In Spirit and in Truth

When reading Exodus 20 v 1-17 (the Ten Commandments) and John 2 v 13-22 (Jesus clears the Temple Courts), which are the passages set down for our study in the lectionary this week, I found myself thinking about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and political prisoner who met his death a couple of weeks ago in the freezing conditions of a Siberian jail.

Later I will say why I thought about Navalny but first let us turn to today’s reading from the Gospel according to John.  The Scottish theologian, William Barclay writes that it has been said that ‘John was more interested in the truth, than in the facts.’  What Barclay meant was that unlike the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John is setting out the story of Jesus with the primary purpose of showing that Jesus was the Messiah. The others tell the story in a more chronological way.  This difference shows up in the story we read today of Jesus clearing the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple Court.  John situates the story in chapter 2 of his Gospel, right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, perhaps because he is wanting to show the Messianic nature of that ministry.  Mark and the others put it more realistically at the end when his open challenge to the religious authorities saw him moving quickly towards the crisis that resulted in his crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

While there is a tendency to view the story of the passion of Jesus, as John does, in the spiritual terms of his sacrificial death to save us from the consequences of sin, I have found myself viewing it through a different lens this week.  When Jesus goes to Jerusalem this final time, he knows he is going to meet his death – he tells the disciples so in Mark chapter 10.  Why does he say this?   It seems that he had determined that he would challenge the religious and political establishment in a fundamental way.  He is going to attack the corruption of the worship of God in the Temple, and he knows that this is such a profound attack on the religious authorities that they will respond by having him put to death.

In our Old Testament reading from Exodus, we are reminded of the Ten Commandments that God had set down for right and holy living.   The approach of the Jewish religious authorities was then to add ever more complex rules which they believed would ensure that people would know how to behave in every conceivable eventuality. Not only did this become excessively legalistic and burdensome, it did not lead to the people and their leaders living the life that God planned, and their worship of God was similarly dominated and deadened by rules.

Jesus did not add more rules.  On the contrary he summed up the whole of the law and the prophets in two simple commandments – Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.  The Gospel he proclaimed, the good news of the Kingdom, was that the worship of God is about living in the spirit of God’s love.  It is not fundamentally about religious practices, including in those days, those of animal sacrifices.  These religious practices, especially around the Temple, had long been the main focus of the Jewish religious authorities.

The first Temple was commissioned by King Solomon and stood for hundreds of years before being destroyed in 587 BC during the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Neo-Babylonian King, and many of the Jewish people were taken off into exile.  Later when the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, Cyrus the Great authorized the return of the Jewish people to the former kingdom of Judah, and the building of the Second Temple began.  Many years later, in 19 BC, two decades or so before Jesus was born, Herod started a huge expansion of The Temple – an enormous project requiring extraordinary amounts of money and resources of manpower and artisanship.  At the time that Jesus was speaking about the destruction of the Temple, they had been working on the renovation and extension of the building for 46 years.  It was a massive edifice and to talk about it being destroyed was to attack what had become the central feature of Jewish religious life.  The Temple was not completed until 64 AD, three decades after Jesus death, but it only survived for a handful of years.  There was a Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66 AD, two years after the completion of the Temple.  The revolt was defeated and in 70 AD the Temple was destroyed, the Jews were dispersed, and Temple worship ended, just as Jesus had said. There are still Jews today who want to rebuild the Temple.  When you see Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, sometimes called the Wailing Wall, they are praying at the remains of Herod’s Temple (see the picture above).  They weep for the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and they pray for its rebuilding.  The first and second Temples were built on the raised area in the Old City of Jerusalem, called the Temple Mount, and that is where Orthodox Jews pray, believing that the Third Temple will be built there when the Messiah comes. 

A complicating factor is that Muslims believe that around 621AD Muhammad travelled on the back of a winged horse-like animal to that same Temple Mount, known to them as Al-Aqsa or Haram Al Sharif, where he led other prophets including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in prayer, and a mosque was built there which is the second oldest mosque in the Muslim world.  I am sure that you will have seen pictures of The Dome of the Rock, and this is a mosque built on the Temple Mount over the site where it is believed that Abraham made preparations to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The place that Jesus was speaking about was, before his life on earth, as well as ever since then, one of the holiest and most contested religious sites in the world, for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Why was Jesus so angry?  Why did he make a whip and drive the merchants out of the Temple Court?  

