Sermon: The Unfinished Gospel

First Presbyterian Church

March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday B

Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

 

The Unfinished Gospel

 

 

Really, this is the word of the Lord. No fooling.

OK, I’ll admit it’s not the most satisfying ending, but there it is. Every shred of evidence insists that the original material we have of the gospel of Mark, or the author of what is in fact an unsigned gospel, ends with what we label the eighth verse of this chapter, with the announcement that the women who came to the tomb and saw it empty were on the run because they were afraid.  Yes, you can probably look at your pew Bible and see a bunch of other verses, but you can also see some the longest footnotes in your Bible explaining that the best evidence shows that these verses were added later, by another author.  While it is possible that some original material was lost, we cannot know that for certain. Therefore, despite the title on this sermon, this gospel really does seem to finish with this strange ending.

C’mon, pastor, is this really the scripture to preach today? I mean, there might be visitors present.  

Just hang on, folks.  If this is how Mark meant to end his novel, there might just be a really good reason he did so. But in one way this gospel of Mark is a lot like those tricky mystery novels my wife likes to read so much; you really do have to remember what happened in previous chapters for the ending to make any sense.

It helps if we spend a moment with verses six and seven of this chapter.  The unnamed messenger waiting at the tomb breaks the news to the women – “he has been raised; he is not here” – and even invites them to see the place where he had been, now empty.  It’s simple enough, and not unlike similar accounts in other gospels Matthew and Luke. 

But the messenger doesn’t leave the news there; there are instructions.  “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” “Just as he told you?” Here we need to look back to several verses from this gospel; from chapters eight, nine, and ten, in which Jesus repeated his warning that he must be rejected by the religious authorities and be crucified and raised again.  We also need to look back to chapter fourteen, the night when he was betrayed, the night he broke bread and poured a cup of wine to give those disciples a sign and seal to hold them (and us) together as the body of Christ.  It was that awkward moment when Jesus told them that “you will all be deserters; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.” But even here, Jesus instructs them again, “but after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”  Even in that bleak and despairing moment Jesus is preparing them for what is to come, for a resurrection – one that at this point is just assumed, “after I am raised up” – and the order to go out to Galilee to meet him.

Now I’m not going to pretend that after this, verse eight and its portrait of fear is anything but a disappointment.  After what should be news both joyful and familiar, we get instead something quite the opposite.  Still, as strange and uncomfortable as it sounds, it might be exactly the message we need to hear this day of all days.

For one thing, in the context of Mark’s gospel it completes a theme that was apparent from its early chapters; the ones closest to Jesus repeatedly don’t get it.  Just to give a few examples; in those three examples in chapters eight, nine, and ten in which Jesus foretells his death and resurrection, in every case the disciples immediately reveal themselves to be more concerned with very earthly ideas of power and influence.  Another example follows after not one, but two miraculous feedings recorded in the gospel.  The famous feeding of the five thousand with five loaves of bread and two fish is recorded in Mark 6, and two chapters later comes a second feeding, in which four thousand are fed off of seven loaves and a few small fish.  Still, just a few verses after that second feeding miracle, the disciples think Jesus is lecturing them over forgetting to bring bread on a boat trip across a lake. If anything happens here, these women who had been following Jesus from very early in his ministry have their moment of weakness every bit as much as the twelve who fled when the authorities arrived to arrest Jesus in the garden.

And if these disciples, these women, who shared so much time and so much travel and so many meals and so many miracles and experiences during the ministry of Jesus, if they failed and fell short so spectacularly in the time of trial, we who follow at a remove of so many centuries, cannot necessarily expect to do better. When we fall short in following, we can at least know that we aren’t the first to do so, and that we are preceded in this failing by those closest to Jesus.

Of course, logically we can guess that at some point, somebody must have said something.  After all, if nobody had ever announced that Jesus was out of the tomb, if nobody had ever followed up on Jesus’s command to meet him in Galilee, why would Mark even be writing this gospel? Why would there even be some community, some church to whom Mark would be compelled to write?  The word is out, and people are gathered together in community around the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Mark has his reasons for not sharing these things or relaying the kind of post-resurrection appearances that Matthew and Luke and John do. Today's reading from Acts offers us an early example of Peter bearing witness to Jesus's life and death and resurrection.

