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3rd Sunday of Lent
March 8, 2015
Reading I: Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11
Reading II: 1 Corinthians 1:22-25
Gospel: John 2:13-25
Reading 1
In those days, God delivered all these commandments:
“I, the LORD, am your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery.
You shall not have other gods besides me.
You shall not carve idols for yourselves
in the shape of anything in the sky above
or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;
you shall not bow down before them or worship them.
For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God,
inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness
on the children of those who hate me,
down to the third and fourth generation;
but bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation
on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the LORD, your God, in vain.
For the LORD will not leave unpunished
the one who takes his name in vain.
“Remember to keep holy the sabbath day.
Six days you may labor and do all your work,
but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD, your God.
No work may be done then either by you, or your son or daughter,
or your male or female slave, or your beast,
or by the alien who lives with you.
In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth,
the sea and all that is in them;
but on the seventh day he rested.
That is why the LORD has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother,
that you may have a long life in the land
which the LORD, your God, is giving you.
You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,
nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass,
nor anything else that belongs to him.”
Gospel
Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves,
as well as the money changers seated there.
He made a whip out of cords
and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen,
and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables,
and to those who sold doves he said,
“Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
His disciples recalled the words of Scripture,
Zeal for your house will consume me.
At this the Jews answered and said to him,
“What sign can you show us for doing this?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews said,
“This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,
and you will raise it up in three days?”
But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
Therefore, when he was raised from the dead,
his disciples remembered that he had said this,
and they came to believe the Scripture
and the word Jesus had spoken.
While he was in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover,
many began to believe in his name
when they saw the signs he was doing.
But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all,
and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.
GOD DOES NOT PLAY FAVOURITES
This will be about the Covenant, again. As John places the clearing of the traders from the temple in the first visit Yeshua made to Jerusalem during his years of public ministry, alongside the wedding feast at Cana, I see both of these episodes as introducing the New Covenant and the whole gospel as explaining it. The wedding banquet is a favourite image of the 'heavenly' culmination, and cleaning up the the temple business is a necessary step in that direction. Some people would see it even as a charter to clean up the financial systems of our world, but that is a bridge too far for me to reach.
Looking at the first reading, I think we can take commandments Nos. 5 to 10 as common to all organised societies, while the first four are particular to the revelation or inspiration that animates the Hebrew-Christian ideal. We can, in fact look simply at the first part of the first commandment and see it as a proclamation of the covenant:
I, the LORD, am your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery.
You shall not have other gods besides me.
There are a number of accounts of the covenant being proclaimed in Moses' encounters with Yahweh, and celebrated with the people, especially in Exodus 24, 32 - 34. But I want to look more closely at what the covenant entails, at what it implies, and what must be excluded from its meaning.
*****
This is a factor that gives agnostics a head start in the honesty stakes, that they are free from the hold the Fates may have on those who believe in them, and not enthralled by the ancient or modern myths that captivate the religious mind. Not that there is anything wrong with mythological stories of the gods blessing puny humans, just as long as we don't get tickets on ourselves as being the favoured ones. There are no favourites with God. There can't be. Perfect justice must show impartiality to each and all, and if 'god' means anything it must be that 'god' is completely right, perfect justice.
And this presents a problem for the Covenant. Did not God choose Abram and call him, promising to make him the father of a great people? And did not Yahweh-God promise to Moses that the people who accepted his covenant and its statutes would be his Chosen People? And did not Yeshua himself say to his disciples: You have not chosen me but I have chosen you? How could any of this work unless these are favoured people, Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Mary the mother of Jesus, John the loved disciple, Mary Magdalene among so many?
There are two points to be made here: 1. No one is chosen on their merits, nor for anything they have that makes them more attractive to God than any other person. This already cuts the ground from under the notion of favourites, because among us when a teacher or leader or parent has a favourite it is for some attractive quality in the one chosen.
2. None of these mentioned were chosen just for their own sake. Each one was chosen or selected for a mission, because there was something to be done, or even just to be a sign to others. Without doubt, in this they were heavenly endowed and blessed, but still God is not favouring them more than the child born in poverty in the slums in some forgotten place.
We are familiar enough with the first idea. It is fundamental to the teaching of humility. Paul somewhere says: What have you got that you have not been given? God is the giver of all gifts. We cannot glory in any qualities or achievements of our own since they are not of our making.
The second idea might be the more cogent, I think, in helping us to keep our balance in this heady business of trying to live a godly life or trying to be a force for good in the world. If we are chosen it is not for our sake, not for us to enjoy being chosen or glory in it, but that we be a sign to others. Abraham was blessed and the blessing is for all humankind. The Chosen People are to be a sign, a light, to all nations, to show the way to the real god, the One Living God.
In passing, I might mention that there are false gods and there are make-believe gods. The latter, used by the state as a means of controlling the people, have been swept away in the Middle East, the Mediterranean World, and Europe first by Christianity and then by Islam. But fake gods are more persistent - Money, Power, Racial Superiority, Physical Beauty and Strength, Science, Mathematics and the rest. These are the gods we still build temples to.
