Everything Upside
Down
March 1, 2021
The Scripture quotations
contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©
1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Jesus turned everything upside
down. He blessed the meek not the strong whom the world so admires. He blessed
the peacemakers not the warmakers the world so honors. In a thoroughly
patriarchal society where women were mostly relegated to household duties (not
that there’s anything wrong with household duties, there’s just something wrong
with limiting anyone to those roles) he said the sister who assumed the role of
the man and sat at his feet to learn had chosen the better part over the sister
who stayed in the traditional woman’s role. In his parables the prodigal is
welcomed home no questions asked, the hated Samaritan is the hero of the story,
and workers are paid according to what they need not according to what they
have earned. To a world that so loved to hate them he said love your enemies.
It’s easy to wish that Jesus had been more specific about what the realm of God
actually is, but it’s not really hard to figure it out. Take everything the
world believes and values, the way the world organizes itself, everything the
world thinks is important or honorable and turn them upside down. That’s the
realm of God.
There’s one story about Jesus
actually physically turning some things upside down. It appears in all four
Gospels, although John places it at a different time in Jesus’ ministry than
the other three do. It’s usually called the cleansing of the temple, although
that’s not actually what Jesus was doing. Mark’s version is the oldest. In it
we read that when Jesus got to Jerusalem at the beginning of what would turn
out to be his last few days before his death he went to the temple. The
Jerusalem temple was the holiest place in Judaism. It was the seat of Judaism’s
religious leaders. In Mark we read:
And he entered the temple and began to
drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and
he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold
doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. Mark
11:15-16.
Mark tries to make it sound like
Jesus is indeed cleansing or purifying the temple, but really to understand
what he’s doing we need to overlook what Mark says and get to know a bit more
about how the temple operated and was meant to operate. First, why were people
selling doves and presumably other animals in the temple? Because animal
sacrifice was the primary function of the temple. In first century Judaism
people sacrificed animals for many different reasons, and some have described
the Jerusalem temple as basically a slaughter house. Not any old animal would
do. The animal had to be pure, without defect. The only way a worshipper come
to offer animal sacrifice could be sure the animal he offered was adequate was
to buy one at the temple. That’s why people were selling animals in the temple.
Why were there moneychangers in the temple? Because people gave money to the
temple. Indeed they were all supposed to pay a temple tax and were considered
to be sinners if they didn’t. The temple however could not accept the only
coins the people would have had. Those were Roman coins. They were defiled
because they had images of the emperor on them and called him the son of the
divine one. For Jews those coins were blasphemous. They used them out in the
world because they had to, but the couldn’t use them at the temple. Still, they
had to pay their temple tax and may have given the temple additional money as
well. So the temple had its own money. It had coins that weren’t defiled and
blasphemous the way the Roman coins were. The moneychangers at the temple
changed the people’s unusable Roman money for usable temple money. Neither the
sellers of animals nor the moneychangers defiled the temple. They were a
necessary part of the temple’s operation. The temple didn’t need to be cleansed
of them, it couldn’t operate without them.
Then here comes this rube from the
backcountry overturning tables and chairs and driving the animals out of the
temple. He must have seemed quite mad. If he wasn’t cleansing the temple, and
he wasn’t, what was he doing? He was staging a prophetic act the point of which
was to say the temple isn’t what you need. God doesn’t need it. God doesn’t
want it. He isn’t cleansing the temple, he is symbolically overthrowing it. He’s
doing nothing less than turning the religious establishment of his day upside
down. We can also understand him to be saying to us be careful that your
religious establishments don’t get it wrong the way the Jerusalem temple did.
They may not be what you need or what God wants. They may need overturning as
much as the Jerusalem temple did. This story also asks us what else in our
lives and in our world needs overturning. If you’ll start to think about it
you’ll see that there’s an awful lot that does.
Yet symbolically overthrowing the
temple was far from the most radical and powerful thing Jesus did to overturn
the world. The most radical and powerful thing he did to overturn the world was
get himself crucified. I don’t mean that he intentionally sought crucifixion. I
mean that he pursued God’s mission for him to the end even though the end was
torture and a miserable, unjust death on a cross. The thing that distinguishes
Christianity from every other faith tradition on earth is that we follow a
crucified savior. If we can’t make meaning out of Jesus’ crucifixion we can’t
make meaning out of our faith. It is what Jesus’ crucifixion means that turns
the world upside down.