Our reading from 1 Corinthians also points out that there are stories about the life and death and life again of Jesus that our gospel authors don’t necessarily tell.  In his letter to the church at Corinth (which was actually written down before any of the gospels were) Paul, in this chapter near the end of his first letter, lays out the most basic tenets of the faith as shared by Paul and countless others, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” Then, to support this story, he cites witnesses; Cephas (or Peter), and later to the twelve; and then Paul mentions an appearance to “more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time,” and another to James (whether the apostle or to his earthly brother Paul does not say).  Some of these we can possibly equate to appearances recorded in the gospels, but they don’t contain anything quite like that appearance to more than five hundred.  

So if Mark is choosing to withhold any stories of Jesus appearing to his followers, what is his purpose? What’s he’s trying to do? Maybe the answer has to do with what Mark wants his readers and hearers - in other words, us - to do in response to this gospel.

The women were charged to tell the disciples – and Peter, even Peter, poor foolish Peter who denied Jesus three times – that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee, and that they should get on their way. What if that’s our challenge as well?  What if we come to the end of this gospel, and we are confronted with the question of whether we will follow Jesus who has gone ahead of us, not content to wait around an empty, useless tomb?  What if that’s our question to answer today, this holiest of days?

What if, instead of a comfortable, happy ending, Mark is intent on provoking us to action?  What if our calling is not to linger at that empty tomb, but to go where Jesus is leading us? Not to seek closure, but to continue the story?

For indeed, in perhaps the most important way, this is an unfinished gospel after all.  Mark has no intention of wrapping up the story and putting a pretty bow on it so we can feel good that it “all came out right in the end.” We, like those original followers, like those in the community to whom Mark writes his gospel, have a job to do. We have a living Christ to follow back to the place where it all began, to following and living with Christ and living with one another in a Christ-like community of faith.  Death took its best shot and could not keep Christ down. So for us, it’s time to get back to work, to get back to proclaiming the good news, to be about the business of telling the world about how “the kingdom of God is near,” as Jesus proclaimed back at the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, and how now is the time to “repent and believe in the good news.”  

Ultimately there is joy and celebration at this news, but unless we are following where Jesus is leading us, breaking through the surprise and the fear and telling this good news, that joy and celebration ends up a bit pointless. This tomb is empty, and Jesus is gone ahead of us; it’s time for us to follow, to continue this unfinished gospel and live out and live into this kingdom of God come near.

For the empty tomb, the unfinished gospel, and Jesus gone ahead of us, Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

Hymns: (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #246, Christ Is Alive!; #245, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!;  #232, Jesus Christ Is Risen Today; #239, Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing!

Sermon: The Colt and the Crowds

First Presbyterian Church

March 24, 2024, Palm Sunday B

Mark 11:1-11

 

The Colt and the Crowds

 

 

One of the great challenges of Holy Week is that, to be blunt, the stories featured in the major services of the week – Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday – are awfully familiar. After all, we tell them every year, and they do represent the climactic events of the life of Jesus, events that shape the faith and theology of Christianity itself (at least when we’re doing it right. 

It is the final three, of course, that are the focus; today, Palm Sunday, is something of a curtain-raiser on this final act of the drama of Jesus’s life and ministry. That is not to say, however, that this event is itself devoid of significance for our faith or our theology, nor that it is devoid of significance to us who seek to live out our lives as disciples of this Jesus, not merely name-droppers of Christ whose lives and actions adhere far more to social attitudes and customs than to anything biblical or spiritual.

Every gospel tells this story slightly differently – for example, the palms that give this day its name are mentioned only In John’s retelling of the story. There are a couple of particular elements of Mark’s account that might hold greater significance for us than we are accustomed to hearing. One of those has to do with how Jesus specifically entered into Jerusalem; the other, with those (in addition to the disciples) who joined him on the way. 

