Third Sunday of Lent Year B 2024

People often strive for unfettered freedom which is really bondage to the passions, so God have Israel the commandments to control the passions and shape the society in love of God and love of neighbor for God. We see this reflected in the Temple Cleansing in that the interruption of the sacrificial cult pointed to the destruction of the Old Temple and the hidden passion for money, the anger leading to revolution, and the exclusion of the Gentiles. He pictures his body being destroyed and so a new Temple being built which was both his personal body and his collective body, the new society. That is just the reversal of human expectations that Paul sees happening in the cross that is strong enough in its weakness to make us children again, but now children of God able to live out love for God and love for our neighbor in God by the power of the cross that has crucified our passions.

Notes

Transcript

Title

The crucified Christ destroyed slave-society and established freedom in the new society/temple

Outline

Freedom in our society means free to do what I wish

In practice it is bondage to our various passions and a struggle against other humans and my own human limits.

But God knew better, so when Israel was freed from Egypt and Egyptian rules God established a social structure based on his nature and therefore creation to control their passions and focus them on love for God and neighbor (along with other virtues grounded in God). This made them able to exist as a free people so long as they knew they were directed towards God.

Jesus takes the outward social shape and moves it inward so that now more than the acting out of the passions is under control - the inward assents of the will are also directed according to God’s character.

Of course, the principles of love of God and therefore love of neighbor for the sake of God remain basically unchanged.

This is why Jesus cleanses the Temple

On the one hand, the sale of pure sacrificial animals and non-idolatrous money was a practical provision for the many pilgrims. It allowed the sacrificial system to function smoothly. But it offends Jesus enough that in a type of demonstration he interrupts the sacrificial system. Why?

Some argue that the issue was commerce in the Temple: greed crowded out worship, haggling drowned out awed silence.

Some note that this was in the court of the Gentiles and thus clearing it opened space for Gentiles to worship.

Some argue that the Synoptic gospels make it clear that because the Temple had become a house of revolutionaries stopping the worship was necessary to demonstrate that revolution would lead to the destruction of the Temple and that the new Temple had arrived in Jesus.

Perhaps some of all of these is true.

[Note that the whip was likely used on the animals, especially the oxen, not on people.]

There is zeal for the house of God and the worship of God, but he could talk about the destruction of the Temple because the true Temple was Jesus and his body (both individually and as the community of his disciples) and he was the true sacrifice that would bring freedom, the freedom of resurrection into a new sphere of life.

Only that would bring the power to live the society of the commandments, the love of God expressed in the love of the neighbor for God.

That brings us back to the introduction and to Paul

For Jews and Romans the true or good society was brought about by force, either divine force (Jews) or government force (Romans). It came from outside. The Greeks did know of wisdom sources of virtue and the good society, but they came from inside human beings. And they did not do a good job of freeing us from our passions.

Paul proclaimed a wisdom in Christ crucified that looked - and still looks - foolish to humans but is divine wisdom working in us. That is, we die to the passion-controlled life and embrace what the world thinks of as shame by identifying with Christ and thus participate in the freedom of his resurrection becoming a God-directed people. The world does not get this - never did and never will.

Christians usually have to grow into this by the reverse growth of becoming children, and thus the need for ongoing repentance. But it is as we become reborn children in the image of Jesus that we become the people of God and live out the decalogue from within as our Declaration of Independence, the shape of God’s new society.