Tag worship

Lifted UP in the Temple

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Before I begin, there is a translation difficulty I need to clarify.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus is often confronted or antagonized by a group identified as “the Jews.”  The Greek word here is Ioudaioi, and it refers to a particular group of self-appointed Judeans who saw themselves as the guardians of the temple, the Torah, and Jewish traditions.  It’s important to remember that almost every character in the Gospel of John, including and especially Jesus, is Jewish. When the writer of John uses “the Jews” to describe those who are challenging Jesus, we are not supposed to think this means the Jewish people as a whole; it is only this one pious and prickly group that is being referred to.   I hate it that this even needs to be said, but, unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-Semitism is once again on the rise and some have used these references to “the Jews” in the Gospel of John to feed their inexcusable bigotry and animosity.   The writer of John was a Jew.  The disciples were Jews.  Jesus was a Jew, and Jesus loved his people, the Jews—even those particular Ioudaioi who were a thorn in his side.

John 2:13         The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.*  14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves and the money changers seated at their tables.  15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, with the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”*  17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”*  18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”*  19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”*  20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”  21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body.*  22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The way you tell a story shapes the way people hear the story.  And that determines how they understand the story.  The way you tell a story also tells people how you understand the story.

If you Google the movie UP, here is how Google tells the story of UP:  “Carl Fredricksen, a 78-year-old balloon salesman, is about to fulfill a lifelong dream.  Tying thousands of balloons to his house, he flies away to the South American wilderness.  But curmudgeonly Carl’s worst nightmare comes true when he discovers a little boy named Russell is a stowaway aboard the balloon-powered house.  A Pixar animation.”

Now, there is nothing wrong or inaccurate in Google’s telling of the story of UP.  But if you’ve seen UP, you know that this is a woefully inadequate synopsis of a truly wonderful movie that will make you laugh and make you cry and in the process maybe even make you stop to think about what’s really important in life.   In Google’s telling of the story of UP there is no mention of the explorer Charles Muntz, Carl’s boyhood hero who later becomes his deadly nemesis.  There is no mention of Dug, the goofy, squirrel-obsessed, talking Golden Retriever, who bonds with Carl and Russell.  There is no mention of Kevin, the giant endangered bird that Muntz is trying to capture and that Carl and Russell are trying to save. Worst of all, in Google’s story of UP there is no mention of Ellie, Carl’s childhood sweetheart and wife, the love of his life whose death left him with broken dreams and a broken heart.

The whole movie begins with the love story of Carl and Ellie.  Their love is a motive force that drives the story, and even though Carl and Russell’s adventures begin long after Ellie has died, she continues to be a presence.  Even after she is gone, she is the gentle current of love in Carl’s heart that opens him to form new relationships with Russell and Dug and Kevin.  That is what the movie is really about.  When all is said and done, UP is a story about the transformative and healing power of love.  And if the only version of UP you ever encountered was Google’s synopsis, you wouldn’t get any of that.

The way you tell a story shapes the way people hear the story.  And that determines how they understand the story.  The way you tell the story also tells people how you understand the story.

So let’s look at the story of Jesus chasing the merchants out of the temple courtyard and overturning the tables of the money changers, a story that appears in all four gospels.  Mark, Matthew and Luke, the synoptic gospels, tell the story pretty much the same way, which isn’t surprising since the writers of Matthew and Luke were almost certainly working from copies of Mark.  But the Gospel of John tells the story of this event very differently from the other three gospels.  

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, the so-called cleansing of the temple takes place close to the end of the gospel during the last week of Jesus’ life, the week we now call Holy Week.   His explosive outburst in the temple courtyard is one of the things that motivates the temple authorities to arrest him and leads directly to his crucifixion.  John, however, places the cleansing of the temple close to the beginning of the gospel, almost at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, not at the end.

Why?  What different thing is John trying to do in this telling of the story of Jesus?  Where is John leading us?  What is John up to?  

It’s only in John that Jesus makes a whip out of cords to chase the animal sellers and moneychangers out of the temple.  In the synoptic gospels, no whip is mentioned.   Why?  Is John trying to give extra emphasis to just how angry Jesus was?  What’s up with that?

In Mark, Jesus justifies his actions by quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah.[1] “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations, but you have made it a den of robbers.”  Matthew and Luke say almost exactly the same thing but leave out “for all the nations.”  In John, however, Jesus doesn’t say anything to justify his actions, he simply orders the sellers, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  Later, as his disciples reflect on this incident, they will find themselves thinking of Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  Is that what the whip of cords was about?  

In the synoptic gospels the chief priests and scribes ask Jesus by what authority he is doing these things.  In John, the Ioudaioi ask him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”  And it is only in John that Jesus replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. ”   In both Matthew and Mark when Jesus is on trial before the Sanhedrin he is accused of saying this, but only John reports Jesus actually saying it.

Let’s go back to the question of why John places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the gospel instead of at the end.  There is a clue in verse 18 when the Ioudaioi ask Jesus, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”   Their question becomes a literary device that sets the stage for all the signs that Jesus will perform throughout the rest of the gospel.

The first half of the Gospel of John is sometimes called the Book of Signs because within this first half, Jesus performs seven signs or miracles which demonstrate his power and indicate who he truly is.  In chapter 2 he turns water into wine.  In chapter 4 he heals a royal official’s son.   At the pool of Beth-zatha he heals a man who has been ill for 38 years.  He feeds five thousand, he walks on water, he heals a man born blind and, finally, he raises Lazarus from the dead, a miracle so powerful that it scares his enemies and makes them even more determined to kill him.  