We get in the first half of this account the curious story of Jesus sending two of his followers to find and bring a colt, specifically one that “no one has never ridden.” If anyone questions their taking the colt, they are told what to say; they say it and are able to proceed.

Now other gospel accounts differ here. Matthew has the two followers going to fetch a donkey *and* her colt. John specifically mentions a donkey. But taking Mark at his word, we have only the word “colt” (especially one that “no one has never ridden”) to work from, which could indicate a young donkey or even a young horse. Here’s the thing, though: either way, choosing to enter the city on a colt is a strange choice.

A horse would have been the likely choice for an important person, say, the Roman governor of this district, who would likely have been riding into Jerusalem from the Roman seat of government at Caesarea Philippi to serve as a reminder that, while y’all may be having your big festival and all this coming week, don’t forget that we’re in charge. If you do, we have ways of reminding you, ways that you won’t enjoy.

A donkey was much more likely to be the mode of conveyance for an average joe, if such an average person were riding any animal at all. Not flashy or fancy, but dependable, reliable, all that. 

Of course, many people simply walked wherever they went, including (for most of their time together) Jesus and his disciples.

The one occasion on which a colt might be the transport of choice might (and I cannot stress enough "might") was the case of a foreign leader entering a city to seek peace between his country and the one being visited. Putting such a ruler on a colt instead of a full-grown donkey or horse might have been meant as a form of humiliation or embarrassment. 

Riding an untrained colt, though, messes with all these pictures. The degree to which it undermines the pomp and spectacle of a Roman triumphal entry is likely clear enough, but even the average joe on his well-trained donkey gets called into question here, if for no other reason than the comfort or safety of the old well-trained donkey over the young colt. The idea of seeking a peace treaty doesn't quite seem to fit, especially when one considers that the next day (in Mark's gospel) Jesus would go run the moneychangers out of the Temple. And for all the humility of the entry otherwise, Jesus is still riding – that is a gesture of a person of some significance, on some level worthy of the adoration to come, as a crowd of people gather around and begin to prepare the path.

Ah, yes, the “crowd.” Again, different gospel accounts portray it differently. John’s story suggests that the “great crowd” that had come to Jerusalem for the festival heard that Jesus was coming to town migrated over to greet him (12:12). Matthew speaks of a “very large crowd” in 21:8. Even Luke (19:37) speaks of the “whole multitude of the disciples” cheering and shouting their “hosannas” to Jesus. 

Mark, on the other hand, speaks of “many people” who were spreading their cloaks on the ground, or breaking off branches to mark the way for Jesus to ride. “Many people.” So we know that there are more than just the twelve disciples, but this doesn’t quite carry the force of numbers that phrases like “great crowd” or “very large crowd” or even “whole multitude” have. 

Even more cautious is the relating of what happens when Jesus and his followers and the “many people” get into Jerusalem. They went into the city, Jesus looked around at the Temple, and then…he went back to Bethany with the disciples. No sign of the “many people" from before. The fireworks wouldn’t start until the next day, in Mark’s reading, when Jesus came back to the Temple and disrupted the commercial establishment there.

In short, the way Mark tells the story, it’s a pretty decent crowd, but not quite anything like the “multitude” other gospel accounts suggest. Hearing the story from this perspective might cause us to consider another question, one that should give us caution: which crowd are we with?

As noted earlier, it would not have been uncommon for large-scale processionals to enter Jerusalem, particularly coming from the Roman center of Caesarea Philippi, with numerous soldiers and horses and chariots and all the fine stuff that makes a tremendous impression on, well, impressionable crowds. Such processions would enter Jerusalem at a different gate, not the same portal to the city that Jesus and his followers used coming from Bethany and the Mount of Olives to the east. Such processions tended to attract large crowds, maybe even “very large crowds,” because it was sometimes useful to stay on the good side of the Romans, or because the procession overtook you and you had no way to get away from it, or frankly because they were large and impressive. While there’s no way to know for certain if such a processional was entering Jerusalem the same day or even the same time as Jesus and his followers, it’s not necessarily impossible that this was the case, or that such a processional might have entered days before or would enter days thereafter. 

