Third Sunday in Lent; 3 March 2024; Lent 3B (RCL); Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25; John 2:13-22.
In the OT reading for this Sunday, we get the third in a series of covenants: Noah, Abram/Abraham, and now Moses, with the Ten Commandments. In the previous two covenants, God gave a sign of the covenant: with Noah, the bow in the clouds; with Abraham, circumcision (though we stopped short of those verses). Likewise in this Sunday’s reading, we stop short of the sign of the covenant: the two tablets of stone. Typically, in Christian iconography, we imagine five commandments on each stone: likely, all ten commandments were on both stones, one to be set up for the people to see, and one to be set up in the presence of God (in the ark of the covenant), so that both parties had a copy.
In both the NT reading (1 Corinthians) and the Gospel, we hear about signs. In John’s Gospel, as is typical, there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of the word sign. Jesus has given a sign (an even to be interpreted on a different plane than the narrative) of his authority over the Temple, while “the Jews” ask for a sign (or warrant) of that authority, completely missing the meaning of Jesus’ act. John loves this kind of irony. We, the reader, know what the characters in the narrative do not.
John’s chronology here is not believable. There is no way either Jewish or Roman authorities would have let Jesus live long after such a challenge to the religious and political structures of Jerusalem. Passover was a week-long pilgrimage festival, requiring sacrifice (particularly of the Passover lamb). People would have traveled great distances, and would have needed to buy animals upon arrival at the Temple. The money changers would have changed Roman coinage into permissible Temple coinage to facilitate those purchases. Jesus’ act would have been a threat to the whole purpose of the festival. The Synoptics place the act at the end of Jesus’ ministry, and it is likely that such an act would have brought about Jesus’ end almost immediately.
John, however, uses a device I call “parentheses,” where he mentions something that piques the readers’ interest (like a vision of angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man) just to leave it hanging until later in the Gospel (the angels in the empty tomb). Here, of course, the parenthesis is obvious: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will resurrect it (that’s the Greek word he uses).” John even gives us the interpretative framework — after his resurrection, his disciples remembered his word.
For John, Jesus’ death and resurrection replace the Temple as the site of God’s intercourse with the created order. Jesus’ resurrected Body is the new Temple. And, of course, Jesus’ resurrected individual body is not longer accessible, Jesus having gone to be with the Father. The Body implied is the Christian community, just as it is in Paul (Do you not know that your (plural) body (singular) is the Temple of Holy Spirit among you? 1 Corinthians 6:19). And, of course, the Johannine community would have known of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE as the confirming sign of Jesus’ replacement of the Temple.
In the reading from 1 Corinthians, Paul is setting his audience up for his scathing critique of their wisdom and knowledge. In the opening of the letter, he has thanked God for the grace bestowed on them, enriching them in every way, in all discourse and knowledge. Ah, but God has destroyed the wisdom of the wise. The cross is foolishness to most, but to us, it is the power of God. Jews demand signs (of God’s power) and Greeks demand wisdom. The cross upends both, unless one can see it as the power and wisdom of God. As the letter develops, Paul will make it clear that such insight requires forgoing one’s own power and wisdom on for the interest of the Body. God has accepted the worst that humanity can do into the very heart of the divine, and changed it there to the power of the resurrection. To share that power, we, too, just expand our horizons to the whole of creation, and be trained to see as God sees. Who are you, Paul will ask, to put a stumbling block in the way of someone for whom Christ has died?
Jesus’ death and resurrection are the sign of God’s inversion of our human structures of power and knowledge. Righteousness comes only through that inversion. The violence and extremism we see around us are surely signs that our human structures of power and knowledge lead only to more of the same.