Hilton Head Island, SC – March 20, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:1-10; Mark 11:11,15-19,27-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. – Mark 11:15
Jesus, God’s Provocateur
When I was a student assistant minister at the Glenburn Parish Church in Paisley, Scotland, we always sang a children’s hymn in every Sunday service. The children liked it, all the rest of us liked it, and Dr. George Cameron, the pastor of the church, who as far as I know chose all the hymns, liked it. Because I liked George Cameron so much, I would have been happy if he had selected “Three Blind Mice” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” George Gordon Cameron was a trrrrue prrrrince among the clerrrgy.
One of the children’s hymns we sang about every six weeks or so had this as its first stanza: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild/ Look upon a little child/ Pity my simplicity/ Suffer me to come to Thee.” The poetry for that hymn, incidentally, was written by Charles Wesley. It is an outstanding hymn for very young children, because it provides a strong spiritual connection between them and Jesus, and that is an extremely important factor in helping children to grow into mature adult Christians. However, if the Gospel record is correct, Jesus was anything but gentle, meek, or mild, even though that hymn is very effective in welcoming little children into Christ’s Church. From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus was a courageous battler against what he believed were seriously flawed religious conventions. From the get-go, Jesus set out to challenge many of the religious notions upon which 1st-century Judaism was founded. And he knew exactly what he was doing. He felt called by God to be a religious pot-stirrer.
The Gospel of Mark is the “Tell-It-Like-It-Is” Gospel. Mark doesn’t embellish or embroider the picture of Jesus which he paints; he simply states what happened as he had been told it by Simon Peter, the prince of the apostles. Presumably, therefore, Mark’s Gospel is a narrative written by someone who was told Jesus’ story by an eyewitness who actually lived with Jesus.
The first action of Jesus that Mark reports occurs in his first chapter (1:21-28). Jesus cast out “an unclean spirit” from a man in the synagogue of Capernaum, a fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The man came to Jesus to be liberated from this “spirit,” which we might call mental illness. I shall not try to explain the details, because we have too many other fish to fry today. But when Jesus was finished with the healing, the leaders of the synagogue were amazed that he seemed to have the power to cast out demons. But that is all it says.
By Chapter Two of Mark’s Gospel, however, and from the very first verse, Jesus was deliberately challenging long-accepted and widely-approved religious notions. He healed a man who was paralyzed. Maybe it was from a stroke, maybe from a disease; it doesn’t say. But instead of healing him directly, Jesus instead told the man, “Your sins are forgiven.” Now why would he do that? It may be because he sensed the paralyzed man thought his paralysis had inflicted him because of his sins. We of course would not see it that way, and I trust Jesus didn’t see it that way either. But perhaps the man did. If so, Jesus wanted him to be healed in the only way he, the man, thought healing was possible, and that was to have his sins forgiven.
When some of the religious leaders in the crowd saw this, they started to mutter among themselves. Jesus knew they were asking where Jesus thought he had received the authority to forgive sins. They believed only God could forgive sins. So Jesus asked them, “Which is easier, to say to this man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk?’” Then, with more chutzpah than even the most self-confident person on earth could ever muster, Jesus said to the incensed religious scribes, “So that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” Jesus then said to the paralytic, “Rise, take up your pallet, and go home.” And the man stood up and walked away, to everyone’s astonishment.
At that time, nearly all Jews believed that only God could forgive sins, and we also think that. But here was a young Nazarene, whom almost no one in Capernaum had ever heard of and who referred to himself as “the Son of man,” whatever that might mean. Jesus told the paralytic his sins were forgiven and that enabled him to stand up and walk. This wasn’t an accidental confrontation with leaders of Judaism; this was an open defiance of them and their long-accepted restrictive theology (Mark 2:1-12).
The next public action Jesus took (Mark 2:15-17) was when Mark tells us Jesus “sat at table in his house.” To my knowledge this is the only verse in any Gospel that ever suggested Jesus owned or lived in his own house. In recording this incident, Matthew merely says Jesus was “in the house,” but he doesn’t say whose house it was, and Luke says the event occurred in the house of Levi, the tax collector, Jesus’ disciple, who presumably is Matthew the tax collector, which is an historical conundrum. (Whoever said Bible study is simple?) Anyway, whoever owned or rented the house where this incident took place, there were other tax collectors besides Levi/Matthew and assorted other known flagrant sinners who lived in Capernaum. And precisely in that situation Jesus deliberately violated yet another Jewish law.