This puts forth the challenge to future generations of Christians. Which crowd are we with? Are we spreading out branches and cloaks on Jesus’s way, or are we out there paying homage to the Empire and its claim to ultimate power? 

If we expand our view, however, there’s one more crowd we might need to ask ourselves about: the crowd that calls for Jesus’s crucifixion, after Pontius Pilate has questioned him at the end of that week. 

The chief priests and other religious authorities had brought Jesus in and questioned him, frankly to no avail, but they handed him over to that Roman governor of the time anyway with their charges against him. Pilate, frankly, wasn’t terribly impressed, even though Jesus mostly kept silent before him. Rather than release him outright, though, he decided to play a political card and offer him as part of a traditional prisoner release for Passover, one of those ways he (like any skilled politician) curried favor with the people. 

Behind Pilate’s back, though, those religious authorities had already been playing those crowds gathered to witness that spectacle. In a scene that is unbearably resonant with contemporary culture, they persuade the crowd to demand that, instead of Jesus, Pilate release to them Barabbas, an insurrectionist and killer. Blindsided by this turn, Pilate finds himself backed into a corner, and orders Barabbas released, and Jesus crucified. 

Which crowd are we with? The ones resounding “hosanna” to Jesus that day, or the ones later that week, stirred up by madly jealous religious leaders to demand that Pilate “Crucify!”? Indeed, which crowd are we with?

We tend to read this narrative as if the “many people” following Jesus on what we call Palm Sunday were demanding his death only those few days later, but we don’t know that for certain. Jerusalem was a large city for its time, and with numerous visitors coming into the city for Passover, there were plenty of people around to make up the angry and violent crowd at the trial before Pilate. Good religious folks, too, the lot of them; that's why they were in Jerusalem for Passover after all. We should not therefore excuse ourselves with the excuse that “everybody else did it." No, we can’t assume that everybody else did it. We can’t justify ourselves by claiming to have gotten caught up in the hysteria and claiming that ‘we didn’t really mean it’. Our call is to follow, right to the very end, no matter what other crowds or Important People demand of us. 

What crowd are we with, as we come to this week of weeks? What is our cry? 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #196, All Glory, Laud, and Honor (processional); #---, Prepare the way, O people; #199, Filled with Excitement; #198, Ride On! Ride On in Majesty.

 

Sermon: The Grain that Bears Fruit

First Presbyterian Church

March 17, 2024, Lent 5B

John 12:20-33

 

The Grain That Bears Fruit

 

Am I the only person who reads this passage from John’s gospel and wonders what happened to the Greeks?

You know, there at the beginning of the reading, simply “some Greeks” who had come to the festival of Passover and approached Philip about seeing Jesus? Philip goes and tells his brother Andrew and then the two of them go to Jesus with the request and…Jesus starts talking about being glorified and grains of wheat and saving or losing your life, and then even more stuff that somehow feels a little bit out of left field? All of this happens, and we never hear about those Greeks again. 

There is a lot in this discourse that can get frankly confusing or disorienting to keep track of in our study or hearing. There is the business of those who seek to hold on to their lives instead losing them, and those who do not cling to life in this world instead holding on to eternal life There is the business of serving and following. There is what appears to be a quick exchange between Jesus on earth and a voice from heaven, and finally the line which in many studies or commentaries is held up as the key takeaway from this lesson: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” John is even nice enough to add one of his little parenthetical explanatory comments here, to make sure that we understand that Jesus “said this to show the kind of death he was going to die,” that is, crucifixion – a mode of execution in which the one being killed was truly lifted up for all to see. And yes, the echo of last week’s reading, with the serpent and Son of Man both being lifted up, is pretty clear.

This does come at a turning point in John’s gospel. The events of Palm Sunday are recorded just before this portion of chapter 12. The next chapter, chapter 13, begins with the event we commemorate on Maundy Thursday, although John’s story speaks of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet rather than bread and cup being shared. The rest of the gospel marks that final week of Jesus’s earthly life and ministry, with lots of private teaching time thrown in. 

So, this is the climax. That crucifixion – Jesus being “lifted up” – is only a few days away. 

