Some Thoughts on this 3rd Sunday of Lent, March 7, 2021.
Today’s Gospel [John 2:13-25] account of an angry Jesus at war with the Temple’s money-changers is a familiar one. It appears in some form in all 4 Gospels and its imagery has had influence far beyond its originally religious significance. Some 88 years ago, on March 4, 1933, in the depths of the 20th-century's Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated President of the United States. Everybody has heard his famous line about the only thing we have to fear. That same inaugural address also included the following words:
“Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
Given the history of the past forty years, it seems FDR may have spoken too soon, may have spoken too confidently about a future from which the money changers still seem never to get completely evicted. But, from FDR until about forty years ago there was some ground for real hope on that score. And, when FDR said those words, in an era so much more religiously literate than our own, he could at least be confident that almost everyone would recognize his reference to the story told in today’s Gospel.
The “cleansing of the Temple,” as it is often called, was obviously a provocative act on Jesus’ part. It has been suggested that, together with Jesus’ Messiah-style entry into Jerusalem, it may have been the provocation precipitating his arrest and execution. Apparently, Jesus thought the Temple was something not just worth fighting over, but worth dying for, which would certainly add significance to our retelling it during Lent.
The original Jerusalem Temple, built by King Solomon and completed around 960 BC, had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586. A reconstructed second Temple was completed in 515 BC and lasted until its destruction by the Romans in 70 AD, after which Judaism has had to adapt and make do without any Temple. But, back in Jesus' time, around 20 BC, King Herod the Great had begun a grandiose renovation of the Temple Mount, making the Jerusalem Temple one of the most impressive shrines in the ancient world. Herod was a great builder. He built palaces and pagan temples for his Gentile subjects, but his grandest project was the renovation of the Jewish Temple. It was the ultimate “stimulus package,” one of the largest construction projects of its time.
In the process, however, along beauty and grandeur, some of the classical, pagan model of a temple as a cultural, commercial, and social center also seemed to creep in from the surrounding secular culture. Jesus’ strong reaction to the various activities taking place in the Temple precincts may have reflected his identification with more traditional Jewish notions, which got him into trouble with the Temple’s priests (known at that time for their more accommodating approach to secular society).
So, in effect, what Jesus was fighting for in the Temple was Israel’s core national value – faithfulness to God alone, God who had made Israel a nation and given it his Law, transforming a semi-nomadic mob of ex-slaves into an actual nation. The exodus generation, Israel's founding generation, so to speak, had wandered about in the desert, desperately in need of direction, with only the vaguest idea of where they were headed. Along the way, however, God gave them the road-map they required to become a serious society, a functioning nation – the roadmap which Jewish tradition refers to as God’s “10 Words” and which we commonly call his “10 commandments.”
Fond as we are of biblical imagery and analogies, we Americans have long talked that way also about our Constitution, our founding-era roadmap out of our post-revolutionary chaos, likewise charting a path to becoming a serious society, a functioning nation. Like all analogies, it has its limits, but it's only a problem when we make the monumental mistake of blurring the difference between God's covenant with Israel and America's covenant with itself, mistaking (as some have done) our very human Constitution for some sort of divine revelation.
The Old Testament Torah, which we traditionally translate as “the Law,” was the concrete expression of God’s gift of himself to his people. The 10 Commandments [Exodus 20:1-17] constitute the core of that Law. The key to understanding the 10 Commandments is contained in how God identifies himself in the very 1st commandment: I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me. The Lord, who has shown himself to be God by liberating his people from slavery, is himself the rationale for this (and every subsequent) commandment.
The 10 commandments spell out in daily life the consequences of becoming God’s people. Living morally is our response to God’s covenant with us, our cooperation with the plan God has been pursuing through all of human history – from creation to Christ, from Christmas to the end. In our fidelity to the commandments in moral lives, we reflect our gratitude to God and our commitment to remain faithful for the long haul.
According to an ancient legend, at Mount Sinai God made the wombs of all of Israel’s women as clear as glass – so that all future generations could see for themselves what was happening and personally commit to the covenant. I suppose that’s poor biology, but it’s a great image! It makes the all-important point that the commandments are addressed to each of us individually, which is why they are phrased in the singular. (Those of us above a certain age will remember having learned them in the old singular form – “thou shalt … thou shalt not.”). We are all each responsible to respond to God with what we do and the way we live.
As our road-map through the desert of daily life, the 10 Commandments call us over and over to commitment and fidelity:
- commitment and fidelity, first of all, to God himself, who has revealed himself to us, in his world, and in his word, and above us in Jesus his Son;
- commitment and fidelity to God’s world, which God has entrusted to us and which we have, both individually and collectively, managed to make such a mess of and done so much damage to;
- commitment and fidelity to one another, our fellow-wanderers in God’s world, whom we have been commanded both to care about and to care for, whether we like it or not and whether we like each other or not, both when war or economic hardships or a world-wide pandemic make us more conscious of our shared danger and our common need, and in times of peace and prosperity, when wealth, health, and safety tempt us to go it alone and leave others behind;
- and commitment and fidelity, finally, to God’s struggling but holy Church, by being part of which we are being empowered to live as God’s people in this world.
None of this comes automatically, and fidelity doesn’t come easily or cheaply – not for the folks at Mount Sinai (as so many subsequent episodes in Exodus illustrate) and not for anyone else either. But the commandments teach us that the fast food of individual fulfillment and personal autonomy just can’t compare with dining with one another together in God’s kingdom.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength [1 Corinthians 1:22-25]. Jesus saw that – despite the blinding glare of the grandeur and riches of Herod’s Temple. And so too, this Lent, Jesus challenges us to see the same with him.
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