March 16, 2006
Menagerie
Lent 3B 2006
Here we are in the middle of Lent, and the appointed Bible lessons catch the theme altogether well: order, depression, and confusion. (We call them “the propers.” It’s the Anglican way.) Moses, just as you might expect, is about keeping Law and Order and all those commandments (Ex 20.1-17). Paul is about breast-beating and on one of his spiritual “poor me” kicks (Rms 7.13-25). And Jesus is throwing the Temple furniture and all the cats and dogs around for he has had it with the prelates and their puffery (Jn 2.13-22).
I’ve a hunch Jesus would like the Jesus Seminar. You know, those biblical scholars who take apart every religious and sectarian jot and tittle to give us a remarkably accurate picture of things that were in those New Testament days, sort of a latter day You Are There kind of experience. And Jesus would like their work not just because of the flattery, but because he is long on metaphor, and those guys understand metaphor with the best of them and aren’t always needing somebody else to explain it to them. And I also think he’d like them (does [or doesn’t] like them, what am I saying?) because they seem to know so well what he was up against.
Today’s story is a splendid metaphor (with some literal thrown in) about what Jesus was up against. It’s Passover time and like the devout Jew he was, he went to church. And instead of a chance for some prayerful peace and quiet and tightening up of his discipline, he found the mother of all unholy messes. It was not altogether unlike today, a church obsessed with itself and its “toys” rather than being a proving ground for staging its mission. The menagerie is different, but the zoo-like confusion is about the same, and we’ve obviously not yet got rid of the pigeons.
We churchers do share a common life with those in that time, maybe for different reasons, but with considerable sameness. These stories illustrate it.
A lot of us would like a bit more, maybe a lot more, law and order. Grace is okay, and grace is really where it’s at. But as a reward for hard work, we’d like something a little more tangible. That southern judge, for example, was not content with the court house as the only symbol of the judiciary. He wanted the Ten Commandments immovably chiseled in stone like the originals and planted right there in the lobby in front of the elevators for all to see. He probably meant well, and a lot of people agreed with him. But we just can’t do it like that in our system. It has to be more in our vision and, like Jeremiah said, in our hearts, more than just hanging up there in a framed sampler down the hall at grandmum’s house.
Paul does a better job of breast-beating than most of us, surely more than I. But Paul had a hand on the action for which we can be grateful for a lifetime, even if he did elbow out the rest of the apostles and get better press.
But it’s Jesus who’s the author and finisher of our faith. It’s Jesus with his puzzling parables and who is, indeed, himself, The Parable. It’s Jesus with all the crazies in his entourage. It’s Jesus going about loving and healing and teaching and walking on water. It’s Jesus to whom we look and find mystery and wholeness and new life. And there’s the rub.
Just as Jesus was frustrated by the misuse of the Temple in his time, so must we be in ours. As noble a cause as is Lent for us and as frustrating at times must it be, there is yet no better time to reorient our lives and purpose with our Lord. There’s no limit to God’s grace, but old prophet Isaiah did recommend that we “seek the Lord while he wills to be found” (Is 55.6). We don’t want to be presumptuous about that, and there’s no sign yet that God’s backing off. But there was that considerable uproar in the Temple once, and nobody can presume it won’t happen again — wherever or whenever the time might be ripe. In God’s way with irony, Lent could be such a time.