INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE

Year B - Third Sunday In Lent

 

EXODUS 20:1-17.   This is the best known of three different versions of the Ten Commandments. Comparing this passage with Exodus 34:10-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 leaves those who hold to a literalist view of scripture in more than a slight quandary.  How could God dictate three versions of the same law code, and supposedly to the same person?

    

A more adequate interpretation recognizes the obvious discrepancies between various source texts, each having been written at different times in different contexts.  Jesus himself acknowledged the importance of the Law of Moses and then went on to give a summary of that law which has universal application:  Love God with heart, mind, soul and strength; and love one's neighbor as oneself. He drew this from two separate texts in the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

PSALM 19.  This psalm rejoices in the glory of creation and in the sanctity of God's moral law.   The closing verse is often used as a prayer offered before a sermon.

 

1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-25.  This is the heart of Paul's message, not only to the Corinthians, but to every other congregation to which he preached or wrote.  All other arguments aside, he proclaimed faith in Jesus Christ crucified and risen as God's sole means of redeeming all creation.

 

JOHN 2:13-22.   Unlike the other Gospel writers, John places this crucial incident in Jesus' ministry - the cleansing of the temple - at the beginning of the ministry, not the end. This is in keeping with John's view that Jesus' coming into the world created the moment when all must decide between following the light which Jesus represents or the darkness which separates humanity from God.

 

Note how John says that even the disciples did not understand what Jesus meant in referring to his resurrection – the one great act of God's absolute sovereignty - as his authority for perpetrating this apparently blasphemous deed.

 

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EXODUS 20:1-17.   This is the best known of three different versions of the Ten Commandments. Comparing this passage with Exodus 34:10-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 leaves those who hold to a literalist view of scripture in more than a slight quandary.  How could God dictate three versions of the same law code, and supposedly to the same person?

 

Scholars have struggled to discover whether or not these commandments were exclusive to the Israelite tradition or adapted from other codes existent in the ancient Middle East. An article in the Biblical Archeology Review states that no scholar claims to have discovered identifiable archeological or historical evidence of an Israelite presence in Egypt or of an Exodus at the end of the Late Bronze Age (circa 1500-1200 B.C.E.) Rather, for these so-called “biblical minimalists”, Moses was a mythical figure of great theological significance in the Hebrew scriptures. The most radical interpretation of the Moses saga defines it as a theological construct of the post-exilic Persian period (circa 500 B.C.E.) when the Jerusalem priesthood attempted to create an identity for the Jewish people. According to Thomas Thompson, of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, we misread these scriptures if we read them historically.

 

Such radical scholarship in no way diminishes either Moses or the Decalogue. In fact, it may actually enhance them from the point of view of biblical theology as distinct from scientific archeological and historical research. Nor does this disregard the obvious biblical evidence of three separate versions of the Ten Commandments attributed to Moses. A more adequate interpretation recognizes the obvious discrepancies between various texts, each having been written in different ages in different contexts. 

 

The commandments have always been a great influence for Jewish and for Christian communities. Moses has always been identified as the great lawgiver. It is more likely, however, that the laws were developed over many centuries in different historical contexts and reflected religious traditions and practices of their times. It is not improbable that influences from other Middle Eastern cultures of the period had some effect on their formation.

 

As they now stand and viewed from the 21st century, the commandments consist of four groups. The first three deal with the worship of Yahweh alone as an invisible, holy God who makes absolute claims on the Israelites as their saviour. The next two, on the sabbath and the honoring of parents, have economic and family reference. Rest is necessary for productive labor and the family is the fundamental unit of human society. The next three focus on the life of the family or individual in the larger community. They deal with such basic realities of human society as the sanctity of life, of marriage and sexuality, and the respect for property as an extension of persons. The last two are of a social nature speaking of truth in the law courts and honoring the rights of others.

 

Taken together and in their negative from, they were not intended to be legalistic in character. Rather, they recognized those forces which could have ruined community life. Jesus acknowledged the importance of the Law of Moses as did the apostle Paul. Jesus then went beyond them to give a summary of that law which Paul also espoused as having universal application:  Love God with heart, mind, soul and strength; and love one's neighbor as oneself. While the Roman legal system shaped the laws of western civilization during the past two millennia, the spirit of the law and much of its

content derives from the Ten Commandments.

 

 

PSALM 19.  This psalm rejoices in the glory of creation and in the sanctity of God's moral law. Its two very distinctive parts point to it originally having been two psalms brought together to express the two chief means of divine revelation - in creation and in the Law of Moses.

