NewCreation

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent Year B

The Signs of John's Gospel Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the third Sunday of Lent. And today we're going to be looking at one of the signs in John's Gospel. Last week, you remember, we looked at the Transfiguration and how that was a sign of what was meant by Jesus' going to death and his rising again, the presence of Moses, Elijah and Abraham showing something of the density of what Jesus was going to accomplish. Today we have a look at St John's version. Everything, all the order in John is slightly different, but every part is significant. So let's have a look. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem because the Passover of the Jews was near. Why the Passover of the Jews? Reasonably, one might think: was there any other Passover? Well, of course, yes there was. That's one of the things that we get muddled by, because our word "Jew" refers to the ethnic reality of modern Jewish people. At the time St John's Gospel was written, it referred to, if you like, an ideological sub-party of the ethnic group known as the Hebrew people. It was something much closer to the Whigs, if you like, and it was especially in the case of the Temple — those who had taken charge of the whole project of what the Hebrew religion should be on the return from Babylon, and who had inaugurated a new way of being temple and people and land under the prophet Nehemiah. And this included quite specific relation to the Temple and the feasts of the Temple. One of the things that this involved was a form of taxation for all those who were part of the Jews — if you like, this thing that was not entirely ethnic and a bit more than ideological, but not like our clear divisions. But basically, if you paid the temple tax, half a shekel a year, as set out in the book of Exodus — which had been altered, the law had been altered at the time of Nehemiah to put that in — then you were contributing to the upkeep of the Temple, and in a sense you were paying for your place within the system of security, salvation and atonement that the Temple offered. And of course the Temple was an expensive thing to build, an expensive thing to upkeep. As we'll see, that's part of what's going on here. So the Passover of the Jews — the reference is being made because we're about to see Jesus doing something that is not entirely part of that Passover. In the Temple he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their table. So cattle would have been standard for certain sacrifice of bulls — that would have been for the old understanding of Passover and the old understanding of atonement. And sheep: that was very much the Mosaic sacrifice, the sacrifice substituting for the firstborn, and God substituting himself via a lamb. And the doves — that is the poor people's sacrifice, the purifying sacrifice, the sacrifice of piety. Now, making a whip out of cords, he drove them all out of the Temple. So this suggests that what he's doing here is two things. He's enacting the cleansing of the Temple, which was a different Passover. It was a Passover understood in the time of the prophet Ezekiel as a rite of cleansing the Temple. It was different from the Feast of the Atonement. It was a springtime festival for the cleansing of the Temple. And one of the ways that the cleansing was done was that the high priest would go through the Temple with whip-like movements, sprinkling blood and cleansing. And here of course Jesus is getting the bloody animals taken out but engaging in the same whip-like movement. In other words, he's beginning to enact the cleansing but without the blood of animals. This is part of the sign that he's performing. And this would also have called to mind the prophecies of the Messiah. It was thought that the Messiah would come in with a whip made of cords, and that his cleansing of the people, and cleansing especially of the priesthood, would take the form of a goad and a prod and a whip. So for instance in the Malachi prophecy that says, "He will come like a refiner's fire, and he will purify the sons of Levi" — what that means is the vision of the Messiah coming in and producing a cleansing with a whip. So a couple of Messiah-related and Ezekiel-related symbols are being enacted at the same time here. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. Now, there were two sorts of money changing going on. The ordinary money changing: for people to buy sacrificial animals, they needed to be able to buy them with Temple coinage, which shouldn't have any effigies of pagan rulers on them, so as to be able to be pure in their purchase. So there would need to be money changers, and the word for tables in Greek is the same as the word for bank. A modern Greek bank is called a trapeza — it just means table. So these were the equivalent of the bankers of the time. Then there was the other tax, which was, if you like, the membership tax: the half-shekel, the Temple tax. That too had to be paid in Temple currency. So that too involved money changing. In other words, this was quite a significant financial center for the keeping alive of purity, membership, togetherness. So when he's doing this overturning, he's enacting the Ezekiel Passover, he's enacting the arrival of the Messiah, and then he tells those who were selling the doves — saying, "Take these things out of here. Stop making my Father's house a marketplace" — that's a paraphrase of the end of the prophet Zechariah, where the prophet Zechariah announces that on that day there will be no more traders and marketeers in the temple. In other words, Jesus is enacting the end of the book of Zechariah, which indicates that on that day — the day of the arrival of the Lord, the day of wrath as it was understood, the day of the