The Temple of His Body
Third Sunday in Lent
The readings for this third Sunday in Lent are nothing if not overwhelming. The Old Testament passage offers us all of the Ten Commandments, while Psalm 19 begins and ends with oft-quoted verses and in between ponders the revelatory power of creation itself and the gift and role of God’s perfect law. In Paul’s well-known section in the opening chapter of 1 Corinthians, he writes of the foolishness of the cross-centered gospel and how this foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and that God's seeming weakness is stronger than human strength. And if all of that wasn’t enough upon which to meditate during this third week of Lent, John’s gospel offers us his own arresting placement of and reflection on Jesus’ prophetic action in the temple courts.
These texts are nothing if not riches aplenty.
I must confess that I am tempted, when faced with such riches, to belly-up to this banquet table of texts and sample a bit of everything on offer. And if I were crafting a sermon on these texts, I would be tempted to do the same. Although I am confident that the Spirit could use such a text-tasting sermon to edify my congregants, I wonder if such a tactic might let both my congregation and me off the hook much too easily, which certainly seems contrary to the spirit of Lent. Why so? Because such an approach likely leaves us hovering far above the table itself, and from that height we might only ingest tasteless abstractions, thereby absolving us from having to manage some of the toughest parts of these texts to chew and swallow.
So in the spirit of Lent, I’d like to suggest we ruminate on a few generative questions that focus on Jesus’ temple language in John’s gospel and then close our ruminating with a side glance at Paul’s Corinthian correspondence.
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I’m confident that nearly anyone reading these lectionary reflections is aware that that the Gospel of John places Jesus’s temple-clearing action at a very different juncture within Jesus’ overall ministry. The three synoptic gospels place the temple clearing during his final Passover trip to Jerusalem shortly after he enters to the acclaim of crowds gathered to witness his entrance. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus enters the temple courts, looks around, and decides to come back the next day because it is so late. When he does so, his actions are considered by all three synoptic gospels as a pivotal precipitating event leading to his crucifixion. In contrast, in the Gospel of John, Jesus clears the temple quite early in his public ministry, indeed after his first “sign” at the wedding feast at Cana, a sign which was witnessed only by the relative few who were present. In John’s account, Jesus’ public action in the temple courts is described in much more detail and much more dramatically. Jesus takes the time, for example, to make a kind of whip out of cords, upends tables scattering coins, and sends merchants and animals scurrying out of the Court of the Gentiles, stirring up considerable animosity and setting in motion a certain, even if longer, path to the cross.
And yet as is so often the case, the Johannine account is crafted in such a way as to draw our attention to a more profound understanding of Jesus’ actions by focusing on his words rather than simply his actions, which seems appropriate for the one who is identified as the Word made flesh. In Mark, Jesus quotes the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah to condemn the authorities for undermining the temple’s purpose as a “house of prayer for all the nations” and making it instead a “den of thieves.” In the Johannine account, Jesus uses his own words, commanding the dove sellers to "take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a market house!" When Jesus is questioned as to his authority for doing all of this, he famously responds: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The authorities understandably misunderstand Jesus, assuming he is talking about Herod’s temple where they are currently standing, which they remind him has been (so far) 46 years in the making. But John’s gospel tells us that Jesus was “speaking of the temple of his body,” and that his disciples remembered he had said this only after he was raised from the dead, which led them to “believe the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”
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“Speaking of the temple of his body.”
I wonder if we might, on this third Sunday of Lent, nearly halfway on our journey toward Easter, ruminate on this one phrase. Is it possible that John’s gospel places the temple clearing account much earlier to foreground this key phrase, and all that it suggests? Is it possible that this account seeks to frame the rest of the story by means of this phrase? If the Jerusalem temple (and the tabernacle before that) was understood as a singular abiding place of God’s presence with the covenant people of God, that liminal space where the divine and human meet, might the Gospel of John urge us to see from the beginning of the story the seismic shift that is coming in the understanding of “temple,” the abiding place of God’s presence and glory? Is John inviting us to hear in these words of Jesus how he is acting out the full Easter meaning of his life, that he can empty the temple courts of sacrificial animals because his own self-offering will bring an end to any such need?
“Speaking of the temple of his body.”
And yet there seems to be more here. Might we ruminate further by focusing next on “his body.” If the focus on the temple led us to rather heady sacrificial theology, focusing on “his body” tethers us to the flesh and blood of this Jesus of Nazareth. As articulated in John’s prologue, the ineffable and scandalous Christian mystery of the incarnation is that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” This “scandal of particularity”—that the Creator would enter creation at one time and place and be subject to all the vicissitudes of being a human being—met with resistance from the beginning and remains a scandal in our own day.
Surely part of this scandal, this deep uneasiness, is tied to our complicated relationship with our own bodies, especially as Christians. We begin Lent by being reminded that we were made from the dust and to the dust we shall return. But that’s just the beginning. There is no shortage of Christians who have been formed to be deeply suspicious if not ashamed of their bodies, seeing them as somehow inherently sinful. Add to this all the ways contemporary societies, animated by spirits of comparison and competition, exalt certain bodies for admiration while shaming others and it’s hardly surprising that many people come to loathe their own bodies. Surely such social formation conspires to offer people in our day plenty of reasons to find the incarnation, the central mystery of the Christian faith, not simply inconceivable but also profoundly offensive. What, after all, would be the point of any god taking human flesh? How demeaning. How undignified. And then for this “god-in-the-flesh” to be subject to mockery, torture, and crucifixion? What kind of god is this?
What kind of God, indeed. Yet we must not forget that the same scandalous particularity that made possible the humiliation and crucifixion of this God-in-the-flesh also made possible the manifold ways this same Jesus dignified the bodily-beings of others by washing feet, touching lepers, feeding hungry multitudes, casting out demons, opening the mouths and ears of the mute and deaf, and setting the lame to dancing. Moreover, Jesus suggests that such actions are themselves signs of God’s inbreaking reign of shalom, a reign rooted in God’s desire for wholeness and human flourishing that cannot be separated from the goodness of our bodily existence.
So if John’s gospel redirects our attention away from temples made with human hands to “the temple of his body” as the touchpoint for God’s presence, what might this suggest about the capacity of the Spirit of Jesus to animate, sanctify, and thereby dignify not only our own bodies, but also the bodies of our neighbors? And might that animating work of the Spirit of Jesus empower all of us together to live more fully into our humanity as revealed in Jesus Christ?
Or asked differently, rather than being embarrassed or ashamed of our bodily existence, or regarding that dimension of our creaturehood only as obstacles to be overcome, what would it mean for our life with God and one another to be able to offer up our full embodied selves? And what would it look like to receive well the embodied lives of others by honoring and upholding their dignity and worth in an age where we endlessly invent new ways to further debase, demean, and diminish the image of God they bear?
And finally, what difference would it make for both our ruminations and our daily lives if we remembered that the same Paul who in the opening chapter of 1 Corinthians insists that the gospel of the cross is a scandal to Jews and Greeks, also claims in his Corinthian correspondence that those who are members of Christ’s body are those who are individually and corporately “God’s temple”? Might this also shift our willingness to allow the Spirit of Jesus to re-member us more fully into “the temple of his body”?
Surely riches aplenty.