The laws of purity required that proper Jews should stay away from disreputable people, having nothing to do with them. Nevertheless, from the very beginning of his ministry Jesus openly hung out with the wrong crowd, and everyone knew he did. When Jesus heard the Pharisees grousing about this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (2:17). Jesus had no hesitation to get down in the social muck where the perverts and prostitutes and shady, sordid souls were. That infuriated those whose religion was always proudly on public display. They did everything they could to keep themselves unstained by staying away from such sorry folk.
The next set of religious laws which Jesus deliberated broke were the dietary laws. There are dozens of regulations in the Torah which governed what, when, and how people were to eat. And while Jesus observed some of these rules, he rejected others, including laws about fasting under certain conditions and for certain reasons. When the Pharisees saw his apparent flouting of the dietary rules, Jesus answered them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.” Without actually saying it, Jesus was implying that he was the bridegroom, and that soon enough he would be taken away from his guests, i.e., his disciples. This suggests two things: First, Jesus knew that he was becoming revered by his followers, and he also already was sensing that his theological enemies would see to it that he would not be able to challenge them indefinitely. Already, in only the second chapter of the second Gospel (which is really the first Gospel to have been written), Jesus knew his days were numbered, and that his ministry in the land of Israel would be short.
In the episode immediately following that one, Jesus and his disciples were both gleaning and eating grain on a Sabbath day somewhere in the region of the Galilee. Once again, the Pharisees, who were among the most enlightened of Jewish leaders, saw this, and called Jesus on it. It was forbidden to work on the Sabbath, and picking grain was considered work. Furthermore, food that was to be eaten on Shabbat had to be prepared before Shabbat, and Jesus and his friends were both picking and consuming what they ate, and they were doing it on the Lord’s Day. I will not take time to explain Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ complaint, but he did respond, and not meekly either. They were hungry, he said, and they were going to eat, and that was that.
Every word of Mark 2 is the record of an event in which Jesus openly questioned the religious status quo. There are five events with the five explanations following each in which Jesus told his adversaries why he did what he did. They strongly rejected all of the explanations. Furthermore, the first event in Mark 3 tells how Jesus intended to heal a man in a synagogue with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Even if it was an act of compassion, it was Shabbat, the Pharisees grumbled, and it represented work, and it was forbidden to do work on Shabbat. But Jesus did it anyway. The last verse of the episode says this: “The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (Mark 3:6).
Religion is one of the greatest of institutions in any society, but it also can be one of the most crushing and restrictive forces in human life. There are forms of religion which lighten the burdens of life, but there are other forms which greatly and sometimes unnecessarily add to the burdens we all must face. Too often, religion imagines that it exists for its own sake, rather than for the sake of the people it is intended to serve, and for the God who inspired religion to come into being in the first place. Religion is a means to an end; it is not an end in itself. Religion must always resist the idea of supposing it has a purpose in and of itself. It doesn’t. Religion is intended to be an instrument of God, not a master of men.
It is not surprising, then, that Jesus made a sizeable stir in the Galilee. But still, it was only the Galilee, and Galilee was not Judah or Jerusalem or the Temple Mount. That was where the traditional Jewish religion was centered. It was therefore to Jerusalem that Jesus purposefully went at the end of his three-year ministry. And it was there where he knew it would all end.
