I Corinthians 1; John 2
March 26, 2000
James R. Gorman
So, Jesus was having a bad day. Well, actually, he was having a really bad day.
And I think I know why.
In verse 12 of the second chapter of John, we read, "After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers and his disciples; and remained there a few days." Capernaum is a port on the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.
Then in verse 13, we read, "The Passover of the Jews was near and Jesus went up to Jerusalem." Went up to Jerusalem? From Capernaum? Do you know how far that is? Why it took us 2 hours on an air-conditioned bus to get from Jerusalem to our kibbutz near Capernaum! Imagine having to walk it!
And in just one verse. From verse 12 to verse 13, he's walked about 70 miles. It's like walking from here to O'Hare airport. No wonder he's in a bad mood. And then he comes across these mercenaries, these leeches, in the Temple precincts making money off of poor travelers like him and his family.
This story of Jesus cleansing the temple is a painful one for those of us who were raised on the image of Jesus meek and mild. Jesus the shepherd who travels far into the night after the lost sheep. Jesus who withstands rebukes and whips and scorns quietly and heroically on our behalf. This Jesus in an uncharacteristic story, not only throws over the moneychangers table but also as recorded only the Gospel of John, fashions a whip of cords and drives these guys out of the Temple entirely.
This is the not Jesus I've come to know.
I don't know about you, but I'm afraid of anger. Partly because I grew up in a household of anger and partly because I'm a man capable of anger and I have experienced first hand its destructive power. In some ways, my Christian faith has become a kind of refuge from the precincts of anger. Jesus, meek and mild is a kind of cornerstone for me for how I wish the world were organized.
But alas it is not.
Jesus' anger is righteous and the target's of his anger deserve it. They prey off of the travelers who have come many miles through many dangerous territories, at the cost of hard-earned cash, only to discover that when they get there, they must exchange all their money from home with the face of Caesar on it for Temple money plus they have to pay the Temple tax, plus, they have the sneaking suspicion through all this changing of money that they are coming out with much less than what they went in with.
And they are. Herod needed the money for the building of this great Temple Mount and he needed to have his appointed folks collecting the tax right at the Temple itself. And in order to keep these folks happy in the doing of this dirty work, the system allowed them to skim more than a fair share of money off of the exchange.
And most people went along with all these abuses, partly because the exchange was too complicated, and because it seemed to make possible this greatest of all symbols of cultural security. A Temple larger than even Solomon could imagine was being built during Jesus' time by the great King Herod.
So, here's this bad news. Jesus has got this wealth problem, for wealth and its abuses had poisoned the life and breath of Israel. It undermined Israel's ability to be faithful. The new Temple made life less secure rather than more secure because the poor, as always, were forced to pay a disproportionate amount for its construction.
The Temple and all its finery and all its handsome stone work and gold and fine woods from all over the world, looked as impenetrable and indestructible as the Titanic itself. What Jesus offered in the place of this vast stonework, gold and wood was the cross. That somehow Jesus believed the foundation of the whole religious experience of Israel would be rearranged and made right by the cross. And because of his behavior in the Temple, he was headed to the cross just as surely as a poor man accused of murder in Texas will go to the electric chair.
For Jesus, in this Temple incident, acts out the beginnings of the destruction of the indestructible. He offers the security of the cross in the place of the security of Herod's building projects.
In the cross, Jesus Christ challenges the first principle of our thinking: that we are perishing. Too many of the great decisions in life are based on this premise. "We often start at a slightly lower point of course, saying that self-preservation is the first law of life."(1) We seem to be convinced that we are all living in a kind of jungle in which our first premise seems to be to survive, by which we mean to outlive our friends and foes alike. And to prevent that, we need to accumulate all the tangible signs and symbols of survival.
As a counterpoint to this wisdom of survival, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus offers us the Logic of the Cross.
It is nonsense, isn't it, that we who need to survive should direct all our thoughts in this season toward One who was not a survivor? Herod's great building projects, of which the Temple was only one, were all about survival. Herod needed to have his legend outlive him and all his adversaries. Herod the Great, historians would call him.
But, alas, the Temple is gone and the great platform that Herod built is now occupied by other people. And just now the Pope, in his advanced years and serious illness, goes there to speak to warring peoples about the path of peace which offers a better alternative to trusting in the artificial modes of security such as armies, tanks and rocket launchers.
In the face of the wisdom of survival, the Christian Church needs to proclaim the wisdom of the cross which is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the very power of God for those who are being saved. In the face of the premise "we are perishing" we need to make clear and live out the truth that we are being saved by the power of a crucified God who will give us a true and trustworthy security born out of the loss of everything.
The cross has always been the instrument by which the first principle (we are perishing) is converted into the second (we are being saved). The principle that we are perishing and must protect everything against all possible losses, is converted into the principle that we are being saved, and God's ways with us through all possible darknesses can be trusted more than Herod's great building program.
The principle that all about us is darkness and we must invest heavily in the lighting and heating business has been transformed by our faith in Christ, for the darkness is not dark to him and neither should it be for us.
If the logic of the cross is lived out, we, too, will be able to stand over against all those false gods of security by which we live our lives. The logic of the cross gives us the power to transform our lives from a bland acceptance of the vast injustices all about us to a faith that challenges and provokes the comfortable and comforts all those afflicted by the moneychangers in our world.
We can ask of our world the really tough questions precisely because we believe that the power of God to save is greater than the powers of history to destroy.
In the power of Jesus Christ, "we are able to say in the midst of our vast distrusts, our betraying and being betrayed, our certainty of death and our temptations to curse our birth: Abba, Our Father. And this we say to the very ground of our being, to the mystery out of which we come, to the power of life over death, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name; I believe, help thou my unbelief."(2)
What Jesus did was a daring thing. And he did it on our behalf, to show us that the very things that we have come to trust in life--big indestructible things--are in fact artificial and untrustworthy. And that God's word can finally be trusted in the darkness to bring light and hope in the chill night air of late winter and early spring. It is to that hope that we are moving in these forty days. It is in that hope that we will rejoice in the coming Easter morn.
1. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Logic of the Cross an unpublished sermon from the 1950s exerpted in James Fowler's To See the Kingdom. p. 156ff.
2. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth cited in Fowler, p. 159.