 

While the first part (vss. 1-6) celebrates nature as God's handiwork, it also reflects an attitude toward the natural world common to all primitive religious traditions. The majesty of brilliantly sunny day and star-studded sky at night, when seen in a natural setting, still awakens a deep sense of awe in the most urbanized of us. In the Middle East, in ancient times as now, the sun provides the most notable feature, especially to a visitor from northern climes in winter - "the greatest of the members of the heavenly choir," one expositor trumpeted. The psalmist does not describe the sun as a deity in the Egyptian or Babylonian manner, but speaks of it as a heroic runner similar to an Egyptian liturgy to the sun which likened it to a charioteer (vss. 4c-6). The 6th century BCE Pythagorean doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, of which the psalmist may well have heard, may also have been in his mind. Certain Hebrew words of the text indicate that this part of the poem dates from the post-exilic period.

 

The second part of the psalm also reflects the Persian period (6th-4th centuries BCE) when the Mosaic law dominated every aspect of life in Israel. The numerous synonyms for the law, five in all, also recall the Wisdom literature such as Psalm 119 and  Proverbs.  So too do the phrases "making wise the simple" (vs. 7) and "the fear of the Lord" (vs. 9). The poem places great emphasis on separation of the faithful Israelite from his pagan neighbors by maintaining rigid adherence to the law and its provision for ritual purity and personal innocence. He prays to be guarded from even the most inadvertent sin (vs. 13) that might corrupt him. The poet is imbued with the spirit if not the actual influence of the 5th century prophet Ezra.

 

Meditating on such things played a large part in the religious tradition of Israel in late pre-Christian times. The Pharisees of New Testament, and in particular Saul of Tarsus, represented prime expressions of this legalist tradition. The closing verse is often used as a prayer offered before a sermon, but it has more to do with making a spiritual gift acceptable to God equal to a sacrifice on the altar.

 

 

1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-25.  This passage contains the heart of Paul's message, not only to the Corinthians, but to every other congregation to which he preached or wrote.  All other arguments aside, he proclaimed faith in Jesus Christ crucified and risen as God's sole means of redeeming all of creation.

 

The issue Paul confronted in Corinth was a division between Jews and Gentiles, and how each perceived the gospel several apostles had proclaimed there. Each party heard the gospel from the perspective of their own cultural and religious background. We all still do so. The problem for the Corinthians was - and for us still is - to move beyond cultural inhibitions that blind us to the new truth the gospel proclaims. Being saved by the power of God in Christ remains as mysterious to us as it did to the conflicted Corinthians. The Jews had the covenant and the Torah which assured them of God's

favour. Greeks had their philosophies. For them as for many of us, salvation was a totally unreal and unnecessary experience - foolishness, as Paul so bluntly put it.

 

In his Daily Study Bible: The Letters to the Corinthians on this passage, William Barclay identified the basic elements of  the four great sermons of Acts 2:14-39; 3:12-26; 4:8-12; 10:36-43. He then showed why this gospel so alienated both Jews and Greeks. A Suffering Servant envisaged by Second Isaiah (Isa. 52:13-53:12) was one thing; a crucified messiah was quite another. It was just not in the Jewish religious tradition. An incarnate deity who died on a cross and rose form the dead was utter nonsense to Greeks.

 

Yet this is the central theme of Paul's Christology. This was the very purpose for which God came into the world as one of us, Jesus of Nazareth. To believing Jews he was the Messiah; to believing Gentiles, divine Wisdom. To Paul, he was neither and yet he was both (vs. 24). He was neither in that he did not fulfill the Jewish expectation of a political messiah to free them from oppression, nor the Greek expectation of a teacher to give them worldly wisdom as had their great philosophers. Yet he was both in that for Jews Christ's death and resurrection fulfilled the ancient prophecies about the Suffering Servant of God in a new way. By his self-sacrifice in love, his death and resurrection became the only adequate antidote to human sinfulness that separates us from God.

 

For Gentiles, Jesus Christ was God's wisdom in that he was not just an idea about which one could reason and debate, but God in the flesh and blood of a human being just like them. He lived and died in the real world, then was raised from the dead to be with us always, something totally different from anything any Greek philosopher had ever said or done.