The disciples were chosen to be witnesses, not just reporters or theological interpreters, but living testimony to the One who lived and died by the truth. To do that, you've got to be that, so it's not surprising that most of us opt for the easier kind of 'witnessing' that settles for a lot of talking, or organising things like churches that we think will do the witnessing in some corporate way.
*****
Getting back to the covenants. In spite of all the hype about being the People of God, heirs in Christ to the promises made to Abraham, pure logic demands that we recognise all people as equal before God, each person being as acceptable to the Heavenly Father as any other. And this before any 'being Christian' or 'being Jewish' or 'being Muslim' or 'being agnostic' or 'being secular scientist' or 'philosopher' comes into play.
Equal!
It happened, when I was working through these ideas this week, that a few lines from Karl Rahner s.j., were posted on the Forum. They set down this same principle, that God communicates with each and every individual before any religious sacramental action happens, before any church membership has occurred:
We are not people who have nothing to do with God, who do not receive grace and in whom the event of God’s self-communication does not take place until we receive the sacraments [e.g. before baptism - TL]. Wherever a person accepts one’s life and opens oneself to God’s incomprehensibility and lets oneself fall into it, and hence wherever one appropriates one’s supernatural transcendentality in interpersonal communication, in love, in fidelity, and in a task which opens one even to the inner-worldly future of humanity and of the human race, there is taking place the history of the salvation and the revelation of the very God who communicates Godself to humanity, and whose communication is mediated by the whole length and breadth and depth of human life.
I feel I ought to apologise for those strings of long words, but then I am not the translator. I believe the words I have highlighted in bold are saying this: Whenever one of us, anyone, recognises that life is more than 'me, me, me', whenever anyone recognises another person, in love, in faithfulness, and recognises his or her own place within the human family, then God is communicating with that person... Rahner's point is that this takes place before any 'church' thing happens.
The promises to Abraham and Moses, re-affirmed on a spiritual level by Yeshua, are made to all people and are prior to any church affiliation. God is on the side of every person. In a word, to be a member of a church does not put you on a higher level than the non-member occupies. You are not chosen to be a church member for your own sake but for a mission - to be a sign of God's intentions for everyone.
The sting in the tail of this is that if you screw up, if you are not a sign of goodness along the lines of Yeshua's goodness, if you make religion a cosy little world of your own or a career path to power and prestige, then you'll be a counter-sign, a negative, not only worthless but actually counter-productive. We need look no further for reasons why people are walking away from churches.
Here we find the serious agnostic-by-choice (as against the one who hasn't really thought much about all this) may be more honest, more true, and a more effective sign of the truth than the unfaithful or simply inconsistent religious person.
Unless your righteousness is better than that of the pharisees [the serious religious people of the day]... you won't even be part of God's realm, while the many who simply live honest lives will sit down at the banquet.
And so we come back to a couple of contributions in last weeks reflection thread. Brian Coyne wrote:
The other perplexing thing about this entire "Providence" business is that it seems to have associated with it a huge element of randomness or chance. Providence doesn't seem to be doled out in any just or fair way, at least from our point of view... Why couldn't God make a fairer and simpler world?
Any attempt to answer this, I think, has to say something about God's justice and righteousness being of another order. It's hard, obviously, if you're the one under someone's heal to believe that you are just as good as the fellow standing on you, but you are! There are plenty of examples where this truth has given strength to the oppressed. The man standing before the firing squad will be at peace if he knows the one holding the gun, or the one giving the order to shoot, is no better than he. The poor are not blessed in the misery of being poor. Their blessing is in not wearing the curse of wealth and the crime of not sharing what they have been given, for it was given to be shared. So the poor are more likely to be honest. Just as the agnostic may be more honest that the pious religious person.
James also wrote:
But so many good people, brought up in the faith, followed all the rituals and prayers and keeping the commandments, and were so convinced of the truths of the faith that they ended up devoting their whole lives to its spread, ended up saying: our hearts are restless until we realised that Thou art not there.
They have done a partial reverse of St. Augustine, but it can hardly be said that they then fell into living dissolute lives. They simply changed course, and while following the essential Christian ethic, ditched even the most basic doctrine expressed in the first six words of the creed, plus all the rest of it.
Just what they ditched, in general, is not something we can know or care about. That they are honest and true is far more important than whether they are labelled as 'fallen away catholics', protestants, heretics or agnostics. They are living examples of the Covenant promises and, in Yeshua's terms, lights shining in the darkness showing the way to the realm of God.
We can let John have the last word this week:
While he was in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover,
many began to believe in his name when they saw the signs he was doing.
But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all,
and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.
He understood it well. I think perhaps the writer of these lines understood it too by that time, after reflecting on the time he'd had with Yeshua, 50 years or more further down the track. But society as a whole and the churches don't seem to have made much progress. We're only just beginning - still.
Tony Lawless