Standing Under the Scriptures
March 22, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Number 21.4-9: The Lord commands Moses to make an image of a serpent, which when held aloft will cure the Israelites of their snake bites.

John 3.14-21: Jesus uses the serpent image in speaking to Nicodemus of the saving power of his own lifting up on the cross.

Last Sunday our two readings were Paul’s setting of the foolishness and weakness of God over against the world’s wisdom and power and John’s account of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, In both readings there was a challenge to the world’s ways, against all odds. Unusually, we began our consideration with the second.

The three synoptic Gospels, Mathew, Mark, and Luke, place the cleansing of the temple in the finale to Jesus’ public ministry, just after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In John, however, it comes near the beginning, preceded only by the changing of water into wine at Cana. We discussed the possible reasons for John’s displacement from the synoptic position, which would appear chronologically probable. One of them was his desire to mark from the outset Jesus’ conflict with the religious establishment, a recurrent theme in his Gospel. Another was that the cleansing was in itself a messianic act, establishing Jesus’ identity. Jesus’ changing of the water into wine may be viewed as similarly messianic, conveying the imparting of the Spirit into a tradition now inert, no longer infused with life.

We went on to the content of the passage. It begins by speaking of Jesus going up to Jerusalem for the Passover, in conformity with a major Jewish tradition. But in the temple there he sees what is at variance to the tradition: sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves for sacrifice and changers of money into the temple coin. A class member suggested that he considered these activities, and the worship practices they facilitated, to be inherently unjustified. Against this, however, the Letter to the Hebrews builds on them in its argument for the efficacy of his sacrifice on the cross. Still he must have thought them to have got seriously out of hand. And his response is to expel them from the temple. We discussed whether his use of a whip of cords constituted an exception to his non-violence everywhere else, thus undermining the impressive case that Richard Hays has made for his pacifism. I noted, though, that the whip could be taken as applied to the cattle and sheep but not to people involved. Further, he only told the dove-sellers to take them away. And he overturned the money-changers tables, not the money-changers themselves.

Naturally the “Jews,” the religious authorities, react to so deep an affront. They do so by demanding the sign entitling him to do these things, namely the sign that he is the Messiah, who alone would be so authorized. He responds with what in Matthew (12.39) and Luke (11.29) he terms the sign of Jonah and what he says is the only sign that will be given to “this generation:”: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” This is a double entendre, which the “Jews” take to refer to the material temple, mocking him for so speaking of what had been forty-six years abuilding. (In chapter 3 Nicodemus similarly misunderstands Jesus.) But he was speaking of “the temple of his body” and thus of his death and resurrection

Finally, we noted the connection that the disciples made between Jesus’ action and Psalm 69.9: “Zeal for they house will consume me,” and that, after the resurrection, “they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” This points to their biblical framework, with which they were imbued, as enabling them to comprehend and assimilate this event, which otherwise would only have confused them. Similarly, the biblical framework with which in our class we aim to become imbued can enable us to comprehend what befalls us, in our own lives and in the world around us, and to respond appropriately.

1 Corinthians 1.18-25, our other reading, had a similar note of messianic defiance, of uncompromising challenge to the world’s way. In it Paul admits that his gospel, his preaching of Christ crucified, is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, But instead of apologizing for it he glories in it. He quotes Isaiah 29.14 to the effect that God will destroy the wisdom of the wise and thwart the cleverness of the clever. He points to the futility of the wise man, the scribe, and the “debater of this age” in that their wisdom did not lead to true knowledge of God. (He had reference, evidently to the penchant of Greeks for discussion and debate.) Instead it is the foolishness of God in the form of Christ’s cross which brought this knowledge, not to everybody but to those who were called, to those who believe, both Jews and Greeks. For them Christ is inherently both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Only those who are perishing fail to receive him. With special defiance he declares that “The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, and the weakness of God is stronger than the power of men.”

How was Paul able to make such statements, flying as they do in the face of all logic? How was Tertullian, a century and a half later, able to echo them in his, Credo quia impossibile---I believe because it is impossible? Did these two have a real basis for what they said or were mainly just whistling in the dark? In fact they had a basis, the strongest of all. This is that the world, indeed the universe in all its material, moral, and spiritual aspects, takes is origin from God. There is no other source which on examination accounts sufficiently for it. Therefore God accords with the grain of the universe or, rather, the grain of the universe accords with God. Anything that diverges from him, insofar as it diverges, must be found wanting. Hence the insufficiency of worldly wisdom in its worldliness.

Our two passages, in their boldness in confronting the ways of the world, issue a double challenge to us. Firstly, they place us under judgment insofar as we have conformed to worldly ways rather than those of God, insofar as we have relied on worldly wisdom rather than God’s. But also they confer on us an obligation to speak and to act against such ways in their divergence from God’s. This does not mean that we are to reject all institutional structures, all exercise of our critical faculties---on the contrary, for such things are good rather than bad in themselves. But it does point to the need to ensure that they are harnessed to God’s purposes and do not become ends in themselves. And God’s purposes are not those which have been humanly attributed to him but, instead, those which he himself has revealed, in Scripture.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted