Better late than never

3rd Sunday of Lent 2009

The most terrifying moment of my childhood was on a holiday in Yugoslavia, when my father, finally driven to the end of his tether by a half-witted switchboard operator who kept inanely instructing him to “dial 9” on a telephone that possessed no dial, ripped the telephone out of the wall and smashed it upon the floor.

When I read today’s gospel and imagine myself in it, I am reminded of that moment of terror. Perhaps that is not surprising if I am seeing myself as an unconcerned bystander (I’ve never seen myself as one of the money-changers, but that is not so much because I’m convinced of my virtue as because I have never been engaged in business). But even when I do see myself as one of those who are being ripped off by the money-changers, desperate to buy the smallest of birds for a sacrifice and realising that the coins I am getting back amount to barely half of what I have brought with me – and therefore should feel grateful to this man who is revenging himself, and us, on these criminals who are using their position in the religious establishment to make life difficult for the faithful – I still find that my primary reaction is fear. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, any violence frightens me because violence means anger that has lost control, and you never know what might happen next; and secondly, this is just not going to help. Violence rarely does. he is only going to make things worse. The traders will not only become angry and vindictive themselves they will increase their prices to make up for their losses and their inconvenience. What is the point of this action? No doubt the man will feel better for having goy it out of his system, but even he won’t get any benefit – he’ll probably end up being lynched or thrown into prison.

this last was perfectly true, and Jesus knew it, which suggests that we ought to look deeper for his motivation. To begin with, in this case violence did not signify anger that had lost control. Strictly speaking, Jesus never lost control – indeed, could not lose control. St Thomas explains that although Christ’s soul was passible, yet he did not have passions as we do; he certainly had passions in the sense of “affections appetitus sensitivi” (so his soul was passible, subject to suffering) because that is part of being a human being. However, says Thomas, his passions differed from ours in three ways: as regards their object: he could not be led by passion towards illicit things; as regards their origin: his passions always arose according to the judgement of reason; and as regards their effect: in us our passions overcome our reason and lead us to do things we should not; in him that could not happen. In other words, his passions were real and he felt them (they arose in “the appetite of his senses”) but they never went further than that. St Jerome seems to be the one who coined the word “propassion” to distinguish Christ’s passions from ours. This long theological digression is not a digression at all; it attempts to explain my statement that Jesus’ passions could never lead him to lose control: anger, sadness and the rest were there, but always within the control of his reason. And there is an interesting fact to add to that: although we are frequently told in the gospels that Jesus was sad, or angry, or had some other emotion or passion, none of the four accounts of the cleansing of the Temple suggest any such thing.

So perhaps we should see the scene differently: not according to that famous painting in which a furious Christ is laying about him with a whip, incensed beyond measure with what is going on, but rather as a calm authoritative Christ, in control not only of himself, but of the whole scene. He is not whipping the traders, much less the animals. He is walking quietly through the Temple, pushing over the money-changers’ tables as he goes, pausing to open the birdcages, and driving the sheep and oxen ahead of him. That’s what the whip is for – it is the language they understand. All this fits far better with the reaction he received: bewildered, hostile certainly, but not violent. it is not as if the people were reluctant to abuse Jesus, try to arrest him, stone him or throw him over cliffs when he made them angry. Had he barged through the Temple in an unseemly rage, attaching respected members of the public and scattering terrified livestock all over Jerusalem, I can’t imagine that they would simply have politely asked Him: “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?”

This is an important point; because upon Jesus’ behaviour in the Temple depends the meaning of the whole episode. Of course he did intend to show that what was going on in the Temple was an abomination; but there was a lot more to it than that. his action is yet another of those acted parables which I have mentioned before. He is pointing out the unsuitable behaviour of the traders in the Temple, yes, but almost in passing; it is the occasion, not the message. he is not telling us primarily about the Temple but about himself. Because the request from the Jews “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?” was completely the wrong request; this WAS the sign. Jesus only once, according to the gospels, used, unqualified, the phrase “I AM”, the pointer to identity with God. “Before Abraham came to be, I AM”. But that does not mean he never otherwise made that point. The Hebrew mind does not say “My essence is the same as my being” or “I possess my being entirely and not by participation” or such Greek ideas. The Hebrew mind says: “I lay down my life that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from me; but I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down; and I have power to take it up again” or, perhaps even more significantly, “Although I give testimony of myself, my testimony is true; for I know whence I can, and whither I go; but you know not whence I come or whither I go”. Which is precisely the sort of thing he is saying in this acted parable. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and we see here that the Son of Ma is also Lord of the Temple; something greater than the Temple is here.

He did not give a new sign, but he explained the one he had already given, wen he said “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up”. He was speaking, we are told, of the temple of his body. Well, yes, he was. But he was also questioning whether there was any difference between the two temples, and challenging his hearers to follow his answer to its logical conclusion. His body and the Temple were one: both were the place where God was. As John Austin Baker has put it, “When God enters our space and time, a man is what he becomes”. A temple can be a privileged place to find God, but only a human being can truly be what he becomes. Jesus was the true Temple; the other one was only a shadow. He did explain his sign, but you could have understood it without the explanation as he walked through God’s house, rearranging it to his liking, as if it were his own dwelling – which is exactly what it was. “The Temple and I are one”? He did not need to say it.

And so we return to the point of the whole episode. Of course Jesus knew that he wasn’t going to “achieve” anything by disrupting the money-changing and selling on one day. he wasn’t a fool, to think that the shock would convert the traders or would give the punters the courage to stand p to them. And he certainly wasn’t overcome by rage. The point of the episode is to tell something about himself, and so aout God. The message was not so much about the traders as about the Temple, and about the od of the Temple. The message could e summed up as: “Look at me, and see what and who I am” but Jesus, who was meek and lowly of heart, had no interest in being recognised as God for the sake of it. He had come to earth not only to redeem us – we could have been saved without all that blood, sweat and tears, had God so chosen – but to show us, we who, as Thomas said, can grasp nothing in our mind unless it has first passed through our senses, what God is like. As the Jesuit van Breemen put it, “The epitome of the Good News is not that Jesus is God, but that God is as he appears in Jesus”. Quite so; and that is why it is important that we should grasp that he is God; and it should have been enough to convert the lot of them at a stroke. And, incidentally, if we could leave it at that and stop picking at it, it might well solve a great many of our interdenominational squabbles, which are no less of a scandal than the most dishonest of the money-changers in the Temple.