Hilton Head Island, SC – March 10, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:11-14,20-26; 11:15-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. – Mark 11:15 (RSV)
Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the ecclesiastical season of Lent. Throughout Lent I will be preaching a series of sermons about Holy Week as it is recalled in the Gospel of Mark.
The Gospel of Mark was the first of the four New Testament Gospels to be written. Scholars speculate that it was written sometime between the years 60 and 70 AD or CE, depending on your choice of nomenclature. Whoever wrote Mark was the least skilled writer among the four “evangelists,” or gospel writers. His style is very simple. For example, he loved the word “and,” as you can see by reading the sermon text. Furthermore, as a percentage of the words in his Gospel, Mark says more about what Jesus did and less about what he said than any of the other three Gospels. That is, Mark seems to focus more heavily on the deeds of Jesus and less on the actual words which Jesus spoke during his three-year public ministry. I do not note this as a value judgment, but simply as a literary fact.
Mark begins his recollection of Holy Week in the first verse of chapter eleven with an account of the Palm Sunday processional, in which Jesus rode into Jerusalem to the acclamation of a sizeable crowd. Six Sundays from now we will return to that when we come to Palm Sunday, but from this Sunday until that one we shall look at a sequence of several events that Mark tells us happened between Palm Sunday and Easter. They are his version of the Eight Days That Transformed the World.
In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus drove out the money changers from the temple very late in his ministry, immediately after he came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In John that event occurred in the second chapter of John’s Gospel, as one on the earliest events recorded about Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Why would there be such a disparity between the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospel? Scholars have long debated that, and whatever conclusion you may come to personally, you will have scholarly support for your position from somebody.
In either sequence, whether the so-called “cleansing” of the temple occurred early or late in Jesus’ ministry, it is obvious that he had previously given much thought to what he intended to do when he came to Jerusalem. He wanted to make a visible and symbolic statement by his actions. What Jesus did was like what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did years ago when he went up on the Temple Mount on a Friday, the holy day of the Muslims. He wanted to provoke the Palestinians. It was like anti-abortion advocates parading outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building when Roe vs. Wade was being decided decades ago, or like pro-choice people parading when cases seeking to curtail Roe vs. Wade were being heard by the Supreme Court.
In other words, what Jesus did in driving out those who bought and sold sacrificial animals and those who changed money in the temple was a major symbolic religious and political statement. He was strongly expressing disapproval of practices which had been going on in the temple for ten centuries and the religious politics which supported the concept of animal sacrifice. What specifically, we might therefore ask, was his opposition?
To understand that, we need to review why the temple was built in the first place. It was King Solomon who ordered the construction of the temple. This occurred about nine and a half centuries before the time of Jesus. The rationale for the temple was laid out by Moses in the Torah, especially in the books of Leviticus and Numbers.. The central feature of the temple was a large altar, upon which the priests sacrificed animals. Sacrifice was intended visibly and symbolically to nullify the sins of the people.
From the time of Solomon on, there was an ongoing controversy between the priests and the prophets. The prophets believed the Israelites needed to hear the word of God, which they believed is what they preached. Then the people were expected affirmatively to respond to it. The priests believed the Israelites needed to have their sins taken away, and that could happen only if they had the priests sacrifice animals on their behalf. This meant that everyone, even the poorest of people, had to buy a bird or animal for sacrifice. Then they had to pay a priest to sacrifice it. No one but a priest could do that.
To equate this controversy to contemporary times, Protestant preachers preach longer in general than Catholic priests (and some of us much longer!). Many Protestants disparage Catholics who go to confession every week, receive absolution, and then go off to sin again with what the Protestants allege to be liberated abandon. Many of us are especially mystified by Ash Wednesday, when Catholics appear (in public no less!) with a cross on their foreheads smeared there by a priest. This is our unresolved prophet/priest theological struggle.
Jesus perceived himself to be a prophet. He could not have been a priest. Priests had to be related to tribe of Levi or to be descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron. Apparently Jesus concluded that the temple had become essentially a commercial operation with no theological underpinnings at all. He saw it as nothing more than a money-making endeavor to enrich the priests.. When he stormed into the temple, overturned the tables, and drove out the money changers, he was expressing in a visibly dramatic fashion his opposition to the very notion of animal sacrifice as a means of achieving a proper relationship with God. Only proper convictions and actions could achieve that, according to Jesus.
Centuries before Jesus, Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had all excoriated both prophets and priests for being false proponents of the God of Israel. “The priest and prophet reel with strong drink,” said Isaiah, “they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment” (28:7). Hosea declared, “As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests are banded together” (6:9). “From prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely,” Jeremiah said, and then he repeated the same blistering indictment once again in a later chapter (6:13, 8:10). Ezekiel railed, “Disaster comes upon disaster, rumor follows rumor; they seek a vision from the prophet, but the law perishes from the priest, and counsel from the elders” (7:26).
Greatly to over-generalize, priests may see the glass half-full, while prophets ordinarily see it nine-tenths empty. Jesus was a prophet. He believed that the Judean religious establishment had become corrupt, and that establishment was most clearly represented in the most important physical entity of Judaism, namely, the temple in Jerusalem. Therefore when Jesus rode into the city on that long ago Sunday, he came “loaded for bear,” as we would say. He wanted to attack the religious powers head on, and that he did with white-hot abandon.
