Tag: "cleansing of the temple"

Jesus’ Nonviolence as the Final and Full Revelation of God

Jesus is not a partial, false, or misleading revelation of God, but in Christ the reality of God is made known, where previously this reality was obscured. As Paul describes, the reality veiled by the law remains (2 Cor 3:7–18), as something inherent to Judaism obscures the reality of God, or is “a ministry of death” (3:7). However, “death’s ministry by way of scriptures engraved in stones” according to Paul, “is being abolished” (3:7 DBH). The nature of this “abolishment” (καταργουμένην, or being “wiped out” or “set aside,”) includes the deadly part of the ministry of death. The scriptures are not set aside, but death and killing, which scriptures (apart from Christ) fostered, are abolished – “in the Anointed it is abolished” (3:14). Paul describes passage from the ministry of death focused on the scriptures, to the ministry of Christ, who removes the veil and provides a new interpretive principle of life and Spirit. Which raises the question of Christ’s relationship to Judaism.

Jesus is Jewish and thoroughly situated in Judaism, and yet his teaching and life are interpreted by the Jews as an attack on Judaism and particularly an attack on the temple. The accusation against him at his trial involves his action and teaching in regard to the temple and that he claims equality with God in forgiving sins (which is to say the same thing). His association and acceptance of sinners (those beyond the pale of Jewish acceptance), his healing of the same on the sabbath, and his teaching regarding his own kingdom and kingship, struck at both the religious and political power of Judaism summed up in the temple. As E.P. Sanders has written, if Jesus claimed that his followers (the least) would be the greatest in the Kingdom and that he, and not the religious leaders in Israel spoke for God, this was a blow against the religio-political entity constituting Israel.[1] Sanders concludes, “Jesus opposed the scribes and Pharisees during his teaching activity (whether basically or only marginally), but he was killed either because the Romans (perhaps on the advice of the Jerusalem leaders) took him to be a Zealot or because he offended and threatened the Jewish hierarchy by his challenge to the temple.”[2]

His interruption of the temple sacrifices (e.g., Matt. 21:12-13) gets at the heart of both Jesus’ threat and the significance of his death. It is not that Herod’s Temple is an abuse of God’s intended purpose and Jesus hoped to clean up the economy of Herod’s temple, but the fact that the temple was temporary and only symbolic of the reality of God revealed in Christ. Jesus’ interruption of the principal function of the temple, sacrifice, points to the contingent and temporary nature of the institution (evident from the inception of sacrifice). The issue was not primarily money-changers or the selling of animals, as the sacrifices had always included these services.[3] The function of the temple was sacrifice, and Jesus disrupted the purpose of the temple as a sign of his permanent disruption of sacrifice. The temple deals in the death of animals, which did not touch upon the deadly attitude of the human heart, and Jewish response to his interruption of the killing is the motive for killing Jesus.

As Josephus points out, whoever controls the temple controls the Jews: “Whoever was master of these [fortified places] had the whole nation in his power, for sacrifices could not be made without (controlling) these places, and it was impossible for any of the Jews to forgo offering these, for they would rather give up their lives than the worship which they are accustomed to offer God” (47. XV.248).[4] Not only the ruling Jews but the Romans exercised control by maintaining ultimate jurisdiction over the temple and its precincts. As long as the Jews were making sacrifices for the Roman Emperor, goodwill was maintained. But Josephus points to the beginnings of Jewish revolt and ultimate destruction of the temple as arising with a sacrificial crisis. Eleazar persuaded the priests who were then serving “to accept no gift or sacrifice from a foreigner.” Josephus describes the result: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans; for the sacrifices offered on behalf of that nation and the emperor were in consequence rejected. The chief priests and the notables earnestly besought them not to abandon the customary offering for their rulers, but the priests remained obdurate” (BF II.409.f).[5] The discontinuation of sacrifices on behalf of Rome unleashed the violence which would destroy the temple. The sacrificial crisis, in the description of René Girard, was unleashed, fulfilling the threat the Jews felt from Jesus: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn. 11:48).

