The story we read today is an interesting one. It’s one that doesn’t really fit with the picture of Jesus that we usually think about. How does a loving Jesus, who goes around teaching good morals, fit with this violent figure who disrupts a market place, stops temple worship and causes chaos. If we read the similar or same story in the gospel of John which we will be doing on Wednesday we find Jesus making a big whip that he uses to drive the people out of the temple. For most people it just doesn’t fit but it’s just an anomaly. It’s like that last card on the solitaire pile that tells us we’ve made a mistake somewhere and we’re going to have to start again. One story amongst many that we can just leave to the side hoping that at some point someone will explain to us how this fits with the Jesus we know. Except they don’t. You see its not the small innocent story that we might think it is. It is one of the climaxes of Mark, it occurs at the start of Holy week, right after palm Sunday. It is one of a very few stories about Jesus that are found in all the gospels. John, as we will see on Wednesday, uses it as an introduction a story to set the tone, mood and message of what is too come. It is the crucial event which directly leads to Jesus’ death.
In science it is often the small things that cause a paradigm shift. That causes us to abandon our old models of looking at things and have to reconstruct new ones. In the middle of the 19th century physicists thought they had it all figured out, there was actually talk about the death of physics we knew all the basic equations all that was left was engineering for people to make machines using the equations that had already been found. There were just a couple of very minor experiments that remained to be explained, nothing big scale or anything just a few loose ends to tie up. One experiment was shining a light on metal released electrons – not so revolution but the speed with which electrons were released and whether it appeared at all was determined not by the intensity of the light but by the colour. However, this loose end led to the complete abandonment of the old theories as accurate descriptions of the universe and to the the theories of quantum mechanics. To Jesus original disciples this was not precisely this, if you look at the story of Jesus it has all been building up to this moment on the way to the cross. But to us that have this idea of gentle Jesus meek and mild, this serves as that kind of paradigm shifting moment that makes us sit up and ask whether we have the right model after all.
What was Jesus really all about. Yes, he was all about love, but not a wishy washy kind that likes to not think about problems, avoid the issues and hope they will go away. This is a Jesus which sees the problem and is going to do whatever it takes to fix the problem. And in this case the temple is the problem and Jesus is dealing with it. When we actually understand what Jesus was doing it is even more brutal and stark that what it appears in the first place.
So what was Jesus doing in the temple. The surrounding stories, comments and Jesus’ quotation or allusion to the Old Testament are there to give us a clue to let us know what is going on.
Clue 1 we have the story of the fig tree. Again considered in isolation this is a bizarre story. Jesus sees a a fig tree and sees it has no figs so he curses it and it dies. Why, it was not the time of year for figs. The tree had leaves on it which was right for the time of year, why did Jesus curse it. Because he wanted to make it absolutely clear that his disciples understood what was going on in what he did in the temple. You see it wasn’t just that Jesus cursed it, it was that it withered as well. Jesus was giving an object lesson about fruitfulness. Unless something was going to produce the fruit it was supposed to it was going to be destroyed.
Clue 2 when Jesus speaks about what he is doing in the temple he does so by using two quotations from the Old Testament. One from Isaiah and one from Jeremiah. The first is from Isaiah 56:6-8. This speaks about the temple being used not just for Israel but for the whole world. Then we have a quotation from Jeremiah chapter 7 where God complains that his people are not living a godly lifestyle and are worshiping other gods but they believe that God will save them because they have the temple and make sacrifices their. God tells them that this is not the case. If they do not repent then he will destroy the temple.
Clue 3. Jesus tells his disciples that if they tell this mountain to throw itself into the sea then it will be done. Notice he says this mountain. Jesus was obviously pointing at a particular mountain. Their is only one mountain in this context he could possibly be referring to. The mountain that Jerusalem and temple itself were built on, you can see from this computer generated picture that the temple rose up in the middle of Jerusalem. In fact the place where the temple stood and the dome of the rock now stands is known as the temple mount.
So given all of this what can we say about what Jesus was doing in the temple. In the tradition of the old testament prophets Jesus was acting out a parable. He was demonstrating in a small way what was going to happen in a big way. Jesus activity was to stop the temple from functioning, for a brief period no-one could enter and sacrifices would have stopped. The sacrifices were the reason for the existence of the temple. Without the sacrifice the temple had no purpose to exist. Jesus was acting out the destruction of the temple. The setting of the story amidst the withering of the fig tree, a quotation from Jeremiah that talks about the temple being destroyed and then talking about throwing the temple mount into the sea make it absolutely clear that Jesus was demonstrating and talking about the destruction of the temple. It was probably this act that led directly to his crucifixion. Not to say that the authorities didn’t want to do something about him before but this was the final straw. Why? The temple was the heart of Jewish worship but it was also the power base of the Jewish leaders. Jesus was essentially condemning the whole system. We read in other places that Jesus was not just talking about a destruction and rebuilding of the temple but a destruction of the temple and to replace it with himself as the meeting place between God and man where sins could be dealt with.
