A Darker Holiness

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In all the rich history of the Ancient Near East, we find nothing quite like the Ten Commandments. There were other laws, of course—famously the Code of Hammurabi—and other pronouncements spoken from on high. But what makes the Ten Commandments unique is that these are the laws of liberated slaves. This is how people freed by God are free to live.

And they make no distinction between the low and the high. Rich or poor, slave or master, king or peasant, all alike stand equal before the Commandments of the Lord. Indeed, these laws favor the lowly, the overlooked, the forgotten.

Why is God called Father? It isn’t because He’s male, not in the sense that I am, that men are. Rather, it’s because fathers in the Ancient Near East were the protectors and providers in their society, both legally and practically. Widows and orphans—people without protection, without provision—were the special concern of God. He would be their Father when no-one else would dare to be.

This flew in the face of Ancient Near Eastern society, as it flew in the face of Roman society more than a thousand years later, and still flies in the face of our society today. We value the rich, the strong, the powerful, the attractive. God couldn’t care less. God cares for people, not possessions. He cares for justice, not success, not in the way that we define it.

The Ten Commandments had been spoken openly to all the assembly of Israel, and inscribed upon twin tablets of stone. And that, for Israel, was holiness. That, for Israel, was sacred. They took these promises of God, these laws of liberation, and placed them in a sacred box—acacia wood gilded with gold—and this, for them, was the presence of the Lord, the footstool of His throne in the heavens.

Holiness, after all, refers to something “set apart,” and they indeed were a people set apart, liberated for a purpose, liberated for a reason. It was the destiny of Israel to become a blessing for all peoples, for all nations, for all that God hath wrought.

The promise of those laws, kept in that box, stayed with those people all their days in the wilderness, and led them home to the Promised Land of their ancestors. That land, for them, was freedom, just as was that law in that box. Eventually, under their greatest, wisest, richest king, the people of Israel erected a mighty Temple, a marvel of the ancient world. And while this Temple was in some ways similar to other temples for other gods, it was also in many ways unique.

First up, there was no statue in this Temple, no image of the One True God. The Holy of Holies was empty. In it was but the sacred box, the Ark, containing the Ten Commandments, the promises of God, so holy that only one man could enter that sanctum on one day a year—and he entered with a rope tied around his waist, in case the sheer sacredness of that space might strike him dead, and he would have to be dragged out for the next High Priest to take his place.

The other thing that made this Temple unique was that it was, well, unique. There were many temples to Zeus, many temples to Ba’als, but only one Temple for the One God. Accept no substitutes. Holiness, in the Hebrew Bible, was thus geographic. There was a Holy Land, and in it a Holy Temple, the presence of God’s Word and His promise on this earth, and holiness radiated out from this site like light from a lamp, or ripples on a lake, or rings in a bull’s-eye.

And that makes sense, because while the Israelites were not the only ones to believe in the One God, they were the ones who insisted that He gets His hands dirty. He comes down to earth. He makes Himself known in caring for the poor, in feeding the hungry, in liberating all those enslaved by the empires of their day. God was transcendent, yes, but also tangible, also here. Though the very heavens themselves could not hope to contain the Lord in His infinity and eternity, nevertheless the House of God on earth was here, in Jerusalem, in His promise.

And that’s where Jesus goes today.

When I said that holiness radiates from the Temple in rings, I meant that rather literally. At the core of the Temple was the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies, empty but for the Ark, and for one hapless High Priest once a year. Beyond this was the Court of Priests, accessible only to the priests and other Levites; then the Court of the Israelites, for male Judeans to worship; then the Court of Women, open to all Israelites; and finally the Court of the Gentiles, that is, for all nations.

It is in this Court of the Gentiles, in the time of Christ, that we find moneychangers plying their trade: selling animals, converting currency, making change. And this, mind you, is all very practical, very convenient. Jews, proselytes, and God-fearers from all throughout the Roman Empire and even beyond its borders would make pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship. And you wouldn’t bring your own animals to sacrifice, just as today we wouldn’t take a refrigerator full of food with us to Europe.

No, you buy the animals there. And if you have foreign currency, it can be converted, for a fee. And if you brought large denominations for portability, you can break those down, for a fee. The same sort of sacred tourist trade goes on today. But Jesus is having none of it, not this time. He has come to the Temple at the high holy days, several times a year, for His entire life. But this time He does something shocking. He makes a cattle-whip of cords and drives the livestock from the court.

Then He overturns the tables of the moneychangers, with their pagan coins portraying pagan gods and emperors, and He says, “Stop making My Father’s house a marketplace!” and “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up!” Now, as you can imagine, this would make quite a scene, and quite a lot of trouble. What is Jesus doing here? And why now, why this time, rather than at earlier visits in earlier years? Was it His custom to flip over tables whenever He showed up?

To understand Jesus, we have to know the Hebrew Bible the way that He did; that is, inside and out. Take, for example, the prophecy of Zechariah, who said of the Day of the Lord’s coming:

On that day there shall be inscribed on the bells of the horses, ‘Holy to the Lord.’ And the cooking pots in the house of the Lord shall be as holy as the bowls in front of the altar; and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them to boil the flesh of the sacrifice. And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.

Bells on horses? Cooking pots? What on earth is Zechariah talking about? Well, he’s referring to the bells on the sacred vestments of the High Priest, and to the sacred pots used to prepare sacrifices at the Temple. The day is coming, Zechariah prophesies, when the Lord shall come to His Temple, and holiness shall burst forth out into the world, no longer bound by geography, by space or by time. Then everything will be sacred. Everything will be holy.

Your mama’s pots and pans will be just as sacred as the vessels of the Holy Temple. The bells on your horses will ring out, holy as the bells on the garments of the great High Priest. “And there shall no longer be traders in the House of the Lord on that day,” no longer be moneychangers, no longer a need for exchange.

For when the Lord arrives, all will be holy. He will be the Temple, He Himself His own Temple. And the promise shall come to fruition at last, the promise given by God to Israel, that their nation, their people, their family, shall be a blessing of holiness for all the families of this earth.

Today the Lord has come to His Temple, and it shall no longer be for us a house of trade. For the true Temple is now the Body of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Jesus is Emmanuel, God-With-Us, God made flesh. And wherever He is, He is holy. He is with the widow and the orphan. He is with the enslaved and impoverished. He is with those who suffer unjustly, who have no protector, have no provision. They are His own. Their pots and their pans are sacred. The bells on their horses ring.

And so, dear Christian, if you want to see holiness in this world, look to Jesus. And if you want to see Jesus in this world, look to those whom all this world ignores.

He is there. He is holy. He is calling.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A tip of the hat to Chad Bird, who pointed out the Zechariah connection.