Jesus’ death would hold off Rome for a period, the point made by the high priest, Caiaphas: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (Jn. 11:50), but the deeper meaning was not that Jesus would preserve the temple for another forty years or so, only delaying the inevitable: “Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (Jn. 11:51-52). In their shortsighted understanding, the Jews understood the Romans were appeased, just as they were, through the continued sacrifices. They would begin to plot Jesus’ death from that day forward, thinking they were saving Israel, when, in fact, their action brings the purposes of the temple and Israel to a conclusion. So, the deadly aspect of the temple is exposed and ended by the murderous plots of its defenders.

Everyone understood Jesus’ action in the temple was symbolic, but it was not the symbolism of clearing (cleansing) the temple of trade, but the symbolism of destruction (the destruction of the temple and its sacrificial system). Jesus makes this clear in John, when he says “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2:19). Yes, he is talking about himself (the real significance of the temple) but it was clear that temple destruction (obsolescence of the temple, at a minimum) was involved with his identity and his death and resurrection. They killed him as he threatened their sacrifices, which point to their lack of efficacy (the heart was left untouched). Eventually an army would destroy the temple, and it would take nothing less, but Jesus clearly posed this possibility within himself; not so much the literal destruction of the temple, but the relative unimportance of the temple compared to the reality.

The temple is not really the problem, anymore than the law is a problem. Judaism, the law and the temple are adequate, as long as they are understood as having a limited purpose. The early Christian community continued to meet in the temple precincts (Acts 2:46; 3:1) and Paul would even offer a sacrifice in the temple to demonstrate his good standing in Judaism (Acts 21:26). The early Christians did not consider the temple as somehow impure. Their continued association with the temple demonstrates that its symbolic importance is overridden and rendered relatively insignificant, as it did not touch upon the reality of Christ. They could remain Jewish, with all that entailed, as this did not pertain to the deeper and true significance of Christ. Yet, this relativizing of the temple and Judaism seems to have been the problem for the Jews.

The non-Christian Jews did not consider the Christian attitude toward Christ, in comparison to the law and temple, to be quite so harmless. The accusation against Stephen, which Luke notes is false, is that this “man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the Law” (Acts 6:13). An examination of Stephen’s speech, which occasions his stoning, has him pointing out from Scripture (Is. 66:1) that the temple was never to be taken as anything but symbolic (Acts 7:49). This combined with his focus on their rejection of the “Righteous One” sets them over the edge. They kill Stephen as they did Jesus, which he explains is their ancestral habit: “you are doing just as your fathers did. Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become” (Acts 7:51-52). The temple, the law, and Judaism have not resolved the problem of murder, killing, and death, but aggravate and accentuate the problem. It is a ministry of death which shows itself in the murder of the Messiah, which in Paul’s words, brings this ministry to an end.

The manner of Jesus death on the cross subverts violent sacrifice and replaces it with the nonviolent offering of love, forgiveness, and life, which Paul sums up as the ministry of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:8). Jesus did not absorb the wrath of God but the wrath and violence of men and his defeat of death or his own murder, in the manner of his death and resurrection, makes death as inconsequential as the ministry of death which killed him. It proved death and the covenant with death empty. Death as final, ultimate, eternal, in the world’s sacrificial systems, seemingly provides an “infinite” fulcrum of power to leverage life from others. Jesus explains that prior to him and his kingdom, violence is the primary means of obtaining the kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt. 11:12). The days of John the Baptist include all of those days that precede Jesus, so that kingdom building up to this time, whether that of Jews or Gentiles, is violent. As Anthony Bartlett puts it, the violent “are taking over or hijacking God’s kingdom and its meaning. This is the key. Violence as a theme and activity violates the kingdom.”[6]

It is not that Judaism did not contain its own nonviolent sort of kingdom, but this evolving peaceable kingdom was subverted by murderous impulses. According to Bartlett, Jesus’ comparison of John the Baptist to Elijah, numbers even John among the violent, who like Elijah, imagines fire from heaven (consuming the prophets of Baal) is the divine means of establishing the kingdom. Jesus has those sent from John report back that his kingdom is very different from that of the old ministry of death: “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. ‘And blessed is he who does not take offense at Me’” (Matt. 11:4-7). Jesus’ peaceable, healing, inclusive ministry to the poor and outcasts may be grounds for even John to take offense. “Thus, the problem about accepting Jesus is the radically changed code he offered – forgiveness and nonviolence, and each entirely coincident with the other.”[7] The transition between John and Jesus must be what Paul identifies as passage from the ministry of death to the ministry of the Spirit.

Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection proves death is not nearly as fatal or powerful or necessary as was thought. Jesus shows death is not efficacious, by pouring out his life, not only in one moment of death, but in a life of sacrificial love which defeats the orientation to death (the ministry of death). Thus his followers are commanded to take up their cross, as his manner of life defeats the reign of death: “but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10); “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14-15). Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, inclusive of the temple incident, is not then, a display of violent power but putting into effect the counter-power of non-violent deliverance from death.

The one who enters triumphantly into Jerusalem on the foal of a donkey (Matt. 21:6) is the humble (ani, which translates as “poor,” “oppressed,” or “afflicted”) king (of Zech. 9:9). The term elsewhere describes the victim of murder (Job 24:14) or the poor man who must give up his only cloak to secure a loan (Deut. 24:12-13). According to Bartlett, “In contemporary terms, we could easily say this king is unarmed, powerless, and so must bring deliverance without violence.”[8] This is the point of Zechariah enacted: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; And the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; And His dominion will be from sea to sea, And from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zech. 9”10). The gentle, meek, non-violent, king, riding on the foal of a donkey is victorious over death and violence. His ride into Jerusalem, and entry into the temple, is the sign the ministry of death represented by the temple is ended (Mk. 11:14) and the living spiritual sacrifice of the Peaceable Kingdom is inaugurated.

[1] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985) 296.

[2] Sanders, 57.

[3] Sanders, 63.

[4] Cited in Sanders, 64.

[5] Cited in Sanders, 64.

[6] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 155.

[7] Bartlett, 156.

[8] Barlett, 164.

Jesus’ Temple Construction as a New World Order

At the beginning of John, Jesus disrupts the Passover sacrifice in the temple with a sign which, in his explanation, points to himself as true temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The temple incident is not about cleaning up Herod’s temple nor is it about getting rid of coin exchange (it was necessary that the coins bearing Caesars image be exchanged for those with “no graven images”) or animals being sold. As Mary Coloe points out, such trade was not itself wrong; rather, “his words and actions must be seen as a prophetic critique of the entire sacrificial system.”[1] The Jewish response indicates as much, as they do not question why he did it but ask what sign he could give that he had the authority to do such a thing. They did not take his action as some sort of violent assault on the temple, but presumed it called for a legitimating sign of authority, as with Moses’ “signs and wonders” (Deut. 34:11). They knew the prophecies concerning the end of sacrifice and the limitation of the efficacy of animal sacrifice, and indeed, Jesus is declaring the end of the sacrificial system, as he is true temple and true sacrifice. As Jacob Neusner describes Jesus’ action in the temple, it “represents an act of the rejection of the most important rite of the Israelite cult and therefore, a statement that there is a means of atonement other than the daily whole-offering, which now is null.”[2]

The Gospel of John is written at the end of the first century, after the Romans had already destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, so that John might be read, not only as the story of temple replacement, but as a depiction of how all of the rites and meaning of Israel are now continuing as a first order reality through Christ. The ingathering of a new Israel, represented in the 12 apostles, resonates with the founding of a new dwelling, a new sacrifice, and a new understanding of atonement.

 As Coloe points out, this theme of fulfilling Israel’s scriptures, echoes from “the beginning” in which the true tabernacling (eskenoseri) among us has commenced in his flesh and God is among us, and we saw his glory {doxa)” (1:14).[3] The language of tabernacle and glory reverberates with the way in which God’s presence was made known to Israel in the ark, the tabernacle, and the temple. Rather than reading this opening scene as a cleansing of the temple, in the context of John, this must be read as the beginning of a new temple and new order of worship and a recentering of the world.

