Lent 3 March 15, 2009

Exodus 20:1-17                                                                  

1 Corinthians 1:18-25                                                       

John 2:13-22

 

“On his first day of eighth grade at the former Holy Name Roman Catholic school in Washington, DC, last fall, Jeffrey Stone bowed his head, clasped his hands and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Within seconds, his teacher chided him: ‘We don’t do that anymore.’”*

 

Holy Name, like six other financially troubled schools in our Nation’s capitol, was turned into a charter school over the summer last year. The crucifixes were taken down from the walls. Religion courses were removed from the curriculum. The day no longer started with prayer. Most of the teachers, including the handful of nuns, remained in their classrooms. But they were public school teachers now.  Holy Name school had become Trinidad, named not after Jesus, but after a neighborhood in the city.

 

Instead of starting the day with the Lord’s Prayer, students begin with a recitation of the school honor code: “’I will arrive at school each day on time and ready to work. I will treat all with respect and dignity. I will solve any conflicts that arise peacefully. I will care for and protect our environment.’ Classrooms are filled with discussions not of the Bible and Jesus but of 10 ‘core values’ — perseverance and curiosity, for instance — that are woven into the curriculum.”

 

There was a time, two hundred years ago and more, when if you’d come to an Episcopal church like this on a Sunday morning you would have seen prominently displayed on the wall a plaque with the Ten Commandments. You would have started the worship service with the reading of the Ten Commandments. You would have been clear that these laws came from God, delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai out of a cloud. No two ways about it. And you would have lived in a society where “law” was understood as divinely grounded, divinely sanctioned. Where there was a “natural law” ordained by God and human courts and rulers attempted to “discover” that law—a “brooding omnipresence in the sky” in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—and apply it here on earth.

 

For various reasons that view of law has fallen out of favor.  Laws are now generally seen as merely human constructs, and as such people look at them purely from the standpoint of their own self-interest, picking and choosing the ones they like and don’t like. So you can’t put the Ten Commandments on the wall of a school or courthouse, or in a public park, any more than you can begin the school day in a public school with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Religion and religion’s laws are okay for those who choose them, but they’re not universal, they can’t be applied to others. They’re human constructs, like school honor codes.

 

Well, in some ways it’s been liberating, not to think that laws are divinely sanctioned. A lot of mischief was done under that regime: kings claiming they ruled by divine right, the rich claiming it was God’s will that the poor were poor, males oppressing females, white Europeans oppressing people of color, clergy dictating obedience to lay folk.

 

We see an example of this mischief in the gospel reading this morning, Jesus cleansing the temple of the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals. What was going on in this scene? I have a perhaps surprising hypothesis: I think Jesus was reforming the law. You see, these activities in the temple were connected with the observance of the Jewish cultic laws, which were of course thought to be from God. Money had to be changed from unclean Roman coins to clean temple coins so the temple offerings could be paid in clean money. Special ritually proper animals had to be purchased for sacrifice on the temple altar.

 

But the ultimate point of these laws—furthering God’s love—had been lost sight of. A whole religious industry had grown up that simply furthered its own power while contending that it had to do with God. That was what Jesus was overturning. And his actions were good—part of his messianic restoration of the kingdom of God’s love. For you see, the law—symbolized in the Ten Commandments—was given by God to Israel as an act of love.

 

After their delivery by God from slavery in Egypt—that great act of love—the children of Israel wandered aimlessly in the wilderness, grumbling about wanting to go back to Egypt where they may have been slaves but at least they knew what to do. So God in God’s love gave them the Ten Commandments, the rules to live by if you want to live in love. That connection between rules, law, and God, love, is crucial in Holy Scripture. It was crucial for Jesus.

 

And I think it’s also crucial for us. I think there’s been loss in the breaking of the old connection between God and law. For if laws are merely human constructs, where’s the sense that they have to do with something beyond themselves, with love? Where’s the sense that life is furthered, joy enhanced, by having the Ten Commandments? If at some level law is not universal, can the peoples of the earth ever hope to agree on what is right? Israelis and the Palestinians? Christians and Moslems? Without a connection between God and law, will we never agree among ourselves in America on things like abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment?

 

Greater minds than mine are wrestling with these questions: the Pope’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, eminent jurists’ and legal scholars’. The wrestling isn’t easy, but it’s important. We can’t simply go back to saying every law in the Bible is directly from God. The Ten Commandments themselves aren’t that kind of rule, absolute and straightforward like traffic rules or Internal Revenue regulations. Scholars tell us that most likely the Commandments were actually written down, put together, as attempts to summarize the whole host of smaller rules and regulations that had grown up to define Israel as a nation. And their application is a matter of interpretation. Does the prohibition against murder apply to fighting in a war, killing an intruder who is about to kill you, putting to death a vicious murderer?

 

The answers to all such questions aren’t easy. But I think it makes a difference whether or not we think they have something to do with God. If laws are only of human origin, then their interpretation can never draw us beyond ourselves, we can never hope to transcend our divisions and move, however incrementally, towards the kingdom of God. But if laws can be the means of realizing love, of gaining some broader horizons in life beyond our individual self-interest, then law must be considered in some measure holy, in some way founded in that Mystery we so inadequately call God. Jesus was always breaking rules but he did so as a means of proclaiming the greater law of God.

 

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*Quotations from “Secular Education, Catholic Values,” New York Times, March 8, 2009.