In the Court of the Gentiles

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22

The lectionary can sometimes be a funny thing. We last had the Ten Commandments come up as a reading on October 4, as we moved toward the end of our tour through a three-month long series of stories from Genesis and Exodus. And now, just four months later, here they are again.

Just a quick recap of the setting for these commandments, called the Ten Words in Judaism. Having fled enslavement in Egypt, the Hebrews have crossed the Red Sea, held a great celebration, and then began to look around at the desert wilderness. What the heck, Moses? We’ll starve out here. We were better off back in Egypt, slavery and all! Yet steadfastly food is provided to them, and gradually they’ve made their way to the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses ascends that mountain and comes into the presence of God, who he experiences as thunder, lightning, thick clouds, shaking ground, and a blasting trumpet. Moses is in the presence of the Holy, as a point of contact between that God and a people down below who are still very much in formation as a people. There in that place he is given these commandments, and they are what will begin to shape and form them as a people. There are a good many other commandments in the Torah as well—over 600 of them—but these ten have a particular place as the heart or kernel of all the law.

If you want to dig into them further and think about what they might have meant for that ancient people and what they still might mean for us, you need only pick up John Badertscher’s book, Ten Steps on Freedom Road: why the commandments are good news, which we serialized in podcast format and released over the course of the fall and early winter. I won’t try to do justice to John’s book now, but just offer his central insight: “I have come to acknowledge the Ten Commandments as offering us a better, truer path of freedom.”

Freedom. What might seem only like limitations—you shall not this, you shall not that—is in fact meant to set a framework within which true freedom is possible. In John’s understanding, among other things these commandments are meant to give us freedom for imagination, for listening, to rest and enjoy, for life together, for intimacy, for friendship. Oh, and this freedom is cultivated and experienced together; not as my freedom, but as ours.

Consider a very current example as you think about that. We are now living in this society with a commandment that says, “Thou shalt wear a facemask in public indoor spaces.” That’s not meant as some arbitrary limit on your freedom of expression—facial expression, that is—nor is it meant to say that the display of nose, mouth and chin in public is somehow shameful. Rather this law is about the freedom to be together in public indoor spaces in relative safety. It isn’t a law about me, but rather one about us.

But we’re a funny bunch, we humans, and we easily miss what lies at the heart of things like the commandments and choose a kind of legalism over the spirit of the law. In her book An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about how as a child growing up in the American South she absolutely dreaded Sunday, as it was the day you weren’t allowed to do anything. Boredom had become the order of the day, not “freedom to rest and enjoy”, as John puts it in his treatment of the sabbath commandment.

In a very real way, I believe it is something like this that Jesus is symbolically cleansing from the temple in today’s reading. He wants to challenge a narrow reading of the temple laws and practices that actually obscured the temple’s true purpose.

“My Father’s house,” Jesus calls the temple in this gospel reading. Not that he was suggesting that God lived there or was contained there, but rather that the whole of that great building and all it contained was meant to stand as a symbol of the connection between the heavens and the earth, between the Creator and the creation, as a place to be recalled to God through offerings, sacrifice, and prayer.

The temple of Jesus’ day was a massive rebuild of the temple from the early 500s BCE, that had itself replaced Solomon’s temple after it had been destroyed at the time of the Babylonian Exile. When Jesus entered the temple, the gospel tells us,

He found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the moneychangers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’

So what’s with this marketplace? Merchants are selling the various animals required for offerings, and meanwhile others are exchanging Roman coins—the coins of day-to-day life—for Jewish coins, because you can’t be buying a pure animal for offering with tainted Roman money. It’s one stop shopping, never mind that the exchange rate they’re charging to trade your coins is like doing a currency exchange at the airport. “Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!”

But there’s something else at stake here as well, which isn’t visible unless you know something of the architecture of the temple. It is actually hinted at in the story as told by the other three gospel writers: “Jesus said ‘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.’”

A house of prayer for all the nations, by which he was pointing to the architecture. At the heart of the temple was the holy of holies, where only the appointed priests could enter, and then the court of priests, the court of men—Jewish men—the court of women—open to Jewish women, men, and children—and finally at the outside the court of Gentiles, open to all. It is this court that the Ethiopian eunuch from the Book of Acts would have been able to enter as he searched out the meaning of the prophet Isaiah and offered prayers, and it is in this court that the marketplace was set up. For the sake of selling animals for offering and exchanging Roman coinage for Jewish coinage—supposedly for purity’s sake—one of the core pieces of ancient Israel’s identity was being squandered, namely their call to be a sign for all peoples. And so a twisted adherence to the letter of the law caused the deeper calling of the nation and its temple to be submerged and debased. And so showing a passion and anger that might still shock us, “Making a whip of cords, Jesus drove all of them out of the temple… poured out the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables.” A holy and prophetic anger.

But in John’s telling, there was more, as Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” by which he was speaking not of the stone and mortar temple, but rather of his own self.

Here N.T. Wright comments,

Jesus is the true temple; he is the Word made flesh, the place where the glory of God has chosen to make his dwelling. The Jews had ancient traditions about the Temple being destroyed and rebuilt. It had happened before, and some thought it would happen again… Jesus takes the traditions and applies them to himself. He is the reality to which the Temple itself points. (Wright, John for Everyone)

Chances are that after Jesus and his disciples left, the merchants and moneychangers simply righted the tables, gathered up the coins, and led the animals back into the court of the Gentiles, and chances are Jesus knew they were going to do that. And in another thirty years that great temple would be no more, destroyed by the Romans in response to an uprising on the part of the people.

But our temple, who is the Word made flesh? The empire tried to destroy him as well, but just as the commandments are meant to be about more than just restrictions—meant in in their spirit to free us—Christ is more than the body they tortured to death on the cross. That death was but the beginning of a new story for Jesus, and for all of us. In him there is no need for a court of the Gentiles, for his temple encompasses all.