This is an important image. The idea that Jesus being “lifted up” in crucifixion would be anything but the ultimate humiliation must have seemed naïve if not downright delusional to anyone who picked up on the image. Crucifixion, as the Romans devised it, was meant not only to be physically agonizing, but also to provide the ultimate humiliation indeed: stripped naked, nailed up to this cross, exposed for all the world to see and mock.

To suggest that such an event would be, far from a humiliation, an exaltation – a moment in which Jesus’s being “lifted up” would actually “draw all people” to Jesus – would have drawn a snort of derision from those Roman soldiers tasked with carrying out the execution, and probably a derisive laugh from those religious authorities who had had enough of Jesus by this time. And yet Jesus proclaims it exactly that: the moment, or the impetus, or the act in which all people are drawn to him. 

It doesn’t make sense.

And it's not as if Jesus couldn't have put all of this to a stop. Remember that, for all he used the phrase "Son of Man" to identify himself, he was also the Son of God. Jesus didn't have to submit to all the pain and torture that was coming. Except that, as Jesus says in verse 27, "it was for this very reason I came to this hour." Drawing all people to himself was his very reason for being here, and that was accomplished only by being "lifted up."

And yet there is a key that is easy to overlook in this passage, back in the first part of the reading: that small line about a grain of wheat. 

It’s hard to do much with a single grain of wheat. You get a lot of such grains and grind them into flour and use it to bake bread, you have something good, but a single grain? Not so much.

In fact, as Jesus tells it, the only thing for a single grain to do is die. 

The grain that falls into the earth, and “dies,” that’s when the new life happens. The one grain becomes many grains. Each one grain begets many grains, bears much fruit, bears new life, and many are fed. Here’s an image of hope for this long slog to the end of Lent; new life from old, new fruit from one seed. 

But this isn’t just an image of hope: it’s also a calling. The one who can’t be like that single grain, well, is dead. The one who yields to the soil, to the nurturing and watering and care visited upon the field, yields much fruit, a bountiful harvest. This was Jesus’s path; and if we claim to follow Jesus, it’s our path too. We quit clinging to the comforts and benefits of this world, the things that allow us to be secure in our own rightness and aloof to the cruelties around us; when we lay aside that comfort and yield our lives to Jesus’s life, that’s when we bear fruit. 

But it begins with the single grain, one that falls into the earth and dies.

[SING “Now when a grain of wheat”]

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #247, Now the Green Blade Rises; #250, In the Bulb There Is a Flower; #450, Be Thou My Vision

 

Sermon: The Crisis of Jesus

First Presbyterian Church

March 14, 2021, Lent 4B

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:11-19

 

The Crisis of Jesus

 

For today’s gospel reading, It’s just about possible to make any sense out of it – especially that first verse – without reference to the reading from Hebrew Scripture assigned for the day. It is true that the readings given for a particular Sunday are usually meant to bear some relationship to one another, but seldom is the connection quite so explicit as in today’s reading. So, we really might as well go ahead and examine what happens in this account from the book of Numbers, before we try to understand what Jesus is talking about.

We find the Hebrew people on their journey through Sinai, having been unable to gain passage through the land of Edom and seeing a way around that region. As happened more than a few times during these wanderings, the people lost their patience and began to complain, both against Moses and against God. You know that on some level they are complaining just to complain, since one of their chief complaints seems to be that there was no food and the food was terrible. When you can’t even be logically consistent, you’re frankly just trying to be a jerk.

At this provocation, poisonous snakes got loose among the Israelites, and many of them (the Israelites, not the snakes) died while others were suffering great pain. Somehow this provoked an outcry of confession among the people, and they pleaded with their terrible awful no-good leader Moses to plead for their lives before God. Their terrible awful no-good leader Moses did exactly that, and God gave Moses a curious instruction: make a replica of one of the serpents and put it up on a pole, and the people who were bitten by the real serpents would be able to look at the fake serpent and avoid dying from their wounds. 

