On
Going to Jerusalem
October
20, 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.
That Jesus’
earthly life ended in Jerusalem is as well established as any other fact about
him. The Gospel of John differs from the other three in that it has Jesus go to
Jerusalem more than once in the course of his ministry. In the others he only
goes once, or at least he only goes once if you don’t consider Luke’s story
about him going there at the age of twelve to be about Jesus as an adult or you
disregard it altogether as unhistorical and essentially meaningless like I do. In
the Gospel of Luke he was in Jerusalem as an infant, but that detail really
doesn’t matter for my purposes here. The turning point in the Gospel of Mark,
the oldest of the canonical gospels, comes when he begins his fateful journey
to Jerusalem. See Mark 10:32. In all four Gospels Jesus’ earthly life ends in
Jerusalem when the Romans (not the Jews) crucified him as a political
troublemaker. For the sake of simplicity I will consider Jesus’ fateful final
journey to Jerusalem to be his only one.
Of course Jesus
wasn’t from Jerusalem or anywhere else in Judea. He was from Nazareth in
Galilee, at least a three day’s walk north of Jerusalem. (The Microsoft maps
app says Nazareth is about 90 miles from Jerusalem.) He began his ministry
there, and in all four Gospels (even in John) he conducted most of his ministry
there. He didn’t have to go to Jerusalem. He could have stayed in Galilee and
probably died a natural death. Surely he knew that Jerusalem was a much more
dangerous place for him to be than Galilee was. It was the largest Jewish city
by far. There had been anti-Roman uprisings there before, so the Romans were
especially sensitive to anyone stirring up the people there. Especially at
Passover, which is when Jesus went there, the Romans strengthened their
presence in the city by bringing in more troops. At that time the Governor
Pontius Pilate, who most of the time was in Caesarea Maritima, a Roman city
over on the coast, came to Jerusalem so he could more directly control the
troops and thus control the crowds. The Romans were always on the lookout for
trouble in Jerusalem, especially at Passover, a fact that made Jesus’ going
there at that time even more dangerous.
Mark has Jesus
predict three times that he would be killed in Jerusalem. Whether the
historical person Jesus of Nazareth actually knew what would happen to him
there we don’t know, but he must have known the he assumed a terrible risk when
he went there. Yet he went. As the Gospels tell the story he spent the last
week of his earthly life there and was indeed executed on a cross as a threat
to public order. Why? Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem when as far as we can see he
didn’t have to? The answer to that question tells us a lot about Jesus and what
one of the major facets of his ministry was all about.
To understand why
Jesus went to Jerusalem we have to understand just what that city was in the
life of the Jewish people of Jesus’ time. It was the economic center of the
region, but its place in the life of the Jewish faithful was more important
than that. Jerusalem was the seat of Judaism’s religious authorities. It’s
where the temple was, the only temple the Jews of Jesus’ time recognized as
authentic. At the temple were the clergy of the faith, most importantly for our
purposes the priests and the scribes. They controlled the faith life of first
century CE Jews in both Judea and Galilee. The heart of the organized,
institutionalized structure of first century Judaism was there. The Jewish
institutions of Jerusalem decided all questions in the Jewish faith. If one
were going to bring about any fundamental transformation of first century
Judaism they had to do it in Jerusalem.
OK, so Jesus went
to Jerusalem, the place where the central institutions of his faith were
located. But why did that matter to him? He had followers in Galilee. He could
have stayed there with them, which would have been a much safer thing for him
to do. He had to have had some powerfully compelling reason to leave his home
and the place of his ministry and go to Jerusalem, and indeed he did. Jesus
went to Jerusalem because he was so convinced that the people of those central
institutions of the faith were getting that faith all wrong. He went there to
disclose their error and to proclaim what he knew his Jewish faith was truly
about.
In Jerusalem
Jesus did not less than overthrow the governing institutions and people of the
Jewish faith at the time. He didn’t do it physically, he did it symbolically.
He did it not as a violent revolutionary but as a prophet in the tradition of
the great Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BCE Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. We
see him doing precisely that in two powerful stories from the Gospel of Mark,
the oldest of the canonical Gospels. They are his prediction of the destruction
of the temple and his prophetic act of overturning the tables of the
moneychangers and disrupting the selling of animals there. I’ll take a look at
both of those stories here to explain what I mean.
