March 8, 2015

Stephen Jacobi

Lent 3     Colossians 1:3-5, 15-20     John 2:13-22

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

It’s a long walk from the pew to the pulpit! Now I stand before you mindful of those who have preceded me in speaking words of love and grace, to both powerful and powerless.

“In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:14-16)

This is not Jesus meek and mild. The babe has left the stable and an angry young man displays – at last! – the zealotry his followers hoped he would show but which for three long years he had kept under control. This is the Jesus, the revolutionary, the activist, the protester.

Last year’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar by the Auckland Theatre Company portrayed this scene particularly well. We in the audience were given temple money and as the chorus sang and danced they paraded pictures of the temple authorities and we dutifully filled up their offertory plates.

“Roll on up – for my price is down; Come on in – for the best in town; Take your pick of the finest wine; Lay your bets on this bird of mine”

Jesus had come up from Galilee to Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish political and spiritual identity, and was at the Great Temple, the place where Yahweh dwelled in the Holy of Holies. This was the place Jesus had come as a child with his parents, where he had been recognised as the Messiah by Simeon and Anna, where even as a child he had become engrossed in conversation with the temple teachers. Some thirty years later those pleasant conversations in the temple shade now give way to a different kind of speech. Jesus throughout his ministry always reserved his harshest judgment for the religious authorities, as in St Matthew’s Gospel: “You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”. (Matthew 12:34)

And certainly their hypocrisy is on full display at the Temple. There were businesses established in the Temple courts – doves and sacrificial animals were sold to the faithful and money had to be changed since Roman coins with Caesar’s head on them could not be used in the Temple precinct. What seems to rile Jesus is that the religious observance at the Temple had taken second, or even third, place to these commercial endeavours and worse that these had eclipsed the practice of justice, especially to the ‘alien, the orphan and the widow’ [1] that was central to the Jewish belief system.

But Jesus’ protest is not simply about religion. John Dominic Crossan in God and Empire puts it like this. Jesus’ protest “was not against the Temple as such and not against the High Priest as such. It was a protest from the legal and prophetic heart of Judaism against Jewish religious co-operation with Roman imperial control” [2]

Crossan says that Jesus’ protest was carefully timed and staged for the maximum impact. And Jesus’ target was not just Jerusalem, it was also Rome. It is impossible to understand Jesus of the Gospels without understanding the country and time in which he lived. Jesus was born in extraordinarily violent times. Jesus’ home-town of Nazareth is not far from Sephoris, a city completely destroyed by the Romans and its 30,000 inhabitants either killed or sold into slavery around the time of Jesus’ birth.

As Reza Aslan describes in his book Zealot Jesus must have known about this as he grew up. [3] The Palestine of Jesus was occupied by the Romans and the “pax Romana” which settled over the country was very much a double-edged sword. The Romans’ political power over the country was enforced by the harsh military discipline of Roman legions, a military force quite unlike anything that had preceded it. At the same time the Romans’ ideological power derived from the cult of Caesar and the practice of imperial religion. The cult of Caesar required subjugated peoples to acknowledge that the Roman emperor was a god whose many titles sound familiar to us – “Divine”, “Son of God”, “God from God”, “Lord”, “Redeemer” and “Saviour of the World” [4]. The Romans didn’t require much observance beyond the construction of temples and occasional sacrifices – they didn't themselves have much truck with religion – but this obedience and submission was central to imperial control.

Of course this was anathema to religious Jews for whom even to name the name of God was a blasphemy but the religious authorities had found the means to engage in uneasy but idolatrous co-existence with the Roman occupying power. And this made Jesus really, really angry.

Earlier, as recounted in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had addressed the religious basis of this co-existence when some Pharisees and Herodians, with all the obsequiousness they could muster, asked him the question: “is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor?” The question was a trap because taxes were paid with those coins with the God-Emperor’s head on them, which were exchanged at the Temple. Jesus’ response was to ask for one of those coins, a denarius, and to give an answer which while ambiguous is also full of implication: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17)

Marcus Borg in his very last book Convictions interprets Jesus’s words in this way: “And what belongs to God? The text does not answer this question but the answer is obvious: everything belongs to God. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ as Psalm 24 puts it. And if everything belongs to God, nothing belongs to Caesar” [5]

These words of Jesus are sometimes misinterpreted to assume that Christians need not be concerned about politics. In fact they point to quite the opposite. In Jesus’ time these words were seditious and the belief behind them is ultimately what put Jesus on a collision path with the imperial power and religious authorities of the time.