This sounds like borderline idolatry, but in fact it works as the opposite of an idol. In order for their lives to be spared, the people would have to look at the very consequences of their sin directly, without flinching or looking away. You either confronted the wrong you had done, or you died, rather painfully at that. You could not help but be reminded of the sin you had committed and the painful consequences of that sin – not only for yourself, but for others. 

Moving to the gospel reading for today, we see that very image, of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. We do so, unfortunately, by lopping off most of John’s account of Nicodemus and his visit to Jesus. We lose Nicodemus’s initial greeting and Jesus’s impatient let’s-get-down-to-business response; we lose the imagery of being “born of the Spirit” and the wind blowing where it will as image of the Spirit, and we miss most of Jesus’s chastisement of Nicodemus and his fellow religious leaders for not hearing Jesus and his testimony (which, so far in John’s gospel, mostly consisted of the clearing of the Temple we read of in last week’s gospel reading). Today’s reading begins at something of a pivot, as the text moves from Jesus's direct replies to Nicodemus and moves to the broader argument being drawn from this example by the author of this gospel.

The parallel isn’t exact here: when the Son of Man is “lifted up” it won’t be about the healing of a bunch of poisonous snake bites. But the comparison does work, and to help it along it will be useful to take a closer look at two words in this discourse and check on the original Greek, which contains some nuance that our English translations, even the NRSV or NIV, don’t quite catch. One of those even affects The Most Famous Scripture Ever, the one which is so widely known and memorized as to make this whole passage almost un-preachable.

I suspect most of us have that verse programmed into our brains (if we do at all) in the old King James Version: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” So pervasive is this widespread piece of learning that other translations (such as the NIV in our church’s pews) hew pretty close to that version. In all of these cases there is one word in this verse that, while not necessarily translated inaccurately, is translated in such a way that a particular nuance of the Greek text is not preserved. That word is, believe it or not, “so.”

When we hear “God so loved the world,” we automatically translate it in our own minds as to say “God loved the world so much,” which is, well, true. The Greek from which all these versions are translated, though, uses a word that is accurately translated “so” but with a different shade of meaning; were we to render that nuance in English, it might come out as “God loved the world like so,” or “God loved the world this way” if we were to put aside the word “so.” In this way the act of God giving God’s “only begotten Son” is tied again to the Moses’s raising up of that serpent in the wilderness. God’s love for the world is not separate from the world being confronted with the consequences of its sin. Jesus raised up on the cross confronts the world with its own sinfulness and the horror that comes of that sinfulness. 

Keeping this context and shade of meaning in mind then opens up the remainder of the reading in a way that is less bound to the kind of rhetoric and definition about “judgment” that often derails full understanding of the words of scripture. That other nuanced word of the Greek text, this one found in verse 19 and there translated as “judgment,” opens this up even more. 

In that verse, the Greek word translated as “judgment” is kreis (κρεις). And yes, “judgment” is a proper and accurate way to translate that word. However, the variety of “judgment” referenced here is not really fully captured by the way we tend to read the word “judgment” in scripture. We lapse over pretty quickly into all the images of hellfire and brimstone that have been popularized in certain strains of American theological thought and miss the immediate moment that this word wants us to notice. It might be useful to consider the English word that is adapted from that Greek word kreis: “crisis.” 

This puts the focus on that immediate moment, when the world sees verse 14 in action – “the Son of Man be lifted up” and the world confronted with its sinfulness and the consequences of that sinfulness. One might see this as the “moment of crisis,” or “moment of truth” to use a long-standing English-language idiom. Once the world sees “the Son of Man … lifted up,” once one is confronted with Jesus on the cross as the ultimate consequence of our unrepentant sinfulness, there is no more innocence, so to speak. It is the moment of truth.

One cannot walk away from that “sight,” that realization, that confrontation with the sinfulness of humanity and the horror it wreaks, without having to make a choice. Eventually we are going to choose one or the other: we will believe, we will take up the journey of faith, we will follow…or we won’t. We will eventually embrace the light, or we will shy away from it for good. To put a popular music spin on it, that old song title from the Doobie Brothers – “Jesus is Just Alright” – doesn’t really work as a response. Jesus is the one we are seeking or Jesus is the one we are fleeing.  

