By What Authority? (Lent 3B)

 Expulsion Of The Money Changers, 1921 - Stanley Spencer

By What Authority?

Third Sunday of Lent (Year B)
4 March 2018
4 March 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Parish, Ashland, Oregon

   The Very Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist  

Exodus 20:1 – 17; Psalm 19:7 – end; 1 Corinthians 1:18 – 25; John 2:13 – 22

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

I grew up in the 1960s, the era when T-shirts and lapel buttons alike declared, “Question Authority.”  Authority is big in all of today’s readings.  God gives Moses the Ten Commandments.  Paul says the Cross overturns the accepted authorities of his day.  The Gospel tells the story of Jesus driving the money changers from the Temple, and how his opponents ask him by what authority he has done this. 

Many scholars studying organizational behavior say there are two kinds of authority: one grows naturally from the skills, expertise, character, and leadership of an individual; the other is bestowed by formal position, hierarchy, rank, title, or some kind of external validation like a degree or board certification.  The first kind is intrinsic, while the second is extrinsic.  An example: a small platoon in a desperate battlefield situation receives orders from the commanding officer to advance.  The soldiers are slow to respond, despite the commander’s rank of Lieutenant: they doubt his judgment and don’t trust him.  But a private in the platoon, loved and trusted by all and physically brave, leaps out into the fray, guns a-blazin’. The whole platoon follows. The lieutenant is exerting extrinsic authority; the private, intrinsic.

In the last few weeks, we have seen crowds flock to Jesus because of his healing and working wonders (Matt. 4:24; Mark 3:10; Luke 5:15; John 2:23).   They accept him because he teaches “not as the scribes and the Pharisees, but as one having authority” (Mark 1:22; Matthew 7:29).

Clearly, from the point of view of rank, status, and position, Jesus had no authority. His authority was intrinsic—it came from who he was, from his acts, and from the effect of his teaching.

Jesus did not simply “question authority” as a knee-jerk assertion of autonomy. He tells leper he has healed to go and be ritually cleansed by a priest, as prescribed in the Law. St. Matthew has Jesus saying “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to complete it.”

Where he did question authority, however, was when he saw that the intrinsic authority of a person, group, or institution did not measure up to their extrinsic authority.

The word “Hypocrite” is his sharpest criticism. The Greek word simply means “actor.”  Jesus accuses the religious leaders of pretending to serve God and lead others. “You are the blind leading the blind.  You put overwhelming burdens on others you are not willing to shoulder. You bar the gate to salvation to others while you yourselves do not enter it.”

There is a big difference between manipulative play-acting and trying to behave better than you think you are in order to amend your life. Sometimes our sense of guilt or unworthiness is such that we think we are being hypocritical if we go all “churchy.”   But “Fake it till you make it” means pretend you are better than you believe you are so that you can actually become a better person. This is not “hypocrisy,” but rather simply one tool of trying to respond to God’s call. “Hypocrisy” in contrast is pretending to be better than you are so that you can stay the same way or even get worse. 

 

Jesus in today’s Gospel turns tables over, uses a small whip to drive away the Temple’s duly authorized concessionaries, and yells that they have corrupted God’s House.   Almost certainly an act of the historical Jesus, it was probably the immediate cause of his arrest and death, as pictured in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  John’s Gospel moves it to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in order to make room for the story of the raising of Lazarus as the reason for Jesus’ death and to say this dynamic was present in Jesus’ ministry from the beginning.   

I do not think this scene is an example of “righteous” anger, an “appropriate” use of violence.  That misses the whole logic of the scene:  Jesus knows that power lies with the moneyed interests here.  The Temple police will restore order through their own use of force, and a few minutes later they’ll be back at their business.  I once saw small hand whips used to control crowds at the Ghanaian-Togo border:  while effective in driving people away who flee to get out of the bite of the whip ends, it is the least brutal of such crowd control methods, apart from modern water cannons and tear gas.  Jesus chooses the least damaging of ancient crowd control methods:  no sword, club, rocks or stick for him.  Jesus knows this prophetic act is probably going to get him killed.  It is not about losing his cool. This calculated act of disobedience makes the point that the Temple has become a tool of oppression in the hands of the powerful.  It is not an effort to overturn that system through force, but rather to make people see the violence and cruelty at the heart of the system, in contrast to the gentle abundance of the Reign of God.  Here, we see not a lack of anger management, but a measure of his overall passion for justice and life. 

The Temple was the only place where you could offer sacrifice to Israel’s God.  The Law of Moses itself demanded quality controls in what was offered: only animals and products of a high quality, even for the simple offerings of the poor.  A cottage industry had sprung up: inspectors would certify that offerings brought by families met the minimal standards.  If not, pre-certified substitutes were available at a price.  But only temple currency was allowed for payment, since the legal tender of the age bore idolatrous images.  And there was a fee for the currency exchange.  The same cast of characters ran the whole system, and set the prices, exchange rates, and commissions. Something meant to be a holy and special way of communing with God had been turned into a crooked protection racket.  

The authorities ask Jesus by what authority he has done this.  “Show us your credentials.”  Jesus replies by shouting out “You want credentials?  Here’s credentials: this Temple will be destroyed, but God will rebuild it in no time.”  They reply, sputtering, that the edifice before them has been decades in the building.  

Jesus is talking about intrinsic authority and not extrinsic.  The Galilean peasantry have been flocking to his message that somehow God’s Reign is breaking into our lives in his person.  In this disturbance, Jesus is saying his personal authority as prophet of the Reign of God trumps whatever power the Temple and its authorities may have.

The Temple had been for centuries the sign that “God is in our midst.” After Good Friday and Easter, and especially after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., Christians would come to recognize that it was Jesus who was “God in our midst,” the new Temple.   It is from this post-Easter perspective that John says “he was speaking of the Temple of his body.”    

Paul in today’s epistle contrasts the authority systems of the two major cultures of his era: “Jews demand signs [indicating God’s power] and Greeks look for wisdom.”  Jewish legal interpretation demanded that people claiming God’s authority establish their bona fides through acts of power as evidence of God’s intervention.  Greek philosophy demanded that one claiming our intellectual and moral allegiance demonstrate the internal coherence of their teaching and its congruence with accepted standards of prudence and wisdom.

To such standards of authority, Paul says, “we preach Christ crucified” or “we proclaim a Messiah on a cross, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”  He cross indeed is a scandal for anyone who looks to the values of this world for authority.  But the ultimate intrinsic authority is what allows Paul to preach what he admits is “foolishness” to the powers that be.  Christ on the Cross was followed on the third day by Christ raised from the dead.  As Saint John says, “he was talking about the Temple of his body, raised after three days.”

“Christ on the Cross,” says Paul, is “foolishness” to those who are perishing in a limited, hopeless world. But to those who hear God's voice, regardless of whatever limited standard of power or wisdom they once used, "Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God,” the ultimate authority.  We must seek to emulate Christ, follow his path of intrinsic, gentle authority, and eschew appeals to external authority.  Let us live our values, and let others judge us by our actions. 

In the name of God Amen.