The story of
Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple is found at Mark 12:38-13:2.
The fact that our numbering system puts a chapter break just before the end of
the story has no significance. That break wasn’t in the original and many later
texts of Mark. The story has three parts. The first and the last of them frame
the middle one. That structure tells us that all three parts belong together
and that to understand the story we must consider all three of them.
In the first part
of the story we read that Jesus is teaching in the temple. He said:
Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes,
and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats
in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses
and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater
condemnation. Mark 12:38-40.
The “scribes” Jesus mentions here
were temple officials whose primary job was writing out copies of the Jewish
scriptures especially the Torah. Together with the priests they constituted
recognized authorities on the meaning of the Jewish scriptures and what those
scriptures meant for the Jewish life of faith. The most important thing for our
purposes that Jesus says about them here is that they “devour widows’ houses.” By
“houses” he doesn’t mean just the places where widows lived. He means that the
scribes (and by implication the priests) took everything widows’ owned.
The second part
of this account is the famous story of the “widow’s mite.” In this part of the
story Jesus observes people putting money into what the text calls the temple’s
“treasury.” That’s probably a sort of collection box where people put the money
they were giving to the temple. We’re told that many rich people put in large
amounts of money. Then we read:
A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which
are worth a penny. Then he [Jesus] called his disciples and said to them,
‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are
contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their
abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she
had to live on.’ Mark 12:41-44.
Here’s the
important point to take from this part of story. No matter how many stewardship
sermons you may have heard based on “the widows’ mite,” this story is not about
generous giving to the church. The widow in this story is not being generous.
We must take the text seriously when it says she put in everything she had, all
she had to live on. She was poor, and now she is completely without any
resources at all. Given the circumstances of the time, unless she could get
some money by begging or prostitution she would starve to death. She isn’t
being generous, she is attempting to pay what part she could of the temple tax
the temple authorities said every Jew was to pay. She’s been told all her life
that she would be a sinner if she didn’t pay that tax. She has come to the end
of her resources, so in what was certainly a desperate attempt to get right
with God before she died she gives the temple everything she had left. The
temple has indeed devoured her house.
The third part of
the story is Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. We
read:
As he came out of the temple, one of his
disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large
buildings! Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one
stone here will be left upon another; all will be thrown down. Mark 13:1-2.
We see that this three part
structure goes like this:
1. Jesus
says the temple authorities “devour widows’ houses,” that is they take
everything a poor widow (there was hardly any other kind) has.
2. A
poor widow comes and puts in the temple’s collection box all she has, all she
had to live on. The temple has devoured her “house.”
3. The
temple, the house of the officials who devour widows’ houses, will itself be
destroyed.
There will be
consequences of what the temple and its officials have done to this poor widow
and certainly countless others like her. The “house” of those officials, the
Jerusalem temple, the symbol of Jewish faith and the power of the priests and
the scribes, will be destroyed. Those religious officials who abuse their power
in order to glorify themselves and oppress the poor will have done to them what
they have been doing to others, especially to the poor. To Jesus the temple and
its officials were so corrupt that they had no more right to exist. Overthrow
the whole thing, he said. Tear it all down, he said. God will tear it all down
because of the way the temple’s clergy oppressed the poor for their own
benefit. Jesus telling his disciple that it would all be torn down is him
making a prophetic statement about the wrongs of the temple and about what
people of faith really ought to be about.
Next we consider
the famous story usually (and grossly wrongly) called “the cleansing of the
temple.” A version of this story appears in all four Gospels, though John sets
it early Jesus’ ministry rather than at the end of it the way the other three
Gospels do. Mark’s version is the oldest. You’ll find it at Mark 11:11-19. We
read that the first thing Jesus did after he entered Jerusalem was go to the
temple. The text says:
Then they came to Jerusalem. 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 money changers and
the seats of those who sold doves; he would not allow anyone to carry anything
through the temple. Mark 11:15-16.
It is true that Mark’s text has
Jesus explain his actions by saying: “Is it not written: ‘My house shall be
called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of
robbers.” Mark 11:17. Yet this story surely has a much deeper meaning than that
those doing business in the temple were ripping off their customers. What might
that deeper meaning be?
