Third Sunday of Lent 2006

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1. The Ten Commandments

• The most important thing about the Ten Commandments in both Exodus and Deuteronomy is their context, as in “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
• These are some of the elements of a covenant with this Compassionate, Liberating God, at the same time some basic requirements or ground-rules for continuing to live as a liberated people of such a God in peace and freedom.
• As St Paul in particular makes clear, however, following on from his master Jesus and the great O.T. prophets and fifteen hundred years of relative disaster: it is not enough for the Liberating God to be just a memory, with everything then just handed over to us. Law and commandments make sense only in the context of the continuing Presence and Power in us and among us of the Compassionate Liberating God, working day by day in our lives, luring us on, making us more and more the children, the sons and daughters, and mopping up the mess and putting us back together when we fail. In other words, the continuing presence of Christ among us and of the Spirit which makes us the children of God.
• Nor is this the whole covenant, the whole of what it is to be one of the sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of Jesus operating out of the power of his Spirit. These are more like the rules of the game, the rules of the game within which our lives as children of God take place, growth in virtue, growth in discipleship and growth as community, into the special persons and special people God calls and lures us into being. Presumably, the Broncos obeyed the rules of the game of Rugby League last weekend just as well as the Cowboys, even though the Cowboys romped all over them.
• Nevertheless, even those ancient Ten Commandments would seem to be of continuing and crucial importance for us and for our world, especially the first three or four.

• The next thing to notice, though only a small detail, is that for us Catholics the numbering system is all wrong. If we number like we usually do, fifth commandment thou shalt not kill, sixth commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery, we end up with only nine. This is because we Catholics run with the version in Deuteronomy rather than Exodus, which combines the first two into one, and splits the last one into two. Or vice versa if you are a Protestant and prefer to run with the earlier text from Exodus. But nothing hinges on it, they are all there either way. Though it could be a little confusing in Confession I suppose, if people on each side were operating with different numbering systems!

• In the old days we were told, the first three (or four) were duties towards God, the last seven (or six) duties to our fellow humans. While there is an obvious point to this, I’m not sure whether it might in fact be more misleading than helpful:
• All ten are Divine commandments, all ten are part of our Covenant with the compassionate, liberating God who set us free and sets us up as a new People. In this sense, they are all duties towards God, part of our religion, God-chosen duties towards God. Whether we like it our not, for Christian and Jew love of neighbour is included in our love of God, any attempt to separate them gets us into serious trouble: a person who says, I love God, and does not love the brethren is a liar. If you love me you will keep my commandments, and the commandment I give you is to love one another. Whatever you do to one of these the least of my brethren you do to me. Etc. etc.
• On the other hand, it is probably the first three or four commandments which are the most important for love of neighbour:
• The first one or two have to do with the prohibition of idols, not having false gods. But what is an idol? (Nothing to do with Australian Idol, which seems to be pretty harmless.) An idol is something to which we bow and scrape, which we bow down and serve to the point of sacrificing our fellow human beings and sometimes even ourselves. Indeed, this latter aspect is part of the prophetic definition of an idol, how you know you have one, how you know that your attitude has gone past proper valuation in the direction of a demi-god to which we bow and which we serve: an idol = what demands human sacrifice. Jesus talked about not being able to serve both God and Mammon, and John Paul II spoke often of the idols of money and power, to which we sacrifice whole sectors of our community. But almost anything can get to the point of being an idol in this sense, not just religions and ideologies: the nation state, national security, the war against terror, our own fears, even ‘our right to determine who comes to our country’ or ‘freedom and democracy’, or ‘the right to free speech’, as well as particular forms of religion – whatever we use to turn off our normal respect for the dignity of other human beings and indeed sometimes our own dignity, whatever we constitute as an altar for human sacrifice.
• The second or third commandment has to do with the misuse of the name of God. This is not just blasphemy, though: it’s terrorism nowadays, it’s religious wars, God on our side, it’s crusades, it’s inquisition, bringing God into our petty disputes and religion into disrepute; on a more banal level, it’s making money out of pilgrims, it’s using religion for political and economic reasons generally, it’s turning the temple of God into a marketplace and a den of thieves.
• The third commandment, for its part, if you read the whole lot, is probably the first example of social justice legislation in world history: not just me, everyone gets a day off. Indeed you could take this as an early affirmation of the dignity of each and every human being irrespective of age or gender or class or legal status, and even a bit of affirmation of animals, even the animals are to get the day off.
• (Even the fourth or fifth commandment, when considered like the others as directed at adults, is in the way of a recommendation for cross-generational respect: it is directed primarily to adults, like the others, and what it really has to do with is not so much young children obeying their parents as adults giving respect and honour to their parents in their old age.
• For all their importance for human life, in comparison particularly to the first two or three commandments, considered this way the other six or seven rate as mere detail – even nowadays, perhaps even especially nowadays. Albeit important detail, and of course there is lots of ordinary everyday murder and adultery and stealing and lying which may have little or nothing to do with the big forces which determine our global fate and with which the first three commandments would seem to have to do.