When people came to worship from all over the ancient world, they had to pay a Temple Tax, but while they could pay for other things in many different currencies, the Temple Tax had to be paid in Galilean shekels, and they were charged exorbitant exchange rates. 

The sacrificial animals had to be ‘pure’ and if they were purchased outside the Temple, they had to be inspected by the Temple authorities (at a charge) and were almost inevitably turned down, so that hugely more expensive animals and birds had to be purchased from the merchants in the Temple.  The whole process had been corrupted both by greedy individuals and by the Temple authorities who were profiteering from the pilgrim worshippers. 

In addition to this corruption, the noise of the animals and the loud bartering and dishonest business was taking place in the Court of the Gentiles, the only place in the Temple complex that non-Jews could enter.  That meant that their experience of the worship of God lacked any sense of integrity, respect, or reverence. 

When John describes the scene, he focuses on the theological significance as he saw it, linking his comments about the destruction of the Temple and rebuilding it in three days, with the death and resurrection of Jesus. However, when Mark is writing his Gospel, much earlier than John, nearer to the actual events and giving a more chronological account, he puts Jesus’ angry outburst at the end of his ministry, just before the Temple authorities had him arrested, tried, and put him to death.

Let us imagine the scene. Firstly, Jesus comes into Jerusalem, riding on a borrowed donkey, demonstrating that he was a poor man. He goes to the Temple, but it is late in the day and so he returns the next day to publicly and very dramatically confront the corrupted sacrificial worship, and the huge amounts of money being made by the Temple authorities from poor religious pilgrims. 

He quotes the prophet, Jeremiah (7:11, NEB) “Do you think that this house, this house which bears my Name, is a robbers’ cave?” 

He also quotes, Isaiah, (56:7, NEB) “….them will I bring to my holy hill and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their offerings and sacrifices shall be acceptable on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”  

The point made in Mark’s Gospel is that while Jews could proceed to the Court of the Women, and if they were men, they could go on into the Court of the Israelites, beyond which only the priests could go.  But the Court of the Gentiles was the only place that non-Jews could worship, and it had been secularized and turned into a noisy corrupt marketplace, denying Gentiles any proper experience of how God should be worshipped.  The authorities did not care, for they thought God only had an interest in them.  Jesus proclaims in the words of the prophet, Isaiah, that it shall be a house of prayer for all nations – not just for the Jews.

This was a radical message and a dramatic confrontation, acted out in the most holy place in the Jewish world.  When he prophesied that The Temple and Temple-worship would be destroyed this was revolutionary and was the key element of evidence in his trial.  In Mark 14:58 (NIV) we read that the corrupt witnesses at his trial said, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’”  In fact it was not that Jesus was threatening to destroy the Temple himself, but rather that though the Temple and Temple-worship was destroyed, as it was by the Romans in 70 AD, there was another better way of worshipping God, not based on animal sacrifice in an extraordinary Temple built with human hands, but rather, as he said to the woman of Samaria, worship would be “in spirit and in truth” – it was about consecrated human hearts, not the constructions of human hands.

Jesus was preaching religious revolution and he knew the authorities would kill him, but he realized that his death, his sacrifice, could be transformational. 

When Alexei Navalny decided to go back to Russia to confront Putin, my immediate thought was that he was foolish.  Why not stay alive and promote revolution in exile?  However, whatever his commitment, calculations or expectations, the road that he took was somewhat like the road that Jesus took.  It was a profoundly sacrificial route and when Jesus calls us to follow him sacrificially, he does so because sacrifice can be transformational.

Time after time these same issues arise.  Religious corruption, similar to that which Jesus observed in Temple worship, led to Martin Luther’s protest in the 1500s against the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church by which, in exchange for money, it was believed that people would receive remission of their sins.  This was to fund the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – a Christian equivalent of Galilean shekels for the huge and elaborate Jewish Temple.   It was not that having a place of worship was wrong.  The sin came through religious practices being a substitute for a life lived in the service and spirit of God.

It seems to me that this is the significance of Jesus’s dramatic act in the Temple, and it led directly to his trial and crucifixion.  He knew what he was doing.  He knew that challenging religious orthodoxy would lead to his death, but he was determined to confront the corruption of the faith and demonstrate the transformational spiritual power of a life lived courageously and sacrificially.

If we are to be his followers, we must beware of substituting religious or any other practices for living in the Spirit and service of God and His Kingdom.

The photograph above was taken by the author at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem in February 2022 and shows the Western Wall, the remaining section of the Second Temple.