The following material was written by the Rev. John Shearman (jlss@sympatico.ca) of the United Church of Canada. John normally structures his offerings so that the first portion can be used as a bulletin insert, while the second portion provides a more in depth 'introduction to the scripture'.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRIPTURE
The Third Sunday In Lent - Year B
EXODUS 20:1-17 This is the best known of three
different versions of the Ten Commandments. Comparing this passage with
Exodus 34:10-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 leaves those who hold to a
literalist view of scripture in more than a slight quandary. How could
God dictate three versions of the same law code, and supposedly to the
same person? A more adequate interpretation recognizes the obvious
discrepancies between various source texts, each having been written at
different times in different contexts. Jesus himself acknowledged the
importance of the Law of Moses and then went on to give a summary of that
law which has universal application: Love God with heart, mind, soul and
strength; and love one's neighbor as oneself. He drew this from two
separate texts in the Hebrew Scriptures.
PSALM 19 This psalm rejoices in the glory of
creation and in the sanctity of God's moral law. The closing verse is
often used as a prayer offered before a sermon.
1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-25 This is the heart of Paul's
message, not only to the Corinthians, but to every other congregation to
which he preached or wrote. All other arguments aside, he proclaimed
faith in Jesus Christ crucified and risen as God's sole means of redeeming
all creation.
JOHN 2:13-22 Unlike the other Gospel writers,
John places this crucial incident in Jesus' ministry - the cleansing of
the temple - at the beginning of the ministry, not the end. This is in
keeping with John's view that Jesus' coming into the world created the
moment when all must decide between following the light which Jesus
represents or the darkness which separates humanity from God. Note how
John says that even the disciples did not understand what Jesus meant in
referring to his resurrection – the one great act of God's absolute
sovereignty - as his authority for perpetrating this apparently
blasphemous deed.
A MORE COMPLETE ANALYSIS:
EXODUS 20:1-17 This is the best known of three different versions of the
Ten Commandments. Comparing this passage with Exodus 34:10-17 and
Deuteronomy 5:6-21 leaves those who hold to a literalist view of scripture
in more than a slight quandary. How could God dictate three versions of
the same law code, and supposedly to the same person?
Scholars have struggled to discover whether or not these commandments were
exclusive to the Israelite tradition or adapted from other codes existent
in the ancient Middle East. A article in the Biblical Archeology Review
states that no scholar claims to have discovered identifiable
archeological or historical evidence of an Israelite presence in Egypt or
of an Exodus at the end of the Late Bronze Age (circa 1500-1200 B.C.E.)
Rather, Moses is a mythical figure of great theological significance in
the Hebrew Scriptures. The most radical interpretation of the Moses saga
defines it as a theological construct of the post-exilic Persian period
(circa 500 B.C.E.) when the Jerusalem priesthood attempted to create an
identity for the Jewish people. According to Thomas Thompson, of the
University of Copenhagen, Denmark, we misread these scriptures if we read
them historically.
Such radical scholarship in no way diminishes either Moses or the
Decalogue. In fact, it may actually enhance them from the point of view
of biblical theology as distinct from scientific archeological and
historical research. Nor does this disregard the obvious biblical
evidence of three separate versions of the Ten Commandments attributed to
Moses. A more adequate interpretation recognizes the obvious
discrepancies between various texts, each having been written in different
ages in different contexts.
The commandments have always been a great influence for Jewish and for
Christian communities. Moses has always been identified as the great
lawgiver. It is more likely, however, that the laws were developed over
many centuries in different historical contexts and reflected religious
traditions and practices of their times. It is not improbable that
influences from other Middle Eastern cultures of the period had some
effect on their formation.
As they now stand and viewed from the 21st century, the commandments
consist of four groups. The first three deal with the worship of Yahweh
alone as an invisible, holy God who makes absolute claims on the
Israelites as their Saviour. The next two, on the Sabbath and the
honoring of parents, have economic and family reference. Rest is
necessary for productive labor and the family is the fundamental unit of
human society. The next three focus on the life of the family or
individual in the larger community. They deal with such basic realities
of human society as the sanctity of life, of marriage and sexuality, and
the respect for property as an extension of persons. The last two are of
a social nature speaking of truth in the law courts and honoring the
rights of others.
Taken together and in their negative from, they were not intended to be
legalistic in character. Rather, they recognized those forces that could
have ruined community life. Jesus acknowledged the importance of the Law
of Moses as did the apostle Paul. Jesus then went beyond them to give a
summary of that law which Paul also espoused as having universal
application: Love God with heart, mind, soul and strength; and love one's
neighbor as oneself. While the Roman legal system shaped the laws of
western civilization during the past two millennia, the spirit of the law
and much of its content derives from the Ten Commandments.