The theme of Jesus as temple marks each key moment in Jesus’ explanation of his identity. Seated at Jacob’s well in Samaria, Jesus indirectly alludes to himself as the temple, which was often pictured as situated above the wellsprings of creation (as in Ezekiel 47:1-12). The temple, in Jewish tradition, was thought to rest upon the spring of creative waters (Gen. 2:8) and also served as the capstone holding back the flood waters of Noah. Noah’s altar is also linked with this foundation stone located in the Holy of Holies supporting the Ark, with its temple sitting upon the wellspring of the earth at the center and source of creation, but now Jesus is this living water (John 4:6, 10). At the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus describes himself in terms of this festival as the source of thirst-quenching water (7:37) and the light of the world (8:12). During the Feast of Dedication, celebrating the reconsecrated temple (in 165 BCE), Jesus describes himself as the “consecrated one” (10:36). During the final discourse Jesus speaks of his “Father’s House” with many dwellings (14:2) which indicates an ongoing extension of the household of God. In the course of the Gospel, the temple has been identified as a building whose true form is the person of Jesus, and this then is extended to a new temple community of disciples, but ultimately a new world order. [4]

If we take Jesus at his word, the key part of temple construction gets under way at the cross and the tomb, in which the echoes of the temple reverberate throughout. John makes it obvious that the cross is the point when the true Passover lamb is being sacrificed, as his Gospel climaxes with the crucifixion at the very moment the Passover lambs are being slain (John 19:14, 31). Jesus is this Passover lamb that cleanses the world of sin and death, according to John the Baptist (John 2:13, which I described last week here).

The work of the temple, representative of a cosmic removal of death, is a work completed in Christ, but maybe it is the empty tomb and resurrection which most clearly bears echoes of Jesus as true temple. For example, in John 20:12 Mary “saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying.” Several commentators see here an allusion to the ark of the covenant with its two angels at either end of the mercy seat or lid on the ark of the covenant.[5] Nicholas Lunn finds ten similarities between the scene of the tomb and the ark of the covenant: the inner chamber of the temple, separated by a veil is like the burial chamber sealed with a rock and, like the ark, Jesus body was “carried” (άροϋσιν) and “put” in the tomb (τίθημι – put, place, lay is used some six times in John to describe that Jesus was laid there (John 19:42; also 19:41; 20:2, 13, 15)). A cloth covered the ark and was wrapped around Jesus for burial, and both involved spices (and specifically myrrh). Both the tomb and the ark were adjacent to a garden (with the Garden of Eden represented as surrounding the ark). Though entry into the holy of holies is restricted, Peter and John enter and believe but Mary receives a warning, similar to that given to the priests not to touch the holy things (Jesus says, “Do not touch me” (John 20:17)) and both times of entry were early morning. Finally, the risen Lord directly correlates to and surpasses the glory surrounding the ark (John 12:16; 2:22).[6]

The glory of the Lord had been attached to the ark (with the cherubic figures described as “the cherubim of glory” (Heb. 9:5)). It was here that God appeared to Moses to give him revelations: “There I will meet with you; and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak to you about all that I will give you in commandment for the sons of Israel” (Ex 25:22). With the loss of the ark the glory departed from Israel (I Sam. 4:21-22) and God fell silent. Now real cherubim show up to mark the spot where full access to God is realized. The presence of God had been identified as the one “who dwells between the cherubim” (cf. 1 Sam 4:4; 2 Sam 6:2; 2 Kgs 19:15; Ps 80:1; 99:1), but now the presence of the risen Lord is marked by living angelic messengers.

Lunn draws parallels between the Levites and Jesus’ high priestly prayer (for the disciples) in terms of the relationship between the high priest, God’s representative, and the Levites. It is stressed several times, that they belong to God: “They are mine [έμοι έσονται],” he says (Num 3:13; cf. 12, 45; 8:14). Jesus repeatedly describes his disciples as those who were God’s which are now mine. “I have manifested your name to the men you gave me out of the world; they were yours and you gave them to me” (John 17:6). “I do not pray for the world but for those you have given me” (John 17:9). “I desire that they also, whom you have given me, be with me where I am, that they may see my glory” (John 17:24). Just as God designates the tribe of Levi as Aaron’s brothers (Numbers 18:2) Jesus calls his disciples his brothers (John 20:17). On the other hand, the prohibitions against touching or looking improperly are clearly abrogated in Christ, whom they could freely see and touch without fear of being struck dead. “No longer is God concealed and unapproachable, but revealed and accessible. No longer is there any threat of death in drawing near, but rather through the incarnate Son’s own atoning death there is an offer of life.”[7]

Besides the obvious implications, that here God and his people meet and that here true revelation is given and divine access is opened through Christ, the explicit linking of cross and lamb, and tomb and ark, bear a striking theological lesson. There is no negotiation with the powers, with evil, with death, or with the necessity of violence. While great violence is unleashed on Christ, this is not something he negotiates but it is what he overcomes. The true high priest has applied his own life blood to the “mercy seat” so that where death previously occupied the center of the world, life now appears so as to displace death. Death or the devil do not demand or require a ransom for Jesus, as he simply defeats both. He is lifted up and the prince of this world who has kept the world enslaved through death is defeated (John 12:30-32).

