7th March 2021
Exodus 20.1-17; 1 Corinthians 1.18-25; John 2.13-22
+ May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Why are we given this text from Exodus, with the Ten Commandments, those weighty ‘Ye shall nots’ engraved on stone and sometimes still seen in churches painted up on whitewashed walls or wooden tablets, alongside the Gospel of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple? We might think, well, in the Gospel passage is where we see a raging, an angry Jesus—even an Old Testament Jesus, incensed against a people turned astray. That language, this passage, may trouble us, those who have seen the God of love revealed in Christ. We may see that it is righteous anger—the anger that confronts injustice wherever it sees it across the world. The courage that stands up to the powers that be. But we return to the ‘why’? What sense do they make alongside one another?
The Ten Commandments are not simply negative admonishments: Do nots, nos. They are safeguards of the infinitely precious. There is only one that explicitly talks about keeping something holy—the sabbath day—but in effect each and every one is about a hallowing. Everything about who God is is precious, and should not be confused or misled by loving other things. name is precious.Life is precious. Our parents are precious. Marriage and commitment to another is precious. Respect for one another and for what each other love and need is precious. Above all, our hearts, and their direction and trust—whom they love and believe in—is precious. Behind all the ‘do nots’ are these things we treasure.
Jesus, in the temple, is re-asserting this preciousness in the heart of where it should be held holy. He is righting the wrong of an idolatry of money and possession that seeps into the heart of the most sacred.
Jesus is also, as the disciples immediately see, far from doing something self-evidently ‘strong’, ‘aggressive’ or ‘powerful’. They immediately read his actions through the words of Psalm 69 when they quote from it ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’ — in which the speaker is one reviled, insulted and outcast by reason of his faithful actions, who is left nearly helpless, crying out for God’s help. It is precisely these actions of Jesus which put him in extreme danger from the powers-that-be and the mob of which we are a part. We look ahead to the cross.
But we have also heard that ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness stronger than human strength’. And Christ asserts that although he pulls over tables which may in the end fall on his own head, there is nothing empty, self-obsessed or self-destructive about his behaviour. For casting himself into God’s hands as he does, indicting the practices of the time as he does, he nonetheless makes a promise full of hope and reconciliation. Whatever destruction comes, even destruction and desecration of the most holy, by God’s power and God’s love there is restoration and resurrection.
That is the Gospel reality we take with us today. That no action in hope of a better world is futile. That no piece of love or generosity or assertion of truth is every truly cast to the winds. That no life given is wasted. It helps us, I think, to persevere at this point in Lent, at this point in our journey in life and in pandemic times, with all to which we are committed and attempting to live out. May we too be fearless turners of tables, proclaimers of the foolishness of the cross, and believers in the unbelievable hope of resurrection.
yours,
Arabella
Revd Dr Arabella Milbank Robinson