PSALM 19 This psalm rejoices in the glory of creation and in the
sanctity of God's moral law. Its two very distinctive parts point to it
originally having been two psalms brought together to express the two
chief means of divine revelation - in creation and in the law of Moses.
While the first part (vss. 1-6) celebrates nature as God's handiwork, it
also reflects an attitude toward the natural world common to all primitive
religious traditions. The majesty of brilliantly sunny day and star-
studded sky at night, when seen in a natural setting, still awakens a deep
sense of awe in the most urbanized of us. In the Middle East, in ancient
times as now, the sun provides the most notable feature, especially to a
visitor from northern climes in winter - "the greatest of the members of
the heavenly choir," one expositor trumpeted. The psalmist does not
describe the sun as a deity in the Egyptian or Babylonian manner, but
speaks of it as a heroic runner similar to an Egyptian liturgy to the sun
which likened it to a charioteer (vss. 4c-6). The 6th century BCE
Pythagorean doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, of which the psalmist
may well have heard, may also have been in his mind. Certain Hebrew words
of the text indicate that this part of the poem dates from the post-exilic
period.
The second part of the psalm also reflects the Persian period (6th-4th
centuries BCE) when the Mosaic Law dominated every aspect of life in
Israel. The numerous synonyms for the law, five in all, also recall the
Wisdom literature such as Psalm 119 and Proverbs. So too do the phrases
"making wise the simple" (vs. 7) and "the fear of the Lord" (vs. 9). The
poem places great emphasis on separation of the faithful Israelite from
his pagan neighbors by maintaining rigid adherence to the law and its
provision for ritual purity and personal innocence. He prays to be
guarded from even the most inadvertent sin (vs. 13) that might corrupt
him. The poet is imbued with the spirit if not the actual influence of
the 5th century "prophet" Ezra.
Meditating on such things played a large part in the religious tradition
of Israel in late pre-Christian times. The Pharisees of New Testament,
and in particular Saul of Tarsus, represented prime expressions of this
legalist tradition. The closing verse is often used as a prayer offered
before a sermon, but it has more to do with making a spiritual gift
acceptable to God equal to a sacrifice on the altar.
1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-25 This passage contains the heart of Paul's message,
not only to the Corinthians, but to every other congregation to which he
preached or wrote. All other arguments aside, he proclaimed faith in
Jesus Christ crucified and risen as God's sole means of redeeming all of
creation.
The issue Paul confronted in Corinth was a division between Jews and
Gentiles, and how each perceived the gospel several apostles had
proclaimed there. Each party heard the gospel from the perspective of
their own cultural and religious background. We all still do so. The
problem for the Corinthians was - and for us still is - to move beyond
cultural inhibitions that blind us to the new truth the gospel proclaims.
Being saved by the power of God in Christ remains as mysterious to us as
it did to the conflicted Corinthians. The Jews had the covenant and the
Torah that assured them of God's favor. Greeks had their philosophies.
For them as for us, salvation was a totally unreal and unnecessary
experience - foolishness, as Paul so bluntly put it.
In his *Daily Study Bible: The Letters to the Corinthians* on this
passage, William Barclay identified the basic elements of the four great
sermons of Acts 2:14-39; 3:12-26; 4:8-12; 10:36-43. He then showed why
this gospel so alienated both Jews and Greeks. A Suffering Servant
envisaged by Second Isaiah (Isa. 52:13-53:12) was one thing; a crucified
messiah was quite another. It was just not in Jewish religious tradition.
An incarnate deity who died on a cross and rose form the dead was utter
nonsense to Greeks. Yet this is the central theme of Paul's Christology.
This was the very purpose for which God came into the world as one of us,
Jesus of Nazareth. To believing Jews he was the Messiah; to believing
Gentiles, divine Wisdom. To Paul, he was neither and yet he was both (vs.
24). He was neither in that he did not fulfill the Jewish expectation of
a political messiah to free them from oppression, nor the Greek
expectation of a teacher to give them worldly wisdom as had their great
philosophers. Yet he was both in that for Jews Christ's death and
resurrection fulfilled the ancient prophecies about the Suffering Servant
of God in a new way. By his self-sacrifice in love, his death and
resurrection became the only adequate antidote to human sinfulness that
separates us from God.
For Gentiles, Jesus Christ was God's wisdom in that he was not just an
idea about which one could reason and debate, but God in the flesh and
blood of a human being just like them. He lived and died in the real
world, then was raised from the dead to be with us always, something
totally different from anything any Greek philosopher had ever said or
done.
