The Foolishness of God (March 3)

Readings, 1 Cor 1:18-25 and John 2:13-22
Image, Mirka Mora, Crucifixion (1976)
 
When I was thinking about hymns for today, I was considering, Come as you are. But it felt a funny paired with today’s gospel reading. If anything, “come as you are” could sound a bit like the cool dry wit of a Hollywood action star preparing for a fight. The Jesus of this story feels a little at odds with the pastoral image of the good shepherd, or the compassionate image of the suffering servant, or the hospitable image of Christ at the table. Even our images of Jesus as one who stands for justice, are a little harder to square with this man, fashioning a makeshift whip. So given that this is a picture of Jesus that might cause us some questions, let us consider how we might understand it in its place, and then in our own.
 
First, it is good to establish that Jesus’ act is not unprecedented. To act with prophetic zeal to purify the temple stands in a line with the Jewish/Hebrew prophetic tradition. The protest is not one against the Temple, nor the sacrificial system, but a call for a truer worship, a challenge of the encroachment of the market (and its varying inequities and inequalities). It echoes, in this way, the commission given to Jeremiah by God:
Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim… Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’    
As an act of prophetic zeal, Jesus’ critique nonetheless affirms the Temple as a place in which God’s presence abides.
 
Now, Jesus’ act not only echoes the prophetic tradition. It also reflects the hopes of his people at the time that God would bring forth a a new, purified, indestructible and incorruptible temple. Some hoped God would build this, for others it was their responsibility, while for some it will be the heir of David’s throne, or the Messiah who will establish this glorified temple. Such a desire is understandable. It would likely have been intensified following the seizing and desolation of the Temple by Rome and its reclaiming and purification in the Maccabean revolt some centuries earlier. The temple remained a place that could be taken, could be misused, could be locked from the people, and so in this context there is the hope that a temple shall be raised which could never be destroyed.
 
This all goes some way to explain the response of those in the temple. Because if someone came in here today and chased the elders around with a whip, I can’t say with much confidence that our first question would be: what sign can you show us for doing this? That’s a question born of a history of prophetic reform, and a present hope in renewal.
 
And so, Jesus offers them a sign. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. Of course, no one understands Jesus, not even those closest to him, who as John points out, only make this connection following his resurrection. Because this sign, like the crucifixion and resurrection it is pointing toward, is one which reflects the foolishness of God.
 
This proclamation of Jesus prefigures his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, where Jesus speaks of a coming time where we shall no longer worship in the temple or the mountain, but we shall worship in spirit and truth. Jesus teaches that the temple shall be rebuilt in his own body, which can never be destroyed, for even in death it is raised up. Such teachings would resound with greater profundity for those with fresh memories of the destruction of the temple forty years after Jesus’ death. The promise of the temple abiding in the body of the ascended Christ, gives hope in the face of such a devastating loss.   
 
And yet, such a promise is not without its challenges. It is not easily reached through signs and wisdom. It asks one to accept that the temple which was stone is now found in the body of a man killed on a cross. That like this body which can’t be grasped or seen, our worship too will not be in one holy land or place, but a dispersed spirit and truth.
 
It asks us, in other words, to trust in the foolishness and weakness of God. For what Christ promises is only comprehensible after we have encountered his death and resurrection. It asks us to lay aside the desire for sign and wisdom, and take as the centre of our faith a stumbling block, to take as the ground of our hope an event which by all worldly appearances seems a failure, to take as the justification of our worship that by some divine paradox the crucifixion of Jesus is the site of the power of God. It asks us to confess that this moment in the story, where Jesus has been sentenced by the religious and political powers of his day, condemned by the people of the city, betrayed, denied and abandoned by the bulk of his followers, and cries aloud on a cross that God has abandoned him, is somehow the moment that assures us that when he said he would raise up the temple in three days he was right, that when he said he was sent by the Father to save the world he was right, that when he said that the kingdom of God was near he was right.
 
What’s more, such a foolishness asks us to proclaim of redemption within a world that feels flagrantly unredeemed. Of those other visions of the glorified temple brought on by the messiah, none would have the audacity to claim that this could happen in part. That we could claim the victory of God over sin in a world still riddled with sin, that we could claim the overcoming of evil with good and yet still live in a world wracked by evil. It asks us to claim that Jesus has brought the salvation of the world while all of creation is still groaning out for redemption. This is not an easy path to take, not only in the absence of signs and wisdom, but indeed despite all worldly signs and wisdom pointing to the opposite: the world is unredeemed, the temple, like the body, was not raised up.
 
And so we need something other than signs and wisdom: we need the story of Easter. And to grasp that story we need the season of Lent to prepare once more for the paradoxical foolishness of God who snatches victory through defeat, and glory through humility. We need this season to encounter the cross and the tomb in such a way that they do not prove a stumbling block, but rather reveal the power of God.
 
Like the disciples trying to decipher Jesus’ inscrutable comments, our faith in Christ is made possible by an encounter with his death and resurrection. This encounter cannot be reached through signs and wisdom, but by allowing the weakness of God to work within us. Through ordering feeling, thought, and act, after the way of Christ. It happens as we take up our own cross and come to understand the way to glory is pathed by solidarity, humility, and justice. It happens as we allow the topsy-turvy nature of the kingdom of God to become our vision of the world as it should and will be. It happens, in short, in the act of living after the way of Christ,  accepting the invitation to come as you are: taste, hear, and see the good news of great joy.