Perhaps the hardest part of all this is to keep verse 17 in mind when all of the other verses come tumbling after with words like “condemned” and “darkness” and “evil.” But that verse, maybe even more than the famous verse preceding it, is where hope is sustained in this reading. Condemnation is not the purpose of this raising up; salvation is.

That moment, the "moment of crisis" so to speak, does represent that we humans are faced with that inescapable realization and the choice that arises from it. However, there is also hope in the fact that Jesus "lifted up" on the cross is not the only way Jesus is "lifted up" in scripture; think also of the Resurrection, in which God raised up Jesus from the dead. But continue from there; think of the Ascension, in which Jesus is lifted up into the presence of the Almighty God. In short, Jesus is still "lifted up," still there to be seen and to be trusted. As long as you live, the choice, or the crisis, is still there.

This is how God loved the world; salvation – life eternal - comes by the Son being lifted up, like that old bronze serpent in the wilderness. It’s all a gift of God’s grace – nothing we have earned, nothing we can earn. The most and best we can do is not flee from it.

For the One who was lifted up, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #53, O God, Who Gives Us Life and Breath; #209, My Song is Love Unknown #443, There Is a Redeemer

 

There's more to the story than this...

 

Sermon: Zeal for What?

First Presbyterian Church

March 3, 2024, Lent 3B 

John 2:12-22

 

Zeal For What?

 

The good folk who formulated the Revised Common Lectionary seem to have decided that the season of Lent, Year B, should start off with some Angry Jesus. After last week’s account of Jesus calling out Peter as Satan, today we get the story often labeled as Jesus’s “cleansing of the temple.” What’s more, we get it in the version found in the gospel of John, which seems in some way more intense and, well, frankly, violent than the accounts found in other gospels. 

After all, in John’s gospel this event happens very early in Jesus’s public life – you could even argue that this was his first public appearance. Yes, John had pointed him out in his baptizing activities, and a few disciples had come to him, and he had turned water into wine at that wedding in Cana, but this was out in front of the whole world, in about the most public place one could be in Jerusalem. For another thing, while the other three gospel accounts of this story do speak of Jesus driving out the moneychangers and animal keepers and flipping their tables over, only John includes that business about Jesus fashioning a whip out of cords to drive the animals out. He’s not just picking up a whip that was lying around; he made a whip on the spot. To put it bluntly, something set Jesus off, and he acted on it, big time.

Jesus’s words point pretty clearly to what set him off. Evoking words of the prophet Zechariah, Jesus directs particular ire at the sellers hard at work on the temple grounds with the cry “Stop tuning my Father’s house into a market!” Jesus’s cry thus evokes the degree to which the state of the temple was far short of its intended ideal as the house of the Lord. 

Those words also help explain the reply of the temple authorities. Rather than launching into a full-fledged assault on Jesus for the disruption of temple business, their reply indicates that they remember Zechariah’s words as well; thus they ask for a “sign” for Jesus’s prerogative to do this. They know as well as Jesus does that this isn’t how the temple is supposed to be (though they would never say so publicly).

Other gospel accounts of this incident, besides placing it during Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem instead of the beginning of his public ministry, hint that there is double-dealing going on in this temple marketplace. Particular animals “without blemish” were required for sacrifice in temple ritual, and those who came to participate regularly brought their own sacrifices. However, those sacrifices (no matter how careful one might be with them) would often be judged insufficiently unblemished or “pure” to meet temple standards. How convenient, then, that this marketplace was right there to provide “pure” animals for sacrifice, at what was certainly a most reasonable fee, of course. At minimum, the potential for abuse in such a system was clear, and in the other gospels such abuse is strongly hinted as a reason for Jesus’s anger. This isn't indicated here in John, though; it seems to be that it is simply the presence of the “market” itself that is the offense. 

Does it indeed serve the purpose of the temple for these traders to be present? Or does it become an obstruction? Does it hinder the people from being able to offer their sacrifices without being exploited or drained of their meager resources? Does it detract from the holiness of worship? These are all possible responses to what happens in these first verses of John’s account, reinforced by that quote from Psalm 69 the disciples recall at this point.