Lord coming in — all the temple commerce will cease. So he's announcing that he's fulfilling that, in the same way that he does in the synoptic gospels. His disciples remembered that it was written: "Zeal for your house will consume me." That's in one of the Psalms, and it talks about the zealousness of God for his own house and the zealousness of the prophet. The famous prophet who was zealous was Elijah. "I have been very zealous, with a zeal I have been zealous for your house," he says, after he has fled from the aftermath of his challenge of the prophets of Baal when their sacrifices didn't work. So there's a suggestion of a different sacrifice that is being announced here. And let's remember, this is where our first reading today comes in. It talks about how God is a jealous God. Actually, in the Greek version it says God is a zealous God. That's the link between the Exodus passage which we had as our first reading and today. It's the notion of the zealous God who punishes people who go against him and yet shows love for thousands of generations. In other words, it's the zealousness of God that is going to be enacted here in Jesus doing what he's doing. We'll see more of that in a second. So the Jews — that's the temple authorities, those who were obviously part of the Nehemiah-Babylonian package, the returned Judahites package — said to him. The translation here says, "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Interestingly, what the sentence is saying is: "What sign are you showing us that you do these things?" It's not saying, "Okay, you've done this, now give us a sign." It's saying, "What is the sign that you are showing us that you're doing these things?" They want him to interpret for them what he's been doing. What he's been doing is fairly obviously a bringing together of a series of messianic fulfillment prophecies, and naturally they want to know how that goes. It's not a stupid question. They don't react, as it were, in a law and order way, saying, "Good God, he's throwing over our banks, won't do," — that's not their first reaction. Their first reaction is: "We know what this means. I wonder who he thinks he is, who's doing these things, or what account he gives of what he's doing." In other words, there is both a wisdom and a cynicism and a suspicion, and all of these things at once, in their reaction. And Jesus says to them: "Destroy this temple and…" "In three days I will raise it up." Now again, our translations mislead. In the beginning of this Gospel it says he comes into the temple and he finds the people. That word, the word "temple," there henceforth refers to, if you like, the temple compound, the whole of the gated area that included the places of slaughter, the places for meeting, the portico of Solomon, and also the actual rather small temple building with the Holy of Holies and the holy place into which only the priests would go, and the altar of thanksgiving outside. So that's the whole of the temple compound. But here Jesus answers, "Destroy this temple, this naos." That means that's referring only to the small bit, the nave, the sanctuary if you like, "and in three days I will raise it up." Now this perhaps gives a hint of why, when he was addressing the people earlier, he was particularly annoyed with those who were selling the doves. Because if you remember, at his baptism the Holy Spirit had come upon him like a dove, indicating that he was now the sanctuary, the place of piety, the real place where God's piety would be shown and worshipped, and that he had specifically rejected those who were selling the doves — the kind of piety that could be bought, and that was especially the kind of piety that was made available to the poor. In other words, it exploited the poor; it gave them access to this sanctuary. He was particularly annoyed with that. Of course, he cast out the sheep and the cattle as well, no doubt causing much more of a disturbance than merely releasing a few doves. But it was the doves that really got him. In other words, abusing the poor for the sanctuary of the Lord. And of course, what he is and who he is — is the sanctuary of the Lord. So he's saying, "Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up." He uses the language of resurrection rather than actual physical building, unlike in the Synoptic Gospels where it's the physical building that he uses. So the Jewish authorities then say, "This temple has been under construction for 46 years." It's rather a useful piece of information. It means that we can date what's happening here at 26 or 27 of our era, because the temple construction started in 20 or 19 before the Christian era. And then it says, "But he was speaking of the temple, the sanctuary, of his body." He's fulfilling what he said in Psalm 40: "You have said holocaust and sacrifice I do not want, and so I said, 'Here am I, in my body.'" He's speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this — in other words, they didn't understand the sign any more than the Jewish authorities — and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. What Scripture? I put it to you that the Scripture is the one that his disciples remembered: "Zeal for your house will consume me." In other words, they are realizing that what he is doing — the whole of his project — has been the coming in of the zealous God who loves people for a thousand generations, and that his coming in is actually going to consume him literally, in the sense in which a holocaust or a sacrifice was consumed, and that that was how he was going to rebuild the house: by becoming the Temple, the sacrifice, the altar, the victim, the priest, and enabling all of us to share in that. We are going to find ourselves living in the Temple made without hands. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.