To understand
what this story is really about we must understand that Jesus was not
“cleansing” the temple. Who were the people he drove out of it? They were money
changers and sellers of doves. But why were there money changers in the temple
at all? And why were people selling doves there? They were there because what
they did was necessary for the temple to function the way it was meant to
function. We saw in the story of the widow’s mite that people contributed money
to the temple. Roman money was the only money there was, and it was all coins
not paper. The coins usually had the image of the Roman emperor on them. Some
of them had the words “Divii Filius,” which means son of the Divine One. To the
Jewish way of thinking those coins were impure. They were defiled. They were
idolatrous. The temple could not accept them. So the money changers were there
so that the people could exchange their unacceptable Roman money for special money
that the temple could accept. The temple could not function without them. It
did not need to be “cleansed” of them. They weren’t defiling it, they were
enabling it to function the way it was supposed to function.
The same is true
of the sellers of doves in the temple. The worship in the Jerusalem temple
consisted mostly of animal sacrifice, which the Torah law specified must be
done under certain specific circumstances. Forgiveness of sin was one of those
circumstances, but there were others as well. People offered animals which the
priests sacrificed, that is, killed as an offering to God. The temple was in
effect a giant slaughterhouse. But people couldn’t bring any old animal to be
sacrificed. We read a condemnation of the offering of imperfect animals in the
book of Malachi:
O priests, who despise my [Yahweh’s] name. You say, ‘How have
we despised your name?’ By offering polluted food on my altar. And you say,
‘How have we polluted it?’ By thinking that the Lord’s
table may be despised. When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not
wrong? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not wrong?
Malachi 1:6c-8a.
The temple clergy taught that only
healthy, whole animals could be sacrificed. The only way the people could be
sure the animals they offered for sacrifice were animals the priests would
accept was to buy them from specialized sellers at the temple. So there were
people in the outer courtyard of the temple selling ritually adequate animals
to be sacrificed. They weren’t desecrating the place. The temple didn’t need to
be “cleansed” of them. Like the money changers they were essential to the
temple’s proper functioning. So Jesus’ prophetic act in the temple wasn’t to
“cleanse” it. It was symbolically to overthrow it.
That, I think, is
why Jesus went to Jerusalem. He knew that all that animal sacrifice wasn’t what
God wanted. He knew that the people didn’t need priests acting as
intermediaries between them and God. He knew that oppression and exploitation
of the poor wasn’t what God wanted. He knew that at least the organized,
institutionalized expression of the great Jewish faith needed radical
transformation if it were to become more faithful to the God it claimed to
serve than it was. He could not make a truly profound expression of what he
knew to be true out in the hinterlands of Galilee. He could not perform a truly
prophetic act to demonstrate the truth he knew there. He could do those things
only in Jerusalem. That’s where the beating heart of Judaism was. Jesus knew
his mission and ministry had to lead him there if he were to complete it, so he
went. There he preached, he taught, he demonstrated, he suffered, he died, and
he rose again. He would not have fulfilled his life’s mission had he not gone,
so he went.
Now, I have long
insisted that the Bible stories, the great ones at least, are not just about
what happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. These
ancient stories arose in times very different from ours, but they retain their
power because they are also about us. I mean by that that we can find meaning
in them for ourselves and for our world. If we couldn’t these stories would
have faded into historical obscurity and be of interest only to those odd
creatures called historians ( and I confess to being one of those myself). The
story of Jesus going to Jerusalem tells us not to accept uncritically what
so-called religious authorities tell you about your faith. Do your own informed
discernment. That’s an important issue for all of us.
I, however, am
more concerned with a different question that arises for me as I read of Jesus
going to Jerusalem and what he did there. See, I am Christian clergy. I’m
retired now, but I’m still an ordained Christian minister. When I read this
story I put myself not in Jesus’ place in it (something it’s always
inappropriate to do in any case), and not even in the disciples’ place in it. I
put myself in the place of the Jewish clergy, the priests and the scribes of
the Jerusalem temple. They represented the religious power structure of their
day. I’m ordained in the United Church of Christ, a small and mostly very
liberal Christian denomination with really no power in the world other than the
word. Still, I’m ordained and have served in a religious institution. This
story causes me to ask: What would Jesus say the religious institutions of
today are getting wrong like the temple authorities of his day got wrong? That
is of course an extremely broad question. There are after all more religious
institutions in the world today than I can even begin to know of much less
offer informed critique of, and they’re getting all sorts of things wrong. Here
I will limit my remarks to the type of religious institution with which I am most
familiar, the Protestant Christian denominations, including my own United
Church of Christ, that we used to call mainline. I’ll treat them collectively,
for they all share a lot of faults in common.