But the question remains why did Jesus do this. What were the reasons given by Jesus for the destruction of the temple. Again we have three clues. Firstly we have the idea that the fig tree was withered because it was unfruitful suggesting that the temple was going to be destroyed for not fulfilling its purpose. Secondly Isaiah and Jesus told us that the temple was to be a house of prayer for all peoples, not just the Jews. Third and lastly, Jesus refers to the temple as den of robbers. Some have taken this to mean that Jesus thought the traders in the temple were economically exploiting the worshipers by charging to much for the sacrificial animals. But this isn’t what Jesus was on about. It comes from a mis-translation of the word for robber. It can mean robber but not in the case of someone who breaks into your house while you are out and pinches stuff and certainly not daylight robbery in terms of high prices. No if the word is to be translated robber then it is a violent robber who uses violence to weigh lay his victims and beat them up before robbing them. It would be better translated brigand or bandit. But robber may not even be the best translation of the word anyway. The two crucified with Jesus were referred to using the same term. But the Romans didn’t crucify thieves, they were put in prison or sold as slaves they weren’t crucified. That was reserved for those who rebelled against Rome. Barabbas the one who was released in place of Jesus was called by the same term and he was a known leader of a violent uprising by the Jews. While the word originally did mean a violent robber by the time of Jesus it was commonly used with another meaning that is apparent in the Bible and in the first century historian Josephus. It came to mean a violent revolutionary. So summing all this up what reason do we come to for Jesus action.
Put simply Jesus was accusing that Israel as a whole had used its vocation, to be the light of the world, as an excuse for a hard, narrow, nationalist piety and politics in which the rest of the world was to be, not enlightened, but condemned. We can see something of this attitude both in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the tendency to violent revolution through the period in which Jesus lived. The Temple had been intended to symbolise God’s dwelling with Israel for the sake of the world; the way Jesus’ contemporaries had organised things, it had come to symbolise not God’s welcome to the nations but God’s exclusion of them. The temple was the symbol the focus of all the revolutionary movements. The guardians of the temple themselves, the priests were notorious for their rich and oppressive lifestyle.
These two ideas both have one thing in common that we can learn from. The people were more interested in their own position and comfort than in accomplishing God’s mission. They were too selfish, they were God’s elect and instead of taking this as a mission to the world, they took this as a privilege they had to maintain and keep for themselves. And Jesus said they were under judgement.
So what can we learn from this. We can learn the lesson that the Jews of the time seemed to miss. It’s not all about you. This is actually a very hard lesson to learn. I remember during the time I was at NTC, one Christmas I was at home but there was the funeral of the ex-DS in our church so people from NTC were up for it. But since it was Christmas my grandparents were around as well. So afterwards there was my grandparents in deep conversation with the principal. So of course, being the paranoid that I am you ask how could they be talking for so long about me. Actually, it turns out that my grandparents knew the principals wife really really well, they used to go on cycling holidays together in their youths. Sometimes it is hard to forget that it is not all about you.
Or the other example is of politicians. People who are elected to positions to protect or serve the people but they turn their position into one that has prestige and power and all will be done to protect that power.
It is all to easy to take this attitude into the church. Instead of the church being about God’s purposes it can about our own purposes. What are our priorities? Are we just interested in maintaining the status quo. We like things very much the way things are know thank you very much, we don’t anyone coming in and messing up our nice system. We don’t want to have reach out to people who are not like us, who have different ideas about whats going on. Are we the type of people that Jesus basically said were to face judgement because they were more interested in doing what they want and protecting their position then they were about fulfilling God’s purposes. How do we treat our worship. Is it all about us and what we like. Are we just in it for a warm fuzzy feeling we often get. Or are we here as the representative of God to bring his message to the world no matter what the cost. What about when non-Christians come in. What is our attitude are we clamouring to make sure our way of doing things is kept and everything else is secondary. Or is the most important thing that we fulfil God’s purposes and that others learn of him.
On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little lifesaving station. The building was no more than a hut, and there was only one boat; but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea. With no thought for themselves,t hey went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to be associated with the station and gave their time, money and effort to support the work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.
Some of these new members of the lifesaving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those who were saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in this club’s decoration, and there was a memorial lifeboat in the room where the cub initiations were held.
About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick, and some of them were foreigners. The beautiful new club was in chaos. Immediately, the property committee hired someone to rig up a shower house outside the club, where victims of shipwrecked could be cleaned up before coring inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities because they felt they were unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. A small number of members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. The small group’s members were voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives, they could begin their own lifesaving station down the coast. They did.
As the year went by, however, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old station. It evolved into a club, and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks and frequent in those waters, but most of the passengers drown.
Just to make things abundantly clear, this is not a criticism of running social activities in the church in the same way that Jesus was not objecting to people selling stuff in the temple. What I am talking about here is the idea that the church is for us. That we can come every Sunday and expect to get a nice warm fuzzy feeling from coming to church. It’s against the idea that we should do all we can to protect our Church for the way we think it should be and any who disrupt this idea of what our church should be like should be excluded.
We are a church not a social club. That doesn’t mean we can’t do social things, personally I feel we do not do enough social things together, because this is where we can build relationships. But it does mean that the rules are different. We are not here to protect our comfy position, we are here to win others, to welcome them to God.
