering.”  And she thinks of all her happy neighbors – certainly much happier than she – and thinks “This ought to be easy,” but as she goes from house to house she hears tales of grief and sorrow from even the liveliest families, she hears story after story of pain and heartache. No matter how full of life they seem, it has not always been that way.  And so she goes back to the Monk and he asks her “Could you not find one family without suffering to give you a glass of milk?”  “No,” she says “and now I understand that there’s no life without suffering, and no suffering that cannot be overcome.”

      Our bright and shiny culture teaches us to avoid pain, it tells us that suffering is altogether bad, and you should avoid it at all costs, and there’s plenty of products out there to help us in this effort, to help those who can afford it, anyway . . . and if suffering should come, doggone it, you just go see your favorite doctor and he’ll give you something that’ll ease that pain, and if he won’t, there’ll be someone who will, who’ll take care of it for you.  But suffering is woven into the fabric of life . . . we can no more avoid the little deaths than we can our final death.  And I think that it’s up to us how we respond, what we make of it.  We’ve all known people who’ve been eaten up inside . . . they seem to collapse in on themselves.  We try to comfort, we use words like “I know how you feel” or “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” but it doesn’t help, and they become a shell of their former selves, their former psyches.  People recover in their own times, or sometimes not at all.

      But the Jesus-story is emblematic of the universal, because from his death came life.  From his story came the church, and the eternal connection of its members one with another, held together by the cosmic Christ.  And Christ’s story is the seminal story, the basic story, maybe the basic story of creation . . . it’s etched in the seasons, in the following of day from night, day from night.  And it’s through this basic story, and through our realization of Christ at the center of it all, that we can begin to deal with all the little deaths, all the heartache and pain, that lead up to that final day.  Paul called it hope, and just as we have hope of our final resurrection, we can have hope that from our sufferings, new life can spring.  All we have to do is keep our eyes on the prize, keep our eyes on Christ.

      Now, I know that this sounds like a load of pious clap-trap, like “suffer the pains and sorrows of this vale of tears, in hopes of eternal life by-and-by” . . .  and while that’s true, we can learn to see the life from our little deaths a bit sooner than that . . . we can learn to listen for Christ, to listen to Christ who is, after all, in everything.  And although there are many ways of putting it, I like the way St. Benedict framed it almost fifteen-hundred years ago.  It’s embedded in his whole philosophy, but best seen in the three Benedictine vows.  The vows of stability, obedience, and change of life . . . we are to remain in our grief, to own it, not avoid it, but at the same time listen – which is the basic meaning of obedience – to the voice of God in everything around us.  We’re to listen to the whisper in the trees . . . life . . . life . . . life, and the babble of our friends and neighbors, who are, after all, Christ to us, and by-and-by we’ll learn the way out, the way of life, what form new life is to take . . . and then, we’re to let God move us there, be open to the change in our lives, the new life in whatever form it is presented.

      What form this new life takes varies with each of us, and with the particular form of diminishment we experience – Christ, after all, loves us as individuals.  Whenever I do something truly stupid – it happens a lot – I have a tendency to brood over it, to wrestle with it, to be depressed over it, sometimes for days.  But if I can manage to keep open to Christ, he will show me the way of life.  Many times, it’s a life-lesson, something I have to take to heart, to learn.  In the case of grief over a lost loved one, new life may simply be a dawning acceptance, an accommodation, literally a new life without the deceased.

Whatever the case, whatever the circumstance, Jesus has shown us the way, he has demonstrated it in his life, and in his death, and in his coming resurrection.   He has shown us the way of life, and fashioned for us a new creation . . . because from his death comes the Church, the body of Christ on earth, and the connection of all believers one to another, and to Christ our redeemer through all eternity.  Amen.

The Son of Man Must Be What? (Numbers 21:4 - 9, John 2:14 - 22)

For those of you who don’t know, or have forgotten, or nodded off the last time—it can be a little boring—the lectionary is a list of four scriptures suggested for reading each Sunday. It goes on a three-year cycle, with one gospel the focus for each year, and if you’re thinking “wait a minute . . . I thought there were four gospels” you’d be right, there are four, but only three years, so we squeeze John in around the edges, because nobody knows what to do with John anyway, and Lent is one of those times. And not only is today’s second reading from John, but parts of it are in the lectionary twice, it’s so important, and the reason is the 16th verse, known to most people as John 3:16 which, for our more evangelical brothers and sisters, sums up the good news in one pithy saying: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. Note the begotten and believeth and whosoever . . . I, like Christians of a certain, uh, age, best remember the King James translation.

The reason a lot of folks know this verse even if they don’t know any others is because they’ve been beaten about the head and neck with it for years, again by some of our more evangelical sisters and brothers, as if by itself it could effect the salvation of which it speaks. Usually what it effects is annoyance at seeing it on billboards and in the end-zone at ball games and—this is my favorite—along the sides of U.S. highways like Burma Shave ads. For God—fencepost, telephone pole, fencepost—so loved—fencepost, driveway, fencepost—the world—dirt road, fenceposts, fencepost . . .

