Lent 3B, 3 March 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Exodus 20:1-17. I AM
- 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
- John 2:13-22. They believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
O God of Love, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.
Sometimes when I sit down to work on a sermon, I get tripped up by the first few words of a reading and fall into a deep exegetical hole! This week the words were “The passover of the Jews was near.” Why get stuck on that, you might wonder. Well, I’m going to tell you. It’s because Passover is probably not a good translation of the Hebrew word Pesach or the Greek word Pascha. There’s a long history of rabbis arguing about the etymology of Pesach, which can mean skipping over or hopping over or even limping over. There is, however, an even older meaning: to have compassion for or to make a sacrifice of mercy. [1] So we might understand that, according to the Gospel of John, very early in Jesus’ ministry, he made a pilgrimage up to Jerusalem to observe the festival celebrating God’s compassion or mercy, a Festival of Freedom from Oppression. In Jesus’ time, the Romans had taken the place of the Babylonians, who had taken the place of the Egyptians as the oppressors.
I think it’s worth noting that, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus made this trip up to Jerusalem just a few days after the story of the wedding feast at Cana and after a quick visit to Capernaum with his mother, brothers, and disciples. As the Gospel of John tells it, this trip to Jerusalem did not take place at the very end of Jesus’ life the way the other Gospels tell it. According to John, this is Jesus’ first public appearance.
Then there’s the word Jews. Why is that a stumbling block? Certainly Pesach is a Jewish festival. Yes, but more and more, I’m persuaded that Judeans is a better translation than Jews throughout the Gospel of John, because Jesus was not engaged in a polemic against Jews (he and his followers were all Jews, of course). There’s a growing body of evidence that Jews and Christians weren’t fully separated as faith traditions for several centuries after John was writing. In spite of what you might have been taught, our Gospel portion for today is not necessarily evidence of an argument between how Jews did things versus how Jesus and his followers wanted to do things. It’s not necessarily evidence of distance between John’s audience and Jews. In other words, I don’t think it’s an argument between Jews and Christians. Mine is a minority opinion, but it’s growing. It’s much more likely that passages like this are evidence of regional differences among Judeans, Galileans, and Samaritans. For our purposes, think of differences in practice between Episcopalians in the five Episcopal parishes within a mile radius of here!
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that there was ever just one way of being a faithful “Biblical Jew” or a faithful “Rabbinic Jew,” just like there’s no evidence that there has ever been just one way of being a faithful Jesus follower. [2] There were and are many ways. Our first and second testaments are full of debates and arguments, of admonitions and encouragements, of differing points of view, that cannot be reconciled with any integrity. This story about Jesus’ visit to the temple in Jerusalem is more likely evidence of an intramural struggle about proper piety and a retroactive debate about the use of temple in the aftermath of Jesus’ death and the temple’s destruction. To borrow a line from The Poor People’s Campaign, Jesus wasn’t staging an insurrection, he was urging a resurrection.
This story is often called “the cleansing of the temple,” which has always struck me as an odd descriptor for what sounds like the making of a very large mess. I do not like the violence in this story, although I call on it frequently as a rebuttal to the facile notion of Jesus meek and mild. According to John, Jesus took time to make a whip of cords, used it to drive the animals out, and then ransacked the place. None of us would tolerate that kind of behavior in our houses of worship. (I used to think that nobody would tolerate that kind of behavior in our capital buildings either!)
John’s Jesus is an observant Jewish male, who went to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage feasts. What made him so angry in this story? According to John, Jesus’ anger had to do with the temple being used as a house of trade. Biblical scholar Bruce Chilton explains that the high priest Caiaphas had moved the animal vendors from outside the city gates on the Mount of Olives up into the Court of the Gentiles, which angered many Jews, including Jesus, apparently, although Chilton doesn’t say what the anger was about. [3] The Gospel of John does say that Jesus made pilgrimages to Jerusalem at least four more times before he was arrested and executed.
John says that when Jesus’ disciples looked back on this particular time in Jerusalem, through the experiences of resurrection, it reminded them of holy scripture. It made them believe, that is to say, to trust or give credence to the scripture. They remembered Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for your house has devoured me.” I bet they also remembered Nehemiah 13:9, in which a very angry Nehemiah liberated the House of God by throwing out the furniture and cleaning out the chambers. [4] They might have remembered Zechariah 14, “And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.” I imagine they remembered Malachi 3, which says, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple…but who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire… and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness,” that is, in right relationship with others, especially with those who are poor. Malachi’s testimony is against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, who mistreat the most vulnerable, and who thrust aside the alien and thereby demonstrate that they do not revere God.
I imagine Jesus’ disciples remembered the prophet Jeremiah, who heard God say, “Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place.” [5] I imagine they remembered Micah’s complaint that the temple priests taught for a price and its prophets gave oracles for money, yet they leaned upon the Lord and said, “Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.” Micah replies, “You will become plowed like a field, a heap of ruins.” I imagine Jesus’ disciples remembered powerful passage later in Micah, “With what shall I come before the Lord…with burnt offerings, with calves, thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
In spite of what you may have heard about Jesus’ fit of pique in the temple that took place just before Pesach, this Gospel lesson is for us, and by us I mean Christianity; I mean the Church; I mean the Episcopal Church; I mean Emmanuel Church; I mean each one of us. This Gospel reading, with its many reminders of the teachings of the prophets, is calling us to account for whatever ways we think we’ve got our relationship with God (or with others) all wrapped up. I hear Jesus challenging us as individuals and as constituent parts of institutions to maintain space for outsiders and foreigners (Gentiles in his case) for gathering, to create space, to make a clearing for the fresh revelation of God’s impassioned self.
I’m glad the lectionary yokes this portion of John with the version of the Decalogue in Exodus. As some of you have heard me say about these words we call “commandments,” in Hebrew, they are descriptions of what it will look like when we live in the knowledge of God’s redeeming love. I hear these readings teaming up to challenge us to remember that, at the core of our beings, we delight in the law of God, who has freed us and who longs for us to live as if it were true, as if we were freed to care for one another, to insist on right relationships with one another, and so to dismantle systems of oppression. Jesus is challenging us to not be complicit when it comes to our moral obligation to do whatever we can to end poverty.
Yesterday a mighty group of us from this parish represented Emmanuel Church at the Poor People’s Campaign rally at the Massachusetts State House, taking our part in a day of a nationally coordinated direct action in Washington, D.C. and 31 state capitals across the county to call on our elected officials and policy makers to use resources to end poverty. Poverty is a major public-health crisis in the wealthiest country in the world. According to a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, poverty kills more people than gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Only heart disease, cancer, and smoking cause more deaths than poverty, and I’d argue those are linked to poverty as well. There are more than 2.3 million poor and low-wealth people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is more than a third of our population. Massachusetts is the second wealthiest state per capita in the US, second only to New York. Meantime, in the first two years of the pandemic, which has been especially brutal for poor people, billionaire wealth grew nationally by $1.5 trillion, more than $2 billion a day. This Poor People’s Campaign is not about the right or left; it is about right and wrong. May we remember that we have been both created and freed by the One Who longs for us to live as if it were true, so that we would insist on right relationships with one another and work at dismantling whatever systems and institutions keep missing rather than making the marks of Love. It’s not about an insurrection, but a resurrection.
- www.outorah.org/p/5710/
- Professor Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, scholar of Rabbinic Judaism
- Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2006), p. 152.
- See D. Mark Davis’ blogpost dated Sunday, March 1, 2015, “Liberating the Temple,” in www.leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com
- Jeremiah 7:2-3.