This weekend a lot of Christians around the world will hear in worship the story of Jesus and the cleansing of the Temple.
People these days like to reference the whip of cords that Jesus made to drive out the animals. It comes up in a lot of online debates and discussions.
Jesus fashions the whip from what the original Greek identifies as basket-weaving materials, from reeds. It’s not the sort of whip that led to the deep stripes Jesus or Paul bore.
I wonder how many sermons this weekend will excuse all sorts of human anger and violence in the name of this unusual scene?
James tells us that human anger does not produce the righteousness God seeks. The apostle does not qualify his wisdom. He does not give us caveats where human anger works. Yet this particular human driving animals out of the Temple is God enfleshed. Jesus is the human God and that matters for how we understand and how we use this moment.
God’s zealous desire that his Temple would be a house of prayer for ALL nations, a sacred place of contemplation and quiet within the world, is disturbed by the chaos and greed of a trading floor, corrupted by those trading in the mercies and forgiveness of God as if these were commodities at an exchange, and very often at the expense of the poor who came to make sacrifices. And Jesus cannot stand this or let it stand.
Have you ever tried to pray, to find solitude or to hear God, in a bustling mall or grocery store? It’s not that God cannot speak in places like that but that their goods and bargains and haggling distract us from hearing.
Jesus was angry that the one place in the Temple, the one place in the world, where Gentiles and Jews could together hear the still small voice was loud and crowded with an unholy commerce in things that God gives to all humans freely: love even as we rebel from his ways, pardon even as we humiliate and kill him.
While it’s a great good to have a God who has wrath for our wrongdoing (who is not grateful that child abuse angers our God?) that same wrath in a human who is not God is a precarious—a very fragile and dangerous—thing. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God seeks, especially when the humans in question imagine they are channels for the righteous anger or judgment that belongs to God alone.
On Sinai God reveals that the taking of human life not only meets his fiery NO but goes against his very nature as God, that God is not like the hypocritical parent who demands we ignore what he does and do what he says but that his holy commands for us are rather descriptions of his very essence as God, that killing a divine image bearer is so at odds with the grain of the universe that the spilt human blood of any and every human has a unique property: our blood cries out to God for reckoning.
What a thin reed we grasp when we use this Temple story to support our drones, our laser-guided missiles, our tanks, our handheld weapons of mass destruction—even (I hear this too often) our atom bombs; to excuse our making of wars, to underwrite our trust in armaments, to give endless permission to our anger.
So much hangs on so little. We literally grasp at straws when we use this whip Christ fashioned to support our violence on the back of Jesus, when the cross this story of whips points to—the destruction of the temple of Jesus’s body by Rome’s vicious whips and on Rome’s version of an electric chair—is a renunciation of all human violence, of violence itself.
We can keep defending ourselves and protecting our lives and fighting by worldly means, and perhaps God will allow us to do so for a very long time, for something close to the “world without end” we invoke in the Liturgy, but what if what it means for the body of Christ to reach perfection, to come to the full stature of the measure of Christ, is to decide instead to lay down our collective life for the life of the world on the pattern of Jesus, as the first Christians did, and see God raise us up from death’s icy grip with the glorious, never-ending temple of the Son on the third day?
Is there a final moment in history when instead of fighting the Antichrist, instead of taking up arms against the penultimate Hitler or the final ISIS or whatever form death’s last great tyranny takes, the church visibly rejects the means and powers of this world, the privilege of self-defense, our idolatry of weapons, and decides instead to beat all our swords and spears into farming tools, chooses to trusts the humility and weakness of God in Jesus Christ to vindicate us—not our armaments and our anger and out right to stand up for ourselves—in order to make manifest an already-accomplished defeat of darkness on Golgotha?
What if the end comes only after an unprecedented and great slaughter of Christians, after a worldwide crucifixion of the body of Christ, in which after great sacrifice in imitation of her Lord she dies and rises from the ashes of her demise by the Spirit, and God is finally all in all because the cruciform pattern of love that governs the universe and holds all things together and gives all living things breath has been confirmed in a peculiar crucified and resurrected people with Christ as her head?
In the end Jesus tells us we will win not by defending our life, nor by trying to hold on to our privilege, but by giving up our life so that the world might live.
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