Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 15, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I’ve said before in these Lenten sermons that the cross is a big deal in Christianity. It has become the defining symbol of the faith around the world. Every Christian denomination I know of uses it. Giving up the cross amounts to giving up Christianity. Our faith is inconceivable without it.

The Christian obsession with the cross goes way back. The oldest Christian writings that we have are the authentic letters of Paul, dating from the 50s and 60s of the first century CE; and Paul makes a very big deal out of the cross indeed. This morning we heard one of the most significant passages in which he does that. In that passage he makes some pretty grandiose claims for the cross. He calls it “the power of God.” He calls Christ crucified “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” He recognizes of course how absurd that claim sounds, calling it “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” He nonetheless insists that the foolishness of the cross is wiser than human wisdom.

Now when most Christians think of the cross of Jesus and its significance they think of only one thing. They think of what theologians call the classical theory of atonement, or more complexly the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement. It is the theory that says that Jesus was the Lamb of God, the totally innocent person who had to suffer and die before God could forgive human sin. The theory holds that God could not forgive human sin without such a price being paid. It goes on to say that no suffering and dying that any mere human could do could be a sufficient price for the affront to God’s honor and dignity that human sin represents, so great is that affront to God. So God, the theory holds, became human Godself in the person of Jesus for the purpose of suffering and dying in order to pay the price that no human could pay. That the idea of God paying a price to Godself makes not a lick of sense has never bothered most Christians much. The classical theory of atonement, which makes Jesus the ultimate sacrifice, has virtually swallowed Christianity whole. To a great many people, it is Christianity.

It’s no secret around here that I strongly reject this interpretation of the meaning of the cross of Christ. What may surprise you—unless you’ve read and remember my book—is that the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers and driving the sacrificial animals out of the temple, John’s version of which we just heard, shows that Jesus rejected that theory too. More precisely, it shows that he rejected the very idea that what God wants or demands from God’s people is sacrifice. The discussion in the chapter of my book titled “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” raises many additional objections to that theory, but this morning I’ll just focus on how our passage from John relates to the issue.

This story, some version of which appears in all four Gospels, is commonly called “the cleansing of the temple.” The idea behind that name is that Jesus thought that the temple, the main function of which was as the place of animal sacrifice as a form of worship, was corrupt and needed cleaning up. We get the idea that he thought that the money changers and the sellers of animals for sacrifice were desecrating the temple and that that’s why he disrupted their business and drove them out.

But when we understand how the temple was intended to and did function, we see that this reading of the story makes no sense. The moneychangers and the sellers of sacrificial animals were absolutely essential to the proper functioning of the temple. The moneychangers were necessary because every Jew was required to pay a temple tax. They could not, however, pay the tax with the Roman coins they used in everyday transactions because those coins depicted the Emperor as a god and thus were idolatrous. So the moneychangers took the people’s Roman money and gave them special temple coins with which they could pay the tax. More importantly the people who came to the temple to offer a sacrifice had to buy their sacrificial animals at the temple because that was the only way they could be sure the animals were without flaws and thus appropriate for sacrifice. The temple didn’t need to be cleansed of these people and their activities. They were essential to the temple’s proper functioning, and Jesus knew that they were. Jesus quite simply was not “cleansing” the temple.

So what was he doing? There was by Jesus’ time an old, old tradition of Hebrew prophets engaging in what are called prophetic acts as well as speaking prophetic words. They would do things was well as say things to get their point across. Jeremiah, for example, walked around with a yoke around his neck to say that because of the people’s faithlessness the kingdom was going to be overrun by a foreign power whom the people would then have to serve. That’s what Jesus is doing here. The point wasn’t that the moneychangers and the sellers of animals for sacrifice were desecrating the temple. They weren’t. The point was that the whole system of animal sacrifice was wrong. Jesus is saying by his actions that sacrifice is not what God wants.

Hebrew prophets had been saying the same thing for eight hundred years before Jesus came along. In the eighth century BCE the prophet Hosea, speaking for God, said “For I desire steadfast love and not a sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Hosea 6:6 Jesus agreed. In the Gospel of Matthew he even quotes that line from Hosea, saying “Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Matthew 9:13 The difference in the wording between the Hosea and the Matthew is only a matter of translation. The temple was all about sacrifice, all about burnt offerings, so Jesus undertook a symbolic, prophetic act against the temple. He symbolically overthrew the temple. He symbolically destroyed the temple. His remark in our reading about rebuilding the temple in three days doesn’t contradict this interpretation but supports it. Jesus’ words say that his resurrected body—that’s what the three days are about—will replace the temple. But not as a sacrifice, rather as how we have that knowledge of God that Hosea had said hundreds of years earlier that God wants from us.

Jesus knew that God does not desire sacrifice. That’s why he symbolically overthrew the institution where sacrifice took place. Why then did the faith tradition that claims him as its Lord turn him into the ultimate sacrifice? Why did it turn the cross, the instrument of his death, into the symbol of him as the sacrifice God required before God could forgive human sin? I’m not sure there’s any want to know for sure. Perhaps the writers of the New Testament books where this theory first appears such as the Letter to the Hebrews didn’t know about Jesus’ symbolic destruction of the temple. Or maybe the tradition has just misunderstood the meaning of that action. The name it has given to the action, the “cleansing of the temple,” certainly suggests that it has. Whatever its reasons were, Christianity revealed a serious misunderstanding of the cross of Christ when it did that. Some theologians have said that making him the ultimate sacrifice is nothing less than a betrayal of Jesus. I agree.

Last week at my dad’s house I was talking with Pastor Greg of Eugene First Congregational UCC. The subject of sacrificial atonement theology came up—Greg had just read my book so that’s not as strange as it sounds. He said that even when he was a child the idea of sacrificial atonement just didn’t make sense. I said that I think it doesn’t make sense to a lot of people in our churches but that they’ve never been given permission to discard it. Not that you really need me to do so, but I hereby give you permission to discard it. Greg said that when we do that we have to give people something to replace it with. For yet another sermon from me on what I propose to replace it with, come back next week. Amen.