We see the same issues at play in the reading we heard from St Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Paul is writing to the early Christian community at Colossae in modern day Turkey, still living under pax Romana.

His words describing Jesus need to be decoded to reveal the extent of the challenge they posed to Rome: “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:15-17)

When Paul refers here to “thrones, dominions or rulers or powers” he is referring in particular to Caesar who is seen as subject to Christ whose power and authority flow from God. And when he talks of Christ as having “the first place in everything” he is directly challenging Caesar. This is not just religion, this is politics. And like Jesus it is what ultimately leads Paul to execution.

Jesus was an enemy of Rome not simply because he challenged the Jewish leaders and certainly not because he could in any way threaten the Romans’ military occupation, but because his words – and he claimed these as the word of God – struck at the very heart of pax Romana and the imperial ideology.

Later St Paul and the followers of what became to known as “the way” spread across Israel-Palestine and to the Gentile communities around the Mediterranean and ultimately even to Rome itself. When they proclaimed in their baptism service as we do today that “Jesus is Lord” they could easily have re-worded it to “Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t”.

For us the Prayer Book even puts the response in capital letters to highlight the point. I know here at St Matthew’s we prefer not to use the “Lord” language – it has overtones of patriarchy and a notion of feudal supremacy, which makes us uncomfortable. I hope though we don't forget the underlying point: Jesus is Sovereign over all things and Caesar isn’t.

And indeed what of us, we modern day followers of Jesus? What does this radical notion of the sovereignty of God, of the rejection of competing ideologies and the embracing of a new kind of power mean for us? What does it say in particular to the powerful amongst us?

I’m sure the Vicar asked me to speak to you today because I am someone who spends most of my time with the power-wielders and the power-hungry. She has to be admired for her sense of humour, although, might I say, the ordained do not get a free pass either when it comes to Jesus’ criticism of those in authority!

Jesus’ words to the powerful of our day are no different from Jesus’ words the powerful of his time. Everything belongs to God – the whole word and our lives within it. This is something that needs to be constantly borne in mind by those who hold power, whether politicians, business or community leaders.

As Micah reminds us: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:6-8)

The Gospels do not provide us with a simple model to follow in terms of a political manifesto or a set of policies which can be applied in this post-enlightenment, post-modern, globalized world of the 21st century. What Jesus does is lay out some eternal truth: this is the ultimate big picture. It is tempting both for those in power and for those desperate to overturn the powerful to seek to co-opt Jesus to support their particular system of beliefs or courses of action.

But Jesus defied co-option in his own time, refusing to be drawn into becoming the sort of revolutionary leader, the sort of zealot, that his own followers expected of him, someone who would free them from Roman rule and the bondage of imperial servitude. Rather Jesus seeks to give back to God what is God’s.

Jesus reminds all followers of the way, whether powerful or powerless, that this is the measure, the yardstick, the performance indicator by which their actions will be judged. Those who acknowledge Jesus as the one who “is before all things and who holds all things together”, as St Paul says, need always to remember this in whatever roles they are called to play in society, on whichever side of the barricades they stand.

In his own day, as here and now, against the politics of power, Jesus sets the power of God’s eternal word. Against the requirements of a religious code, Jesus offers a new kind of sacrifice. Against the idolatry of Caesar’s rule, Jesus represents a new kind of sovereignty. Ahead of all political objectives, business plans and campaign strategies, Jesus holds out the promise of a new way, one firmly based on love of God and love of humankind.

[1] See Jeremiah 7:5-6 and Crossan, p 133

[2] Crossan, p 132

[3] Aslan, pp 44-45

[4] Crossan, p 28

[5] Borg, p 164