Second Sunday after Epiphany; 14 January 2024; Epiphany 2B (RCL); 1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51.
What a mish-mosh of readings for this week. I suppose the 1 Samuel and the Gospel both address the issue of the call of God, but the 1 Corinthians sticks out uncomfortably like a sore thumb. I’ve chosen to leave off the optional verses of the 1 Samuel reading, so as not to have to explain the crimes of Eli’s sons, although the whole story does give insight into the role of the priesthood in the religion of ancient Israel. On the other hand, the passage from John’s Gospel is an important set-up for the outcome of the Gospel.
John uses a device that I call a parenthesis. He will obliquely introduce a topic, which then seems to disappear from the Gospel (open the parenthesis) until much later in the Gospel return to the topic and resolve the tension set up by the original mention (close the parenthesis). The device is all over the Gospel. A great example comes just before this passage, when John the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb of God — twice. The metaphor of lamb then disappears from the Gospel (apparently), until the crucifixion. John’s timetable has Jesus crucified at the exact hour the Passover lambs would have been slaughtered in the Temple court (hence John cannot narrate the last supper as a Passover meal). John also calls our attention to the metaphor by mentioning at the feeding of the 5000 that the Passover feast of the Jews was near. The mention of the drinking the blood (and eating the flesh) of the Son of Man would have recalled the Passover feast as well as the blood of the Great Day of Atonement. Jesus’ crucifixion replaces both.
In this instance the mention of the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man opens the parenthesis. The incident recalls Jacob on his flight from Esau. He stops to sleep at Bethel, and in a dream (?) sees the angels of God ascending and descending a stair case with its top in the heavens. When he awakes, he sets up a stone and anoints it with oil, and says “Surely this is none other than the vestibule of heaven.” Later, Israel would build a temple at Bethel. John compares Nathaniel favorably with Jacob, when Jesus proclaims, “Here surely is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Jacob was full of deceit, having deceived both Esau and his father Isaac.
Importantly, when Jesus says, “You will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man,” the ‘you’ is plural. He is addressing us, the readers of the Gospel. But, then the angels disappear from the Gospel until the very end. When Mary Magdalene at last enters the tomb, she sees two angels sitting where Jesus’ body had lain, one at his head and one at his feet. This immediately recalls the mercy seat (the two cherubim over the ark of the covenant) in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s Temple. It was into that chamber that the high priest entered with the blood of a goat to sprinkle the mercy seat with that blood on the Great Day of Atonement (remember the metaphor of drinking the blood of the Son of Man).
Mary, in other words, has entered the inner sanctum of the new Temple (Jesus’ tomb), which is now in the same site where Jacob/Nathaniel saw/sees the angels of God ascending and descending on a stair case/the Son of Man. And in the locked room after his resurrection, when Jesus breathes on his disciples and infuses them with the Holy Spirit, he gives them the responsibility of forgiving or retaining the sins of the world (remember John the Baptist saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world“). John’s community has taken on all the functions of the (now destroyed) Temple and its institutions (like the priesthood). It’s a stunning move. It lays a remarkable responsibility on the community (us) to act as a priesthood and Temple for the world, the point of contact between divine and created orders.
And then there is the passage in 1 Corinthians. What is remarkable about this passage is Paul’s anthropology of the body. Anyone united to the Lord (by baptism) has become one body with the Lord, so visiting a prostitute (an institution of pagan temples) joins the Lord to the prostitute (and hence also to the divinity to which she is consecrated). It is important to note that in the second to last sentence the possessive pronoun “your” is in the plural, yet the noun it modifies, “body,” is in the singular: Do you not know that your all’s body is a temple of the Holy Spirit among you?” Collectively, we have one body, and the body serves as the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Again, it is a daring insight. This little, rag-tag group of the followers of Jesus is the point of contact between divine and created orders. It is up to us to forgive or retain the sins of the world, to bring the world into the presence of God in the inner sanctum.