| Lectionary : Proper 27 (gospel) | | Date Created: Nov 07, 2006, 12:53 PM |
|
The Gospel reading for this coming Sunday is Mark 12:38-44. And the Epistle is Hebrews 9:24-28.
And both are extremely good remedies for some trendy but wrong teaching going around these days. In the Gospel, Jesus shows not only his attitude toward giving, but also his attitude toward the Temple in his day. In order to cohere, Wright's system requires a Jesus who does not cleanse the outer Temple courtyards of businesspeople as in the text of the Gospel, but who judges the business of the inner Temple, its priesthood and reason for existing. But this passage makes clear that the argument in his lifetime was not with the Temple but with the hypocrisy of the synagogue. An impoverished woman has somehow been made to feel as though she should give the very little she had to the Temple -- that the Temple was there for her to give to rather than to give to her.
Now you or I if we'd been there would probably -- and Tom Wright's Jesus, if he existed would certainly -- have condemned the Sadducees and Temple in much the same way that the real Jesus often condemned the Pharisees. You have taken the poor and made them twice as worse off! You have preyed on the... blah blah blah. Jesus does not do this. A modern Jesus in line with our ways of thinking might well have prevented the woman from donating her money. A modern Jesus might well have felt sorry for the poor deluded woman. Instead Jesus praises her. Usually his praise is reserved for someone who places extraordinary trust in himself or extraordinary trust in God. Here he praises someone who places extraordinary trust in the Temple. Until his death, it remains the way that God himself ordained that his people approach him.
Look at verse 40 in the Gospel reading. Here he does actually condemn those who "devour widow's houses." Is he talking about the Temple or the Sadducees? No. He's talking about the Pharisees and the synagogues! He is in Jerusalem, about to be killed by Sadducees led by the High Priest and other Temple officials (though the Pharisees were in there too) and yet, even in the next story, Mark 13, which does concern the coming destruction of the Temple, there is not the slightest hint in the actual text that this is God's anger with the Temple itself. Those things that the Lord is said to be actively doing, during all the times spoken about, are positive: giving you the words to speak, creating the world, cutting short the suffering, coming in the clouds and sending his angels to gather the elect back together from the very ends of the earth.
I'll write a little about the epistle reading tomorrow. In it it's clear that, yes, Christians are to regard the Temple as having been fulfilled and pointing away from itself now. But that in the light of Jesus' death and ascension. And even then, not because it was evil but because it was a pointer. |
|
|
|
