Living and ministering on the border between England and Wales can be challenging. Different Covid rules apply on each side, of course. That can cause some debate at times. But last weekend the debate wasn’t about Covid but about a game of rugby in Cardiff. To be honest, the end result of that match was more or less as I expected; but the process of reaching that result was not without controversy, and the arguments and debates that followed the game have continued for much of the week on Facebook and wherever people virtually meet. On one side of the argument - and the border - they’re getting very hot under the collar on the subject of poor refereeing standards; and on the other side they’re suggesting with equal vehemence that some people need to grow up, spit out their sour grapes and learn a bit of sportsmanship.
Imagine the same intensity of heated debate, but not about sport but philosophy. That’s the world Paul encountered in places like Athens and Corinth, as he travelled around the Graeco-Roman world talking about Jesus. He would start in the synagogues, among people of his own Jewish race. Then he’d maybe move on to the market-place, or wherever people met in debate. And some folk were persuaded, like the little church in Corinth to which he wrote our first reading - but many more didn’t. Some rejected him out of hand, some laughed at the foolish things he was saying, and now and again he got beaten up.
How could anyone follow a man who had been crucified? A man whose body had been mutilated and broken? The Greeks who heard Paul - for them the perfection of the body was paramount - look at the statues of their gods, each one super-human in their beauty. What Paul was trying to tell them seemed just completely foolish. And the Jews? Here is Paul trying to tell them that the Messiah many of them were longing for, the one anointed by God, had died on a cross - and that this what was always supposed to happen! To talk like that was scandalous - it was impossible that God’s Messiah could die, especially in such a shameful way.
So Paul’s message failed on both fronts, you see. It failed in terms of Greek philosophy; and it failed the test of Jewish tradition. But Paul pressed on regardless, proclaiming Christ, nailed to the cross, whether people stopped their ears or not. For that didn’t matter to Paul - neither philosophy or religious ritual mattered any more. What had transformed his life, and would transform the lives of those who did accept his word, was a new and life-giving relationship with God, offered by a man who had chosen to die so that we might live, who had chosen to bear the burden of human sin so that we wouldn’t be crushed by it.
And Paul could see that the philosophical debates of the Greeks and the religious laws that governed Jewish life were in the own ways prisons: prisons that trapped people within systems that led nowhere, did nothing, and could never save them from themselves. Paul knew himself to be freed from all that: and he knew that what seemed like foolishness was wiser than all this world’s wisdom; he knew that the weakness of God, seen in the one who is crucified and is yet our Saviour, is stronger than human strength.
Fundamental to this is something central to the Gospel message - that Jesus was in control of his own destiny throughout. The story of the road to Calvary is not a tale of doomed heroism, it’s not a brave endeavour that in the end failed; no - what we see is a man who as he does his Father’s will becomes painfully aware of what must happen to him - yet he continues to walk that road, the way of the cross.
And in our reading from John’s Gospel, we see Jesus forcing the issue. For as he throws the money changers and the dealers in pigeons out of the temple’s outer courts, he is consciously and deliberately confronting those who will plan his death. I’ll say more about that in a moment.
I think though that we also see Jesus genuinely angry at what was happening in his Father’s house. This isn’t a staged event: he was furious at what was going on. It wasn’t the simple fact that commercial trading was happening in the temple that angered Jesus, though that must have distracted from the prayer and worship, and will have prevented non-Jews from being able to enter the outer courts, something they should have been allowed to do. What most angered Jesus was the abuse of power, and the way in which the ordinary folk of the land, the poorer among them especially, were being exploited. To offer sacrifice, they must first buy the bird or beast to be offered; to make an offering of money they must first change their secular cash for temple coins. And those who held the franchise could charge what they liked, and did.
And Jesus was angry, because God deals with us graciously; he offers us his love, long before we ever deserve or merit it. And so for the poor to be exploited and cheated in the one place where they should be most completely aware of God’s welcoming love was more than scandalous.
Old Testament prophecy made it clear that God’s Messiah would make his temple clean; so in his angry response to what was happening Jesus was also declaring himself as Messiah, and making it impossible for the authorities to ignore him. The Messiah wasn’t there to serve the status quo, he was there to overturn tables.
As he overturns the tables, Jesus declares himself to be on the side of all who are truly searching for God. And he will prove this in the manner of his dying. This is what had so changed Paul. And Jesus calls us his brothers and sisters. As he walks the way of the cross, everything he does, he does for us. So what should we offer him? Surely, our love, our service, our sacrifice, our passion for true justice, our prayerful obedience; and maybe even our anger.
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