That phrase – “Zeal for your house will consume me” – sure seems to fit here. You can see why John reads this thought into the disciples’ collective thought; Jesus has seen the temple overrun by marketplace activity and he went all crazy on them. The remainder of the reading, though, should perhaps give us pause before rushing headlong into taking this as our particular lesson from the story.

We have already noted that rather than outright condemning Jesus for his act, the temple authorities ask Jesus about a sign. His answer, as much as those temple authorities might not get it, is what truly unlocks what Jesus is about at this moment, and it turns out that Jesus might not really be quite as concerned about the building as it seems.

Jesus answered the authorities, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And let’s be honest, the reaction of those temple authorities is, on the surface, very logical. The temple has been “under construction” for forty-six years, as they observe (which suggests it still wasn’t quite complete), and this one man thinks he can build a whole new temple in three days? It is perfectly reasonable to respond Dude must be crazy, if you’re going to take that statement literally. 

However, those temple authorities didn’t get what Jesus was saying, and apparently Jesus’s own disciples didn’t either, at least until after Jesus had been resurrected years later. John is particularly fond of this little trick he pulls here – sticking in a little after-the-fact editorial comment that unveils the “real story” behind a moment like this one. In this case, the hidden nugget of wisdom John drops has everything to do with what the true “temple” really is, and what it really means to worship God in spirit and in truth. And it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with a building.

John’s little insert is pretty simple, actually: “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.” 

On the surface, it might seem like a non sequitir – wait, what does his body have to do with the temple? – but following the logic of the statement we find ourselves with a whole lot to unpack. For John to speak of the temple of Jesus’s body points way, way ahead in the story. John acknowledges this in his note that the disciples only really understood what Jesus was saying here after the resurrection. 

This becomes part of the gospel that sweeps through the infant church in the book of Acts. You can hear it, for example, in Stephen’s last great speech before his stoning, when he tells his listeners that “the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands” (which is itself a quote from Isaiah 66:1). God is not bound up in human buildings at all, nor can the worship and service of God be so bound. One would think churches learned that lesson from the time of pandemic shutdown. Churches ended up finding ways to keep worship going, somehow, even if the occasional house cat or dog became unintentional fixtures of the service for some. 

Not all churches, though, seemed to learn this lesson. You might remember that there were a number of churches that insisted that they had to continue meeting together, no matter how much virus-spreading that caused. You could also see churches rushing back into in-person worship only to have to resort back to the remote version when people started contracting the virus as a result. At the risk of seeming to denigrate fellow Christians, what kind of God do they think they worship? Some kind of God who can be contained in a building? 

Or are they bound by all sorts of external concerns that in fact have very little to do with the worship of God Almighty? Are they so bound up with the idea that worship itself is bound up in a particular building (not unlike the temple in the biblical account)? 

If the center and focus and reason and locus of our worship is in anything other than the person of Jesus Christ, we’re doing it wrong. Even as at some point we do return to worship in the sanctuary after such an interruption, we had better be reminded that there are those who cannot gather with us or with any church in person even under the best of circumstances and remember that Jesus would not have us exclude them from the worship of the Lord because of that hindrance. 

The way the larger church (the "church universal," so to speak) thinks about worship needs to be different, now and forevermore. Anything that detracts from the source and object of our worship being Jesus and Jesus alone has to be put out of mind for good. If we can’t do that in the church writ large, we aren’t serving anybody particularly well – not God, nor Christ, nor ourselves nor the world around us. And it’s probably best to start that rethinking and reimagining now, before we larger church or any individual church gets itself bound up in thinking the only goal is for everything to go back to “normal." There are some “normal” ideas that should never return, and the whole idea that the worship of God in Jesus through the Holy Spirit can or should be pinned down to a building needs to be one of those “normal” things that never rears its head again.

For Jesus Christ, our only Temple, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #625, How Great Thou Art; #521, In Remembrance of Me; #543, God, Be the Love to Search and Keep Me