It has always been surprising to me that John, the writer of the Fourth Gospel, said that the cleansing of the temple occurred very early in Jesus’ ministry, perhaps only weeks or a few months after he began to preach and teach. Normally I am skeptical about almost everything John says, but in this he may be chronologically correct. Furthermore, after John tells us Jesus drove out the moneychangers and the sellers of sheep and oxen and pigeons, he shouted loudly enough so that everyone in the temple court could hear him, “Take these things away! You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade!” (John 2:13-22)
All three synoptic Gospels, though not John, record a Palm Sunday procession, but they do not all report precisely the same sequence. Mark, the first Gospel to be written, says that after Jesus rode into the Holy City in triumph, he went to the temple. But he didn’t do anything; he just looked around, and then went back to the village of Bethany, where he was staying during the Passover festival. Mark says it was on the next day, Holy Monday as it is known by Christians, that Jesus came back into the temple and attacked the money changers, overturning their tables, as in John 2. However, in both Matthew and Luke, immediately after the triumphal procession, Jesus went to the temple. All four accounts agree that Jesus “cleansed the temple,” as we say, but they don’t agree on when he did it. However, they leave no doubt that he did it. But remember this: John says the cleansing of the temple came very early in the ministry of Jesus, and the other three Gospels say it happened just five or even four days from the end, from Good Friday.
But why would Jesus take such a provocative action so early in his ministry, as John says he did? Or if the synoptic writers are historically correct, why would Jesus jeopardize the glory of the one event in which he was perceived to be the Messiah by a large number of people by such a provocative action? Why not just drink in the adulation and prolong the hosannas? For the crowd, Palm Sunday was a joyous parade! But the echo of the acclamations was scarcely finished before Jesus staged his enormously disruptive scene in the temple.
It is obvious that Jesus had carefully orchestrated the events of the entire day, whether it happened early or late in his ministry. Clearly he had something very different in mind from the thinking of the crowd if the Palm Sunday story is accurate. Each Gospel carefully notes that Jesus instructed the disciples to get a particular donkey from a particular person in a particular place. Only then could the processional begin. It had to be a donkey that Jesus rode, not a horse. A horse would signify he came as a warrior, but a donkey signaled Jesus was coming into Jerusalem in peace. Jesus clearly did not intend to make a political or military statement on Palm Sunday, but he did want to make a very strong religious statement, and he wanted to make it in the temple. From the beginning to the end of his ministry, Jesus was God’s provocateur.
Through the many centuries of the evolution of religion, two kinds of clergy evolved, although in the Old Testament period Jews did not, and still do not, use the term “clergy.” But in both Judaism and Christianity, though not in Islam, there are two types of professional religious functionaries. The one group are called priests and the other are known as prophets. To oversimplify to make a point, priests perform sacrifices and prophets preach. In both Judaism and Christianity, there have always been far more priestly clergy than prophetic clergy. Jewish priests, however, actually sacrificed animals in the temple. That was their religious vocation.
Originally therefore, and even now symbolically, priests are involved in performing sacrifices on behalf of the people. That is why all Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and many Anglican or Episcopalian clergy refer to themselves as priests. They administer the sacrifice of the Mass or the eucharist. Most Protestant clergy do not call themselves priests, but in their ministry and manner, Protestant clergy tend in their sermons to be both priestly and prophetic. Nevertheless, most Protestant clergy behave more as priests than as prophets.
Why do I tell you this? I do so to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth perceived himself to be strongly if not solely in the prophetic tradition of Judaism. The genealogical fact is that he could not be a Jewish priest. Priests could come only from a priestly lineage. He was of the lineage of Kng David, and David was not a priest. Jesus had no interest in performing sacrifices; prophecy was what Jesus represented, and his prophetic zeal against sacrifice was displayed in anger.
When Jesus went into the temple, whenever it actually happened, he was making a powerful prophetic statement by turning over the tables of the money changers and driving them out. He strongly believed that soon after he died the Romans would destroy Jerusalem, and with it, the temple. He said as much in all four Gospels. And then he knew that Jewish priestly religion would be terminated. Prophecy was what would count. But prophecy does not mean foretelling the future. It means forth-telling what God wants from His people. Thus Jesus was a prophet, not a priest, and thus he castigated those who had turned the temple into a business.
Many in the Palm Sunday crowd knew who Jesus was. Those who did not recognize him asked, “Who is this?” They were told, “This the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee” (Matthew 21:11). From the first moment Jesus opened his mouth in public to his last moment on the cross when he cried out, “It is finished!”, Jesus perceived himself as a prophet. He was --- and is --- God’s prophetic provocateur, to us and to everyone. Hosanna in the highest!