“What sign will you show us?” they asked him.  Jesus answered, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  That left them flabbergasted.  “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,” they said, “and you’re going to raise it up in three days?”  

And this is where the narrator gives us a little hint about where all this is going:  “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

He was speaking of the temple of his body.  

The Greek manuscript for the Gospel of John uses two different words for temple in this story.  The first word is ieron which refers to the temple building and all its grounds. The second word is naos which means a shrine or sanctuary.  Naos is the word that was used to refer to the Holy of Holies in the inner court of the temple, the area sealed off by a great curtain where only the high priest could go and only on certain high holy days.  The naos was the area where God was supposed to dwell.  But Jesus speaks of his body as the naos, the shrine in which God dwells.  Destroy this naos, this shrine, and in three days I will raise it up again.

It’s helpful to remember that the Gospel of John was written long after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans.  For the Jews living in exile after the destruction of Jerusalem—and that included the Jewish followers of Jesus in John’s community—one of the most pressing questions they faced was where and how should they worship God.  When there is no temple and no place to offer sacrifices, what do you do?  Where do you go?  Where and how do you come into the presence of God?

Here in the second chapter of John, Jesus answers that question.  God is not out there in heaven.  God is not shut up in a building or a holy place or hidden behind a curtain.  God is in you.  And in me.  As Karoline Lewis wrote, “The temple is no longer necessary (if it ever was).  We are to be the temple of God.  We are to embody God.  You are.  I am.  We are together.”  

When Jesus sat down with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, she wanted to talk about the proper place to worship.  “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,” she said, “but you all say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”  Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when people will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…  The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.  God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”

Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly reminds us that he embodies God.  In chapter 14 he says, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?  The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”  In chapter 17, as he prays for protection for his disciples, Jesus says, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,  that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.   The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,  I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

“The glory that you have given me I have given them.”   The Greek word we translate as “glory” is doxa, which carries the sense of the Hebrew word kavod.   This is the word used to describe the weighty presence of God, the divine way of being.  Jesus has passed on this divine way of being to us so that we can be one with God and be God’s visible presence in the world.

Alice Walker captured this idea beautifully in The Color Purple in a letter that Celie writes to her sister Nettie where she tells Nettie about her conversations with Shug.  “Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for… She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church?  I never did.  I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.  Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.  And I think all the other folks did too.  They come to church to share God, not find God.”

God is in you and God is in me and God is in us all together.  We are the temple.  God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.  You are a shrine.  God is in your heart and your mind and your soul and your body.  We bring God with us and when we share God, we are lifted UP to new heights and new adventures.  We are the balloons that lift the house and carry it to Paradise Falls. And remember, when all is said and done, this story we are part of, this story about God alive and at work in the world in us… it’s a love story.

[1] Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11

image © Peter Koenig

Church Without Walls

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.—1 Corinthians 12:17

We are going to church.  Maybe we won’t be back in our building for a while, but we are going to church.  We might not sing in our sanctuary for some time yet, but we are going to church. Think of to church as a verb in its infinitive and infinite form.  To sing, to dance, to praise, to pray, to help, to uplift, to listen, to learn.  To church.  To gather as the body of Christ in whatever way we can even if it has to be in the catacombs of ZOOM.   To do whatever good we can even if it has to be organized through emails and texting.  To support each other in love and extend that love to others even if it is through phone calls and Instagram and Facebook and Messenger.  We are going to church.  We will church.  We are churching. 

So what if, for reasons of responsibility and maintaining everyone’s good health, we can’t gather in our sacred space just yet?  Our churching does not depend on our architecture.  Maybe—dare I say it?—our architecture has sometimes hampered our churching.  Maybe the sacred appearance of our doors, the religious statement of our whole building, has kept some people from crossing the threshold and stopped them from entering into the joy of churching with us.  Maybe since the outside affirms their preconceived notions, they figure that what happens inside will, too.  Maybe even we who are so comfortable on the inside have let our churching be molded by our packaging.  Thoughts?

In the Latinx communities of South Los Angeles and elsewhere in the Southwest they fandango.  Fandango is a centuries-old type of dance and style of music that originated in Andalusia.  In the Americas it has picked up some distinctive New World traits, blending old with new.  Fandango has also become the name for a kind of pop-up party, a neighborhood celebration centered around the dance and the music.  Someone will find a space then pass out flyers and at the appointed time people will come to dance and hear the band and sing the songs.

Martha Gonzalez, an Associate Professor at Scripps College, is also the lead singer of Quetzal, a band that organizes and performs at many fandangoes.  In a recent article in the L.A. Times she said,  “I think we always need spaces to gather, but it’s also the cultural work that needs to be done, creating culture so that even if the space disappears we can migrate to another space and we pick up where we left off because we worked on the culture mechanisms.  I think that’s the most important thing we can learn from having these spaces and then losing them.  The work and the culture we created continues to thrive.”

Take out fandango and put in church.  We need the spaces to gather but it’s really the cultural work that holds us together, the culture of being the body of Christ, the culture of being the hands and feet and heart of Jesus in this world.  We may love the building we have called church but we need to remember that it is only a facility.  It facilitates churching.  Even if the space disappears we can migrate to another space and pick up where we left off.  ZOOM, for instance.  The work, the worship, the bonding, the blessing, the loving, the welcoming, the praying, the generosity, the caring—the being the body of Christ—all continue to thrive.  Maybe we can’t gather in our building right now.  But come what may, we are going to church.