To get at that meaning we’ll look
at one of Paul’s most profound theological statements about the cross. In 1
Corinthians we read:
For the message about
the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God….For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did
not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our
proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks
desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and
foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser
than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 1
Corinthians 1:18, 21-25.[1]
To understand what Paul is saying here we must start by
looking at the cross of Christ from the world’s perspective. To the world Jesus
was nothing but a fool and a loser. He didn’t have to get crucified. He could
have avoided it. All he had to do was recant everything he’d said and promise
neither to do any more miracles nor be in any way a problem for Rome. He didn’t
do those things. So the Romans picked him up like a common criminal, or at
least a common political criminal, and nailed him to a cross to die a miserable
death like they had done so many times before him and would do so many times
after him. He preached a lot of inflammatory nonsense. He’d stirred up a big
following by healing people, and the Romans didn’t tolerate people with mass
followings. No, to the world he was no hero. He was a fool and a loser.
That’s why Paul says that the cross
is foolishness to those who are perishing, that is, those who live according to
the ways of the world. That’s why Paul says Christ crucified is a stumbling
block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. I can hear people saying to Paul,
“You mean to tell me that this yokel from Galilee who got himself executed as a
criminal is my Lord and Savior? Hah! What utter nonsense! You mean to tell me
he’s the long-expected Messiah? You’ve got to be kidding! The Messiah will be a
king who will drive the Romans into the sea, not some poor working stiff who
gets himself crucified! And what do you mean he’s the Son of God? He’s
absolutely nothing like a god. He’s not powerful. He’s not cunning. No one ever
said he was another Adonis. Get out of here with your ridiculous claims about
this loser!”
Yet Paul calls him the power of God
and the wisdom of God. He says that God’s weakness is stronger than human
strength, and God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. He was of course
right about that. What’s weaker than a man on a cross? Yet three hundred years
after Paul the cross of Jesus conquered the empire that had executed him. Today
that cross is displayed all over the world as a symbol of God’s love and grace.
The world said we need strength, power, might. God’s wisdom said no you don’t,
you need a demonstration of how I enter into everything in human life with you,
even the really bad stuff. No one worships Caesar Augustus today. Two billion
people worship Jesus Christ. More importantly, since his day billions of people
have found their connection with God in and through the Crucified One. We have
found God’s grace through him. In him we have experienced peace, forgiveness,
courage, and inspiration. The foolishness and weakness of the cross of Christ
have given an untold number of people new life, resurrection in a sense from
life’s burdens, trials, and failures. There is divine power in the cross of
Christ that those who live only by the ways of the world cannot comprehend. To
them the cross is a foolish stumbling block. To us it is life and hope, courage
and grace.
So the cross of Christ really does
turn everything upside down. The hapless loser becomes God Incarnate. Torture
and execution become the key to life, both life here on earth and, we trust,
life forevermore. No human set out to make a crucified man from a backwater
part of a backwater part of the Roman Empire the earth’s Savior. No human ever
would. We didn’t do it, God did it. God turned the standards and expectations
of the world upside down. In God’s upside down world we find life, we find
salvation.
We also find a powerful and
frightening call. In Christ God turned the world of Christ’s day upside down.
God calls us to do the same in our world. Christianity is not a conservative
religion, though it has tragically come to be seen as that by most people. It
is a revolutionary religion, nonviolent but still revolutionary. God calls us
to turn the social structures of the world upside down, to make the last first
and the first last. God calls us to upend the world’s addiction to violence and
oppression. God calls us to create a world in which everyone has enough because
no one has too much. God calls us to overturn the world’s addiction to material
goods and replace it with life lived by spiritual values. God calls us to do
nothing short of turning the whole world upside down. God promises to be with
us as we do, so let’s get on with it, shall we?
[1] I
consider the two passages in this post together because they appear in the
Revised Common Lectionary for Sunday, March 7, 2021.
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