 

For a century and more, some scholars have claimed that Paul was the real author of apostolic Christology and architect of the Church. His genius transformed the simple message of Jesus into the gospel the apostles proclaimed and a Jewish sectarian community into the apostolic Christian Church. Yet Paul's preaching of Christ crucified differed little from that of Acts.  His conversion experience changed his life and his theology from that of an ardent Pharisee to that of a devoted Christian

apostle. He accepted the grace of being made "a new creation." As John W. Drane, of the University of Stirling, Scotland, said in his article on Paul in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993): "He was certain that Christians were already a part of God's new order, and the church was to be an outpost of the kingdom in which God's will became a reality in the lives of ordinary people. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, individuals, society and the whole structure of human relationships could be

radically transformed, so that in the context of a physically renewed world system, God's people should grow 'to the full measure of the stature of Christ.'"

 

More recently, Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall has presented a strong case for a theologia crucis, a theology of the cross, as necessary for the church and its individual members to both adopt as its theological system and its means of living in the post-Christendom age. We no longer can claim the public respect, powerful influence and stated goals we once had in Western society when we aimed in blatantly triumphalist terms at the beginning of the 20th century, “to win the world for Christ in this century.”

 

 Hall points to Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann and a few others who have led the way in calling the church out of its imperialist and triumphalist stance to an engagement with the suffering of the world as we now see it at the beginning of the 21st century. He recalls a picture of Reinhold Niebuhr that appeared on the 25th anniversary of Time Magazine in 1948. In the background were dark, roiling clouds and on the horizon, a cross. How we interpret and live out a theology of the cross in a dynamic manner in our present context is the present challenge we all face. (Hall, Douglas John. The Cross in Our Context.; and Bound and Free: A Theologians Journey. Fortress Press, 2003, 2004.) A truly confessing theology of the cross emphasizes the role of the church community and the individual Christian as standing with the suffering, and often in confrontation of the secular, political and even ecclesiological powers of the world, offering nothing other than faith, hope and love, however costly that may become as it did for Jesus.

 

 

JOHN 2:13-22.   Unlike the other Gospel writers, John places this crucial incident of Jesus cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the ministry, not the end. This is in keeping with John's view that Jesus' coming into the world created the moment when all must decide between following the light which Jesus represents or the darkness which separates humanity from God.

 

Several speculative questions about the temple precincts come to the surface in this passage. Where were the money-changers in relation to the temple itself?

 

A few years ago, I sat with a group of tourists on the remnants of the steps leading up to the "Beautiful" or "Golden" Gate by which pilgrims passed through the east wall of the city into temple precincts. An archeologist told us that a hoard of coins from many parts of the Roman Empire had been found at the foot of these steps. She implied that this was the location of the money-changers tables. Pilgrims could pay their temple tax or purchase sacrificial animals only in shekels so they had to exchange whatever currency they carried into the sacred coinage as they entered the temple gate.

There were several other gates to the temple mount where money-changers may have been located also.

 

Would there have been space for a great gathering of pilgrims as well as all the sacrificial animals and caged birds? It was possible, but it seems improbable. Two 19th century investigators, Charles Warren and Claude Conder, reported the existence of thirty-seven cisterns on the temple mount to supply vast quantities of water for ritual ablutions and the flushing of blood from the altar. In his book, The Mind of Jesus, (Harper, 1960) William Barclay quoted a report by Josephus that 256,500 sheep were

slaughtered during one Passover. The 2nd century C.E. rabbinical Mishnah stated that area of the temple mount to be 500 by 500 cubits after Herod the Great extended it during his reconstruction, but it was not exactly square. The royal cubit used in the temple equalled 20.9 inches. Thus the area measured about 870 x 870 feet. The temple and altar of sacrifice were said to have occupied a space of 187 by 135 cubits (320 x 232 feet) and were not located in the exact centre. That is about equivalent to a modern football field plus its sidelines. Add the space for spectator stands and some

exterior parking and one gets an image of the size of the temple precincts. No wonder it dominated the whole city-scape from whatever direction pilgrims approached it. One does wonder, however, if the author of John's Gospel was familiar with the actual site.

    

In articles in Bible Review, (10:6, December 1994), Bruce Chilton and Bernhard Lang offered the hypothesis that “the cleansing of the temple” was actually a violent protest against the priestly domination sacrificial liturgy of the temple. Jesus regarded this an a violation of Levitical mandate of each Israelite making his own offering (Lev. 3:2) which had been taken over by the temple priesthood. In era of the Second Temple, only the priests were deemed pure enough the offer sacrifices. So they had set up the elaborate liturgical system of maintaining the purity of the sacrifice which required each Israelite to purchase “an unblemished lamb” and making this purchase only with the acceptable coin, the temple shekel. Hence the tables of the money changers at the entrance to the temple precincts. Here is an excerpt from Chilton’s article:

 

“(Jesus’) opponents saw the purity of Israel as something that could be guarded only by separating from others, as in meals of their priestly fellowships (havuroth). Jesus’ view of purity was different. He held that a son or daughter of Israel, by virtue of being of Israel, could approach his table and also worship in God’s Temple. (See the story of Jesus declaring a “leper” clean [Matthew 8:1–4//Mark 1:40–45] and the story of the woman with the ointment [Luke 7:36–50].)