Ok, so you have to be a certain age to even remember the Burma Shave signs, but you get the picture . . . it’s certainly the most famous single verse in the New Testament, if not the whole Bible, and it’s a shame that it gets taken out of context so consistently. You remember context, don’t you? It’s that thing that helps determine meaning. And the context for John 3:16 goes something like this: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” And we get the lifting up part: it refers to Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross, which we remember at this time of year, but Jesus could have said “just as I lift up this stone here” or “just as Peter lifted up his toast at breakfast this morning” . . . instead he used some obscure episode from Numbers that Sharon just read to us.

And the first thing to notice about that is that it’s a bronze serpent that’ Moses nails up, not a flesh-and-blood one, wouldn’t want to get PETA after us, and he hangs it on a pole, and whoever looks upon it lives instead of dies of snake-bite. And the second thing to notice is that “poisonous serpent” is not a literal translation of what went after the Israelites. The Hebrew word is actually fiery serpent or “seraph,” which is found in other parts of the Old Testament. My favorite one is from Isaiah, where a bunch of seraphim (seraphim is the plural of seraph) are flapping around the Temple, and Isaiah describes them as having three pairs of wings: one pair covering their faces, one pair flying and one pair covering their, uh, “feet,” a Hebrew euphemism for “genitals.” Anyway, these flying snakes swoop down on Isaiah and brand him on the lips, thus imparting God’s word into his mouth.

And besides proven g that snake-on-a-pole is not the weirdest story involving seraphim in the Bible, what the Isaiah passage shows is that these critters tended to be associated with God’s word, and in Numbers that word is “judgement.” It seems Israelites are prone to murmuring, this is just the latest example in Numbers, it’s happened four times before, but this time they murmur against both Moses and God, which is apparently the last straw. And what they’re murmuring is “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” I guess it’s so bad they don’t know whether they have food or not.

Be that as it may, all the griping represents something that ticks God off more than anything else in the Bible: a lack of faith. I can just hear God now, saying “”Geez . . . I made you my people, brought you out of bondage to the Pharaoh, gave you my law, what do you want from me? When have I ever let you down?” And since in the Old Testament, our God is not only an awesome God but an irritable one as well, he dispatches those flying snakes.

And in the New Testament, lack of faith is arguably the main concern of Jesus, God’s anointed one, as well, so there’s definitely a parallel here in John to that strange story, and it fits perfectly with John’s theology of Christ as the Word. Just as the seraphim were the word of God to Isaiah and Moses, Jesus is the word of God here in John. But we have to be really careful here: as I stressed at the outset, what Moses nailed to a tree was not a living creature, it was made of bronze, so it was not a sacrifice , so I’m sorry sacrificial atonement fans, that’s not what John is going for. He doesn’t liken the crucifixion to snake-on-a-stick because it’s a sacrifice.

But if that’s not it, then what is? Why, other than the fact that something is lifted up, is this an apt metaphor for Jesus being crucified? Well . . . what else is being lifted up besides the bronze snake? What does it represent? We’ve said that the fiery seraphs/poisonous snakes represent God’s word, in this case it’s a word of judgement. The people are just not showing any faith, they’re faithless, so God sends a word of judgement, and what is the judgement? Death. Every time a person is bitten by a snake, they die. And Moses cries out to God, much as he did when they were in bondage to Pharaoh, God relents, and gives them a way out.

And what is that way out? Well, it’s to hang that word from God, that word that is death, up where everyone can see, and anyone who looks upon death will, paradoxically, live. And right here we have a meaning of the story, a possible reason that John found it such an apt metaphor. When the Romans hang Jesus on the cross, they hang the Word of God, they hang the judgement of God, the judgement which is death. And Jesus says “whoever believes in him”—whoever sees, whoever accepts this crucified Word, this judgement made flesh— will not die.

Whoever accepts the judgement of God, whoever accepts the death sentence—as Jesus did—will be saved. Whoever acknowledges their complicity, their faithless disregard for God, will have eternal life. And that life, especially here in John, begins not after we die, it’s not pie in the sky, it begins right here, the moment that one believes in that judgement, accepts that one is complicit in all the woes of the world.

But wait . . . there’s more! In John’s theology, Jesus is not only the Word made flesh, but light as well . . . the light that was coming into the world. And do you hide that light under a bushel basket? No! You put it up where everybody can see, where it can illuminate the whole world, shining into the darkest corners.

So for John—who’s the only one to relate the story of Jesus comparing his own death to snake-on-a-pole—the crucifixion is not about Jesus being a sacrifice, nor is it about him being a substitute for us, or paying some price we owe. It’s to lay bare, to put on display, the end-product of human faithlessness, the inevitable result of the mess we’ve made of our lives and culture, and that end-product is death.

And we can see that there’s a certain psychological sophistication at work here . . . we’ve all heard stories of—and maybe even experienced—looking death in the eyes, how it can be liberating, how it can put things in perspective . . . once you’ve accepted death as inevitable, once you’ve maybe even had a brush with it, it can be liberating, there’s not a lot else that can terrify you.

But more important, I think, than what it is is what it isn’t: In John’s theology, Jesus’ death is not a sacrifice. To John, God is not a vengeful God, who demands human sacrifice to calm himself down. God is not some Aztec deity, as theologian James Allison puts it, thirsting for blood appeasement. God is a god of enlightenment, not darkness, a God of relenting, of second chances. No matter what the crucifixion is, no matter how atonement works—and there are as many theories as there are theorists—it’s not sacrificial, God did not send his only begotten son as a sacrifice on the altar of our sin. Amen.

Money-changer Blues (John 2:13 - 22)

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.