Year B
John 2:13-22
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Gospel of Paradox
In this season of Lent, we are week by week approaching the foot of the cross on Golgotha. We may wonder sometimes why it is necessary to make that journey with Jesus to watch him die on a cross. It certainly does not seem very beckoning. Yet, God is known in the cross and all our texts today affirm that the God of creation and scripture is especially known in the cross. There we see divine power and divine love in the hands of humanity’s attempt to justify the world’s understanding of power. The God of the cross shows us a different kind of power and our lessons today combine to say that the Christian life is a process of showing this different kind of power by seeking out the injustices, the wrongs, and the weaknesses within ourselves and our society.
Empowered and guided by the Holy Spirit we are able to identify what is ill and dysfunctional in the world and in our lives, and given the power to change. To seek forgiveness and accept renewal always keeping in view the fact that we can never be pure of sin and left to our own strength, we can do nothing to change ourselves. Yet, we are to seek and to commit to driving out anything that keeps us from God, our true selves and others. Knowing the God of the cross as our texts tells us today means entering, again, into the strength of weakness and into the wisdom of foolishness. It means repenting, again, of our attempts to seek power and wisdom over and against others.
Therefore, our first response today as we read the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments might well be “Lord, we are aware that we have broken your laws and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. From a pastoral point of view, this week’s Exodus reading should not be received as a burden but as a gift, as an opportunity to grow deeper in relationship with God in Christ. Particularly in Lent when we are called to reflect on all the ways our lives do not embody the kingdom and fall short of Christ-likeness, this text provides a roadmap of faith on the journey toward Jerusalem. It is appropriate that we read the story of the Ten Commandments after hearing the story last week of God creating a covenant with Abraham and Sarah.
Israel has been redeemed from slavery in Egypt, she has escaped across the desert to the foot of Mount Sinai, and she has heard that God has elected her to be his special people—his holy nation and his kingdom of priests. In response to all of that favor of God, Israel has promised, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” We have most likely made the same sort of promises to God. Then, we come to the Ten Commandments, and like Israel, we learn just exactly what it is that the Lord requires of us as his followers. These commandments from God are not laid upon us as some sort of legalistic rules, so that we must obey them in order to have a relationship with God. We already have a relationship with God as Israel did.
We already know that God loves us and chooses us, as Israel knew. And yet, these commandments are not just suggestions either. They lay out for us what God expects of us now that we have received his redeeming, saving mercy. They show us how to love God in return for God’s love and mercy toward us. We are expected to obey with the help of God’s Spirit as our grateful response to all that the Lord has done for us. And Paul today develops an understanding of the commandments that are included within the understanding of the gospel, as paradox. God wants a commandment obeying community or counter-cultural community who witness to a paradoxical gospel.
Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthian church with an appeal to mend the divisions that have developed among the members of that community. This then leads him into a discussion of the cross and what it proclaims. The whole passage plays with the contrast between wisdom and foolishness. He asserts that the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but power to the believers. We see God’s power in the failure and powerlessness of Christ. God takes on foolishness and makes it wise. The cross does not deny the reality of death. It reinforces it and denies it is the end of the story. The false wisdom of the world seeks to keep us from the inevitability of death.
The cross becomes the “corrective lens” that permits us to see God for who God truly is, and earthly things for what they are. The cross is the pivot on which everything turns that reverses the world’s way of seeing value. The strong are weak, the weak are strong. The text challenges us to think again about what it means to say that the cross stands at the center of what it means to be people of faith. When we are tempted by our own aspiring to power or claim a god of power, we are confounded by the God who enters into the weakness of all weakness and transforms it into a different kind of strength.
Jesus today sees the buying and selling in the temple, as compromising this true wisdom and power of God and insulting the worship of God. Entering the temple, Jesus discovered the ways of the world had invaded the temple. What he saw was an outrage. A false religion we might say and a false religion rejects a weak God, hence the rejection of Jesus as the true temple and the cross. Jesus’ actions in the temple are about confronting injustice, and hypocrisy; desiring to have wrongs righted and God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven.
John, of all the gospel writers, records Jesus’ cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry instead of at the end as the other gospel writers, to define his messianic power and purpose. Writing this many decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, John is writing to help the people of God see that their proper focus is not to be entirely on matters established by the world, but on Jesus and what Jesus would have us be about. In Lent, this is a time to remind the church that its passion is its abiding love for God and the things of God. A religion, that informs how we should live all of the time; how we should relate to our neighbor; how we should understand our purpose.
Harry Fosdick a Presbyterian pastor once wrote: “The real God is Purpose, hard at work getting something done on earth to redeem our race from its sin and misery, calling every man to some task which, in the place where he is put, no one can do his stead. Church of Christ, the proclamation of such faith is your task today. You fritter away your strength on trivial sectarianisms. You insult the intelligent and alienate the serious with petty dogmatisms that do not matter. You fiddle trifling tunes while the world burns. But back of it all, still the glory of the true church within the church, is a message without which mankind is doomed. If you really believe the Christian gospel–God behind us, his cause committed to us, his power available for us—then proclaim it, live it, implement it, for humanity’s hope depends upon it.”
It is clear from our texts today that God had in mind from the beginning a covenantal community quite unlike any conventional community for the mending of God’s holy world.