Mainline Protestant
Christianity has been in decline in the United States for a very long time. All
sorts of polling and analysis have been done to try to figure out why, but for
now ignore all that polling and analysis. The question before us here is: What
would Jesus say mainline Protestant Christian institutions are getting wrong? I
have nowhere near enough hubris to claim to speak for Jesus. Still, there is
one major critique against those institutions that I am bold enough to believe
Jesus would share with us. Here it is.
You have not been
telling the people the truth! You have let fear of losing members and their
money keep you from telling the people the truths your ordained people, or at
least most of them, learned in seminary. You have instead played to the people’s
preexisting beliefs and prejudices. You have not shared with them understandings
of faith generally and Christianity in particular that would be new and
probably challenging for them. You have not adequately challenged conservative
Christian evangelicalism with its narrowly conservative ethics and biblical
literalism. You have let that bastardized version of the faith become the
dominant, most visible face of Christianity in your country. Because you have
done and not done these things Christianity has become and is becoming more and
more irrelevant and unacceptable to most of the people in your context.
Here in no
particular order of importance are a few of the things that are central to true
Christianity that you have not adequately shared with your people:
·
God is transcendent mystery. You humans can
never fully comprehend who or what God is. Your call is to live in and with
that divine mystery not to solve it.
·
Truth consists of more than facts. Mythic and
symbolic truth is far deeper and more powerful than mere factual truth.
·
God’s grace is universal and totally
unconditional. God has already extended it to everyone not because of who they
are but because of who God is.
·
Jesus was hardly at all about what you have to
do to get your soul to heaven after you die.
·
You don’t have to do anything to get your soul
to heaven after you die. You certainly don’t have to have believed any
particular thing to get your soul to heaven after you die.
·
There is no such thing as hell.
·
Thoughts and beliefs do matter, but they matter
mostly because they lead to actions. Proper thoughts and beliefs lead to proper
actions, improper thoughts and beliefs lead to improper actions.
·
Faith without works is useless for everyone
except perhaps for the spiritual needs of the person holding the faith.
·
Jesus was a radical, nonviolent revolutionary
who sought to turn every conventional belief, custom, and institution in his
world upside down. He calls us to do the same in our world.
·
Because God’s grace is universal and
unconditional, and because of the conditions of human existence, there is no
one way to God. Christian exclusivism is an abomination.
·
God is nonviolent. Period.
·
God calls all people away from violence and
toward creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. That after all is
what Jesus did.
·
God is love, and God’s love so far exceeds any
human conception of love that you can never truly understand it. You don’t
understand it, you stand under it.
·
God calls all people to lives of love,
acceptance, and inclusivity not to hate condemnation and exclusion.
·
No human institution, including especially the
church, has ever been, is, or ever will be perfect. They all need constant
renewal and reformation.
·
God is neither a Puritan nor a Victorian.
Victorian sexual ethics are not from God.
·
Sex, like everything else, must be grounded in
love not in rules.
·
The Bible is a human product. God didn’t write
it. God loved the people who wrote it but gave them no special revelation about
what they were to write. They wrote of their experience of God not something
that came directly from God.
·
Because it is human not divine the Bible is full
of contradictions and falsehoods as well as full of truth and wisdom. Use love
as your guide to what to take and what to reject from it.
·
Symbol and myth are the language of faith. Read
the Bible stories for their mythic meaning (if a particular story has any—not all
of them do). Don’t get hung up on mere facts.
·
Most of all, God loves you. Period. God loves
everyone. Period.
·
God calls everyone to love God, all people, and
themselves. Whatever expresses love is true. Whatever contradicts it is false.
You have had all
of these truths available to you for a very long time. You’ve sat on them. You
haven’t asserted them nearly strongly enough either to your church people or to
the world. You haven’t gone to Jerusalem the way Jesus did. You haven’t
challenged conventional human truth, you’ve surrendered to it. Knock it off! Go
to Jerusalem! Turn your world upside down in the name of love! Don’t delay, do
it now! It may yet not be too late.