By symbolically turning the institution of the priesthood upside down, Jesus also intentionally confronted the most obviously powerful element of the Jewish religion. Prophets have never been an organized religious guild. In the history of the world, there was never a Fraternal Order of the Divinely-Designated Prophets of God, nor will there ever be one. In both Judaism and Christianity there have always been priests, but prophets come and go. Only God determines who they are and where they go. At least that is how prophets understand the process.
In the religion of the Jews, the high priest was the most important person in the entire priestly hierarchy. He was not like a bishop or archbishop or cardinal; he was like the pope. In Latin, he was the pontifex maximus, which means “the highest priest.” By upsetting the central elements of temple worship, Jesus was also deliberately attacking the high priest, and he knew it.
We know from all four of the Gospels that the high priest at the time Jesus was crucified was a man named Caiaphas. Apparently he was member of one of the wealthiest families in Jerusalem. So not only was Jesus locking horns with the highest leader in official Judaism, but he also was pitted against one of the richest men in the land. In Jesus’ lifetime the most influential priests were analogous to the men of the highest council of priests in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. They are some of the wealthiest members of the Mormon Church. When a high religious position is yoked with great wealth, it is as formidable barrier for religious reformers to overcome. What ultimately happened to Jesus was almost a certainty, based on what happened in the temple on Palm Sunday.
Traditionally, the temple incident has often been called “the cleansing of the temple.” Some scholars, perhaps with less political correctness but more historical accuracy, call it “the temple tantrum.” Jesus deliberately went “over the top” to express his strong disapproval of what the ritual of sacrifice had become in the most important physical setting in Judaism. In so doing, he set in motion a series of events which resulted inevitably in his death within only five days.
Two thousand years of ecclesiastical history have resulted in Christians perceiving Jesus as God Incarnate, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Savior of the World, and the Messiah. Whether Jesus perceived himself to hold any of those titles has long been debated, and will continue to be debated until the end of time. But there seems to be no doubt that in whatever other roles Jesus conceived himself, he may have believed himself to be primarily a Jewish reformer of Judaism. Of all the things he said and all the actions he took throughout his three-year ministry, what he said and did in the temple on Palm Sunday is the clearest indication of his insistence on reform. His anger in the temple thrilled many of the common people, because they felt greatly burdened by the priests, but it enraged most of the Jewish religious authorities. The acclamation of the first group could not overcome the fierce reaction of the latter group. The temple priests became instant allies of the Romans in opposing what they considered to be the outrageous actions of the brash young Galilean.
Maybe we can best grasp the magnitude of what Jesus did in the temple by comparing it to two other movements. The first is the Protestant Reformation under Martin Luther, and the second is something which is currently being played out in the United Methodist Church.
When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, he had no idea he was starting something which would transform western Christendom forever. He wanted to reform the Roman Church, but he had no intention of leaving it. However, Luther’s effort at ecclesiastical reformation lasted the rest of his relatively long life. Jesus’ efforts were to last only four full days after Palm Sunday.
For the past three decades, how Protestant denominations have dealt with the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage, and ordination of gay or lesbian clergy or other church officers has been severely tested. To one degree or another, the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, American Baptist, and Disciples of Christ Churches have all either completely or partially split over these questions. For over fifteen years the United Methodist Church has wrestled back and forth, trying at least partially to satisfy everyone while completely satisfying no one. As a result of its recent denominational conclave, it appears its American congregations shall split apart. That also may occur in some of its thousands of congregations elsewhere in the world.
Reform never comes easily. It always brings pain and heartache, both to those who favor it and those who oppose it. The levels of stress it produces vary from one situation to another and from one time period to another. Reformers often make mistakes in their tactics. Calling the temple “a den of robbers” was a phrase not likely to make friends and influence people. The fact is that Jesus did little to transform the religion he served and loved for his entire, if also brief, life. And, like Luther, what he unintentionally accomplished was the establishment of an entirely new religious institution, closely related to but different from the one he had attempted to reform.
Later in Mark’s account of Holy Week, he has Jesus referring to the destruction of the temple in the near future. Matthew and Luke give more expansive details about that same episode. It is unlikely Jesus said anything about it, but the early Christians knew about Jesus’ temple incident, and, in retrospect, they probably concluded the Roman obliteration of Jerusalem and its temple was somehow related to what Jesus had done on Palm Sunday.
What did God and Jesus want with respect to the temple and its rituals? Christianity believed they both wanted the temple to be a place for worship more than for sacrifice. Jews believed God wanted it to be a place primarily of sacrifice, until the temple no longer existed, in which case most Jews realized they had to live without a temple. However, a few wanted --- and some still want --- the temple to be rebuilt.
What does God want with respect to homosexual ordination or gay marriage, or abortion or birth control or scriptural interpretation or climate change? On those issues Christians are obviously and vociferously divided. Reform never comes easily.
From the moment Jesus engaged in his angry temple tantrum, the great majority of the Jewish religious establishment coalesced to determine that his reform movement must never gain a foothold. Indirectly Jesus influenced Judaism from then on to some degree, and indirectly Jesus was the founder of an entirely new religion. That did not become evident until the second century of the Common Era, however. It was his followers, and particularly a man named Saul of Tarsus, who were the real founders of Christianity.
“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” We see that in the so-called cleansing of the temple, the remaining events of Holy Week, and in the astonishing events recorded in the remainder of the New Testament. To quote from another excellent if also relatively unknown hymn, “God is working His purpose out, as year succeeds to year.”