Readings: Exodus 20.1-17, Corinthians 1.18-25, John 2.13-22
We preach Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor.1.23-24).
But let’s start where our Gospel reading left us, amid the wreckage of an act of godly foolishness. There he stands among the overturned market stalls, still flushed with anger and exertion. It’s a bit late to ask the young firebrand for his credentials, but that is the question. What sign can you show us? What right do you have? At one level, he has already told them. Stop making my Father’s house a market-place. My Father’s House. With those words he has already shown them his ID. What sign? He looks up at the temple buildings, and speaks quietly into the silence that has fallen on the courtyard. Destroy this temple, he says, and I will build it again in three days. They laugh at him, a little nervously perhaps. His preposterous claim is either blasphemous or insane or both. Surveying the wreckage of their market place, they worry about the risk that he may upset the delicate status quo in relations with the occupying power. The popular young rabbi is a menace who will have to be silenced.
Destroy this temple, and I will build it again in three days. If they had understood what he was really saying, they would have been even more scornful. The sign he has offered them is not about the physical destruction and rebuilding of the temple, but about his own death and resurrection. Even his disciples don’t understand that until they recall his enigmatic remarks later, with the benefit of hindsight. So it’s hardly surprising if the sceptical Jewish establishment can make no sense of it.
It takes St Paul to do that. Writing some 20 years later, he can see that the death and resurrection of Jesus have overturned not just the tables of the moneychangers, but the whole landscape of religion and philosophy. By preaching Christ crucified and raised from the dead, Paul understood that he was exposing the transformative character of those events for both Jewish and Greek thought. To a pious Jew a radical teacher like Jesus, who sat light to the whole framework of Jewish law, who provoked opposition from the Jewish establishment by what he said as well as what he did, whose death by crucifixion was specifically recognised in the book of Deuteronomy as evidence that he was under God’s curse – such a man could not possibly be a prophet, much less the great prophet destined to fulfil the Messianic prophecies and restore the kingdom to Israel. Likewise, to a Hellenistic philosopher, the reputation of a seemingly wise and attractive teacher was fatally damaged by the appalling and degrading nature of his death as a common criminal. If that was where his teaching led, then by the evidence of his own fate, it was not wisdom but folly.
In twenty-first century Hampstead, we do not expect our heroes to show us miraculous signs or even great wisdom. Come to that, we are probably not over-impressed by the ephemeral trappings of celebrity or ostentatious wealth, that perhaps do mark out the stars of our culture. On the other hand I think we do respect worldly success and solid achievement. We like our children and grandchildren to work hard and do well in their chosen professions. We would probably tend to discourage them from undertaking such a quixotic career change as Jesus seems to have made in his early thirties, still less from gratuitously courting opposition in ways likely to lead ultimately to failure and even death, however worthy the cause. No wonder the gospels report that Jesus’ own family tried to restrain him. To bring the question a bit closer to home, I wonder how many of us, even now, would be supportive, rather than concerned to raise objections, if one of our children said they were planning to go off and help fight Ebola in West Africa? What would we say if they were planning to join a humanitarian aid convoy heading for a war zone in the Middle East, or even to abandon a promising career in finance or law or whatever, to go and work for some worthy but rather obscure charity?
Yet the sense of Paul’s message is not just that we should welcome and support such choices. Paul goes much further than that. He insists that such seemingly unwise choices lie at the very heart of God’s plan. He wants us to grasp that the one who looks up to Christ to keep their balance like the tightrope walker in Diana’s Ash Wednesday sermon, the one who gets hurt following the dictates of his or her conscience, the one who makes sacrifices large or small as they take up their cross, in short the one who follows the crucified Christ, that person is not a failure, that person has become a channel for the power of God and the wisdom of God. Why? Because when we act in that way, in his name and for his sake, we are identified with him – we are in Christ, as Paul says – and if we are in Christ, acting as He did out of that deep compassion for others which comes from the very heart of God our Father, then we are tapping into that love – weak and foolish as it may seem to be – which gives expression to the wisdom of God and the power of God. And that does indeed change everything.
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength (1 Cor 1.23). If we truly believe that, we shall not be afraid to make choices that others might regard as foolish and weak. In Christ, crucified and raised from the dead, our apparent weakness and foolishness – like His – will turn out to be infused with the power of God and the wisdom of God, by which his kingdom is being built.