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2. The Cleansing of the Temple

• It is in the light of the idolatry of money and power and the misuse of God’s name, and the effect that problems with the God stuff can have on our fellow human beings, that we can understand something of Jesus’ anger. Jesus’ anger when he went into the Temple, this religiously sensitive person who treasures the Temple as his Father’s House, and running on the Infancy Narratives always has since he was twelve, devoured by zeal for God’s house. But a person also devoured by zeal for the Lost Sheep the poor the sick the blind the lame, the little ones. His Father’s House should be a house of prayer, not a marketplace or a den of thieves; and a house of prayer for all the people, not just the religious elite and the reasonably well off.
• Our version from John’s Gospel has ‘market’ or marketplace. Matthew Mark and Luke have, ‘den of thieves’. It certainly was a marketplace, sheep and cattle and birds and money-changers and people everywhere buying and selling, it would have been a noisy place. Indeed it was an important part of the Jerusalem economy and a key source of economic as well as political power. Not exactly the kind of place to appeal to Jesus’ religious sensitivities. It probably was also something of a den of thieves. Given the way things were set up, this was almost inevitable. There were two points to take a cut, to make a profit. Roman coinage was not accepted, so it had to be exchanged. And then you had to go and buy with the exchanged money your sheep or cow or bird to be sacrificed. And all this in a captive market, people intent on doing their best by their religion, the best sacrifice they could afford. And doubtless the temple authorities who controlled the franchise would take their cut.
• But it was not just that you needed to be financial to be a part of it all. The disabled as such are prejudiced against in the priests’ manual, the Book of Leviticus, for example, Leviticus 21:16-23, “…For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs…he shall not come near the curtain or approach the altar, because he has a blemish, that he may not profane my sanctuaries…”. Hardly the Commonwealth Games with its integration of disabled athletes.
• According to Matthew’s version, after the cleansing of the Temple, “The blind and the lame came to Jesus in the Temple, and he cured them.” This seems to have annoyed the chief priests and scribes almost as much as the cleansing itself. Entertaining the blind and the lame in the Temple and mediating to them God’s healing and compassion, something so blatent, must have been particularly annoying. And in the light of such texts from Leviticus as the above, it may constitute as important a sign as the cleansing itself.
• And so the Incoming of the Reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, with its key values, gets to clash with earthly realities, the idolatry of money and power, the misuse of God’s name and the virtual exclusion of the poor and oppressed, in the Temple which should be a House of Prayer for All the People but is more like a marketplace and a den of thieves. As one of the commentaries said, this kind of thing you only get to do once. Up to this point Jesus was more of a nuisance, now he is on the way to his death, only a matter of time, a death which will be a scandal to the Jews, madness to the Greeks, but to those who are called the Power and Wisdom of God.

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3. The Dispersal of the Divine Presence

• Jesus treasured the Temple, ‘My Father’s House’, and the whole point of the Cleansing of the Temple is to restore it as a House of Prayer for All the People including not only the poor but the blind and the crippled and the other miscellaneous excluded. This seems to be part of his sense of mission of what he came to do. This is in spite of the fact that he and his group of disciples have been functioning as an alternative centre of the divine presence, running around Galilee and in places in between, the bodily presence of Jesus itself as, in today’s words, a temple, a kind of alternative sanctuary.
• This dual pattern continued among Jewish Christians in Jerusalem after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, gathering together in the Temple on almost a daily basis and breaking bread together in their homes, experiencing and recognizing the presence of the risen Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread. This pattern seems to have continued probably right up to the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., and we find even St Paul involved in Temple worship during his last trip to Jerusalem.
• After the destruction of Jerusalem, however, even the keenest Jewish Christians found that they, Christian Jews, didn’t need the Temple, unlike their Jewish brethren. God’s Temple now, God’s sacred space is now wherever the risen Christ is present, and the risen Christ is present wherever two or three gather in prayer and especially when they gather for the breaking of the bread. God’s House, My Father’s House, is, wherever the children gather.
• This is something I’ve experienced since coming to the parishes of Herberton, Malanda and Yungaburra, each with their historic churches. What makes them sacred spaces, and I think they are all obvious sacred spaces, what makes them sacred spaces is not some blessing ceremony a hundred years ago, but the gathering of God’s children in the spaces since, and the gathering which still continues, the important part these spaces have played in people’s lives, and the love and care that has been put into them over the years. My Father’s House, Wherever the Children Gather.

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