There is no deep discord, original violence, or dialectic difference to mediate the work of Christ. He is the light that dispels the darkness, the life that overcomes death, and the “I am” which exposes all false metaphysical presuppositions. It is not, as Karl Barth depicts it, that the antithesis to creation – nothingness – is somehow lent a reality in competition with God’s being. He maintains, “That which God renounces and abandons in virtue of his decision is not merely nothing. It is nothingness, and has as such its own being, albeit malignant and perverse. . . . It lives only by the fact that it is that which God does not will. But it does live by this fact.”[8] In Barth’s Calvinist depiction, God must negotiate with this malignant order as if it is in competition with the reality of God. While some may not be so bold as Barth and Calvin to assign evil to God, there is a long tradition imagining God must somehow stoop to the level of death, darkness, and violence to overcome it.

The tomb as ark and the cross as means of establishing this relation, not only connects Christ to the atoning sacrifice, it also bears the full meaning of that sacrifice. We find the life of Christ in the place of death and the love of Christ in the place of violence. Christ’s life puts paid to the notion that violence is inevitable and that even God must struggle against the powers, pay the penalty, and work within the law or the laws of the universe. This inevitable violence and death dealing struggle describe every human order, every institution, every means which cannot imagine a resource that transcends the violence of the world. But this is precisely why Christ is the singular atoning sacrifice, the sole foundation of a new peaceable kingdom. We should not look to the shadows to determine the substance of the reality.

However atonement might have been construed prior to Christ, it now must be understood in light of his work as, “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2, NIV). In John’s depiction in both the Gospel and the Epistles, love is definitive of God but this is a love that comes to full expression and fruition in the work of Christ: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). The love of God as the defeat of sin and death is the meaning of atonement and this is the meaning of the world.

The Lamb is at the center of the throne, the place described as between the cherubim (Exodus 25:22). (As in Numbers, it is from here that Moses “heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim” (Numbers 7:89).) The center of the world has become the throne room of heaven in John’s vision: “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne” (Revelation 5:6). All peoples and all of heaven are now centered on this reality: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!’” (Revelation 5:13). Here the world is brought into relation with its Creator and Redeemer through the true Temple and True sacrifice of reconciliation.

[1] Mary Coloe, “Temple Imagery in John,” Interpretation (2009, 368-381)

[2] Jacob Neusner, “Money Changers in the Temple: The Mishna Explanation,” NTS 35 (1989) 290. Quoted in Coloe, ibid.

[3] Coloe, Ibid.

[4] Coloe, “Raising the Johannine Temple (JOHN 19: 19-37),” Australian Biblical Review (48/2000) 47-58.

[5] Nicholas P. Lunn, “Jesus, The Ark, and The Day of Atonement: Intertextual Echoes in John 19:38-20:18”

JETS 52/4 (December 2009) 731-46, provides the following references. John Lightfoot, A Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859) 443-44; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, Vol. 5: Matthew to John (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991) 979; Β. F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (London: John Murray, 1892) 291; Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994) 73. More recently the same comparison has been made by Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, XIII-XXI (AB; New York: Doubleday, 1966) 989; Rowan Williams, in an “ssay entitled, “Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne,” in his volume On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 183-96, esp. 186- 87; Johannine scholar Mark Stibbe in his popular work The Resurrection Code: Mary Magdalene and the Easter Enigma (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2008) 61, 71; also Jim Cassidy, “The Mercy Seat” (a sermon preached August 2008) at http://www.calvary-amwell.org/sermons/ John20b.mp3.

[6] Lunn, Ibid.

[7] Lunn, Ibid.

[8] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation. Volume III, Part 3 (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 352.