For a century and more, some scholars have claimed that Paul was the real
author of apostolic Christology and architect of the Church. His genius
transformed the simple message of Jesus into the gospel the apostles
proclaimed and a Jewish sectarian community into the apostolic Christian
Church. Yet Paul's preaching of Christ crucified differed little from
that of Acts. His conversion experience changed his life and his theology
from that of an ardent Pharisee to that of a devoted Christian apostle.
He accepted the grace of being made "a new creation." As John W. Drane, of
the University of Stirling, Scotland, said in his article on Paul in *The
Oxford Companion to the Bible* (1993): "He was certain that Christians
were already a part of God's new order, and the church was to be an
outpost of the kingdom in which God's will became a reality in the lives
of ordinary people. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, individuals,
society and the whole structure of human relationships could
be radically transformed, so that in the context of a physically renewed
world system, God's people should grow 'to the full measure of the stature
of Christ.'"
JOHN 2:13-22 Unlike the other Gospel writers, John places this crucial
incident of Jesus cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the
ministry, not the end. This is in keeping with John's view that Jesus'
coming into the world created the moment when all must decide between
following the light which Jesus represents or the darkness which separates
humanity from God.
Several speculative questions about the temple precincts come to the
surface in this passage. Where were the money-changers in relation to the
temple itself?
A few years ago, I sat with a group of tourists on the remnants of the
steps leading up to the "Beautiful" or "Golden" Gate by which pilgrims
passed through the east wall of the city into temple precincts. An
archeologist told us that a hoard of coins from many parts of the Roman
Empire had been found at the foot of these steps. She implied that this
was the location of the money-changers tables. Pilgrims could pay their
temple tax or purchase sacrificial animals only in shekels so they had to
exchange whatever currency they carried into the sacred coinage as they
entered the temple gate. There were several other gates to the temple
mount where money-changers may have been located also.
Would there have been space for a great gathering of pilgrims as well as
all the sacrificial animals and caged birds? It was possible, but it seems
improbable. Two 19th century investigators, Charles Warren and Claude
Conder, reported the existence of thirty-seven cisterns on the temple
mount to supply vast quantities of water for ritual ablutions and the
flushing of blood from the altar. In his book, *The Mind of Jesus*
(Harper, 1960) William Barclay quoted a report by Josephus that 256,500
sheep were slaughtered during one Passover. The 2nd century C.E.
rabbinical Mishnah stated that area of the temple mount to be 500 by 500
cubits after Herod the Great extended it during his reconstruction, but it
was not exactly square. The royal cubit used in the temple equaled 20.9
inches. Thus the area measured about 870 x 870 feet. The temple and
altar of sacrifice were said to have occupied a space of 187 by 135 cubits
(320 x 232 feet) and were not located in the exact centre. That is about
equivalent to a modern football field plus its sidelines. Add the space
for spectator stands and some exterior parking and one gets an image of
the size of the temple precincts. No wonder it dominated the whole
cityscape from whatever direction pilgrims approached it. One does
wonder, however, if the author of John's Gospel was familiar with the
actual site.
Note John's comment that even the disciples did not understand what Jesus
meant in referring to his resurrection (vss. 21-22). That was an act of
God's absolute sovereignty. From John's post-resurrection point of view,
this apparently blasphemous deed substantiated Jesus' authority as the
Messiah, but no one really understood this.
Confrontation with the religious authorities forms the main conflict of
John's whole narrative. Their demand for a sign (vs. 18) referred to the
expectation that every prophet from Moses onward would give spectacular
signs to authenticate his mission. While John believed that Jesus was the
Messiah, the demand for a sign implied that the questioners did not. Most
likely they belonged to the Sadducees party or served as guards of the
temple under orders form the high priest. They only wanted to know what
authority he had for disrupting the lucrative temple economy. The
disciples remained uncertain about the incident until after the
resurrection (vs. 17). As proof of Jesus' authority, John quoted from
Psalm 69:9, which the early church regarded as a messianic psalm. From
vs. 22, we can conclude that such scripture references played a large part
in the shaping of the messianic tradition of the early church. For the
author of John's Gospel, this incident forcefully witnessed to that
tradition.
The Jewish authorities' claim that the construction of the temple lasted
forty-six years is now thought to have been inaccurate. Herod the Great
began its reconstruction in 20 or 19 B.C.E. He did not finish the task
before his death in 4 B.C.E. The project was not finally completed until
64 C.E., just six years before it destruction by the Romans. Scholars
presume this reference to be an early Christian tradition preserved by
John as a means of emphasizing the place of the temple throughout his
narrative.
copyright - Comments by Rev. John Shearman and page by Richard J. Fairchild, 2006
please acknowledge the appropriate author if citing these resources.
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