 

“Jesus’ views led to disputes in Galilee, but these were only of local interest. (Slightly deviant rabbis were far from uncommon there, which is why the region was known as ‘Galilee of the nations,’ in Isaiah 9:1.) But when Jesus brought his teaching to the Jerusalem Temple, where he insisted on his own teaching (or halakhah) of purity, matters were different. The resulting dispute is reflected in an incident often called the cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21:12–13//Mark 11:15–17//Luke 19:45–46//John 2:13–17). From the viewpoint of the authorities what Jesus was after was the opposite of cleansing. He objected to the merchants who had permission to sell sacrificial animals in the vast outer court of the Temple. In Jesus’ “peasant’s” view of purity, Israel should not offer priest’s produce for which they paid money, but their own sacrifices that they themselves brought to the Temple. He believed this so vehemently that he and his followers drove the animals and the sellers out of the great court, apparently with the use of force (Matthew 21:12//Mark 11:15–16//Luke 19:45//John 2:15–16).”

 

Chilton and Lang carried their argument further in discussing the origins of the Christian liturgy of the Eucharist. They proposed that Jesus established “the new covenant in (his) blood” at the Last Supper when he substituted the bread and wine of the typical evening meal for the flesh and blood of sacrificial lamb of the Passover. In instituting the new covenant, he would have placed the emphasis on the possessive pronoun, my body and my blood, as was done in the original sacrifice of the lamb when the owner would place his hand on the victim’s head as he repeated those words. Quotations of the presentation formulae when sacrifices were offered in ancient times supported this hypothesis (Exodus 24:8 and Deuteronomy 26:5-10). They also claim that our present interpretation of the words of institution actually stems from the Hellenistic Gentile church of the later apostolic and post-apostolic eras. Here is Chilton’s introductory comment:

 

What Jesus was doing at the Last Supper has not been understood for the better part of 2,000 years. The reason for the misunderstanding is that Jesus, a Jewish teacher who was concerned with the sacrificial worship of Israel, has been treated as if he were the deity in a Hellenistic cult….

 

 

Within the Greco-Roman world, Jesus was readily appreciated as a divine figure, after the manner of one of the gods come to visit earth. Hellenistic religion of the first and second centuries was deeply influenced by cults called Mysteries, in which a worshiper would be joined to the death and restoration of a god by means of ritual. Jesus’ Last Supper was naturally compared to initiation into such a Mystery…. After all, he had said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood” (Matthew 26:26–28//Mark 14:22–24//Luke 22:19–20). For many Hellenistic Christians, that could only mean that Jesus referred to himself: Bread and wine were tokens of Jesus that became his body and blood when believers consumed them!”

 

Note John's comment that even the disciples did not understand what Jesus meant in referring to his resurrection (vss. 21-22). The resurrection was the symbol of God's absolute sovereignty. From John's post-resurrection point of view, this apparently blasphemous deed substantiated Jesus' authority as the Messiah, but no one really understood this before it happened.

 

Confrontation with the religious authorities formed the main conflict of John's whole narrative. Their demand for a sign (vs. 18) referred to the expectation that every prophet from Moses onward would give spectacular signs to authenticate his mission. While John believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the demand for a sign implied that the questioners did not. Most likely they belonged to the Sadducees party or served as guards of the temple under orders from the high priest. They only wanted to know what authority he had for disrupting the lucrative temple economy. The disciples

remained uncertain about the incident until after the resurrection (vs. 17). As proof of Jesus' authority, John quoted from Psalm 69:9 which the early church regarded as a messianic psalm. From vs. 22, we can conclude that such scripture references played a large part in the shaping of the messianic tradition of the early church. For the author of John's Gospel, this incident forcefully witnessed to that tradition.

 

The Jewish authorities' claim that the construction of the temple lasted forty-six years is now thought to have been inaccurate. Herod the Great began its reconstruction in 20 or 19 B.C.E. He did not finish the task before his death in 4 B.C.E. The project was not finally completed until 64 C.E., just six years before it destruction by the Romans. Scholars presume this reference to be an early Christian tradition preserved by John as a means of emphasizing the place of the temple throughout his narrative.

 

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