Saint Mark's Church

At least two locations in Jerusalem claim to be the Upper Room: the place where Jesus shared his last supper with his disciples, and where the gift of the Eucharist was first shared.  One of those locations is called the Cenacle.  It is the better known of the two, outside the ancient city wall, on Mount Zion.  The other is to be found in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, where one of the winding, walled streets makes a dogleg of a turn, not too far from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  A sign announces that you are approaching Saint Mark’s Convent.  Passing through the entrance and the outer courtyard, you go through another set of doors into a small, ornate church, at the back of which is a narrow staircase that leads to the Upper Room.

Except the stairs here don’t lead up; they go down.  Everything in Jerusalem is built on the ruins of something older.  The old Syriac church of Saint Mark is built on the ruins of an older church, an older structure that was destroyed at least once, about 70 AD in the Roman sack of Jerusalem.  Older versions of Jerusalem lie buried beneath the current version – which looks plenty old to me – and so a faithful visitor must now go down a set of stairs to enter the Upper Room.

There is a certain cognitive dissonance to this experience that is hard to escape.  It’s not just that there is almost nothing about the windowless, plain room that suggests it is a holy place; that there are almost no signs and little feeling of sanctity to the place; that the modern electric lights  - Home Depot-style, faux-crystal fixtures that are wired to the ceiling - rob the space of any ambiance.  There is something wrong with the idea of walking downstairs to get to the Upper Room.  You simply feel that you cannot be going to the same place that Jesus and his disciples went.  It feels more like you are entering a kind of M.C.Escher drawing, in which stairs that seem to lead down actually lead up.  But this cannot be.

Indeed, it cannot be.  And the very name for the kind of structures that Escher drew – for instance, stairs that appear to lead down but also go up– the name for this is an “impossible object.”

An impossible object is a 2-dimensional representation that the viewer perceives instantly as a projection of a 3-dimenstional object, although it is not actually geometrically possible for such an object to exist in real space.  Imagine, if you can, those images Escher drew of staircases that seem to lead a person in any and every conceivable direction: up, down, over, and under.  In isolation, any one section of the drawing seems to make sense, but at the connecting points, somehow things go awry, even though it’s hard to say why.  Look at the whole, picture, though, and you can see that there is no up, down, or sideways to it; no clear orientation to ground the viewer; no way to say what’s up and what is down.  An explanation of impossible objects tells us that “in most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds.  However, the initial impression [of possibility] remains even after it has been contradicted.”

All of which leads me to wonder about the Upper Room of tonight’s gospel.  Not just about the precise location of it in Jerusalem, but about what took place there, about the gift that we are told was given, the commandment that was delivered, the example that was made, the lesson we are meant to learn from tonight’s gospel.  Having once walked down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room, I find myself wondering if the Upper Room is an impossible object?  Are the lessons this gospel seeks to teach us impossible objects?  And if they are, would that mean that the bread and the wine – those crucial gifts of tonight’s celebration – are also impossible objects? 

Or more precisely: the Body and Blood of Jesus that Christians have believed for two millennia are hidden beneath the forms of bread and wine – are these impossible objects that we have allowed ourselves to perceive in such a way that they could not actually exist?  And do we cling to the initial impression of what these elements are, even after that impression has been contradicted by a vast array of evidence in the world?

To put it another way: Is the church’s teaching about tonight – that Jesus gave us the gift of his Real Presence in the bread and the wine of the Last Supper, and that when we pray the prayers, and say the words, and believe with our hearts the things we must pray and say and believe, then he is really, truly among us – is all this just a staircase leading downstairs into a supposedly Upper Room?  A story, whose cognitive dissonance can only be resolved with a willful ignorance, sometimes called faith?

To much of the world, this is how what we do tonight, and every day of the year here at Saint Mark’, looks: like a bunch of people who have been duped into believing that you can walk downstairs to get to the Upper Room; that an Impossible Object is actually the Real Thing.  But what we must remember about tonight is this: that tonight’s Eucharist has been built on the ruins of older Eucharists.  One Mass is built on the bricks of many masses that came before it, even if those bricks were left only for rubble before.

How do we determine whether or not the bread we take and bless and break and share tonight is really Jesus’ Body?  How do we determine if the wine is really his Blood?  We may have to excavate this Eucharist, to dig down to the layers deep below: the older Eucharists this one was built on – which is exactly what the church is inviting us to do tonight.  We dig down past 163 years’ worth of masses right here on this spot, celebrated by my thirteen predecessors, and the men and women who worked with them.  Then we dig down past the colonial Holy Communions, that were probably kept on Christmases and Easters in this city, but not much more than that.

Because this is a holy archaeology, we don’t have to sail the seas to find the fossil record of the masses that prayed for the ends of wars and the well-being of the men and women who fought them.  If we are lucky we will discover the evidence of the masses (though not enough of them) that prayed for the safety of Jews who were being slaughtered in Poland; of masses that beatified Nicholas and Alexandra, that were terrified by the tricoleur, that gave thanks for Columbus’ return, that damned the onslaught of the Moors, that rejoiced at Fra Angelico’s painting, that set the Inquisitor’s imagination aflame, that prompted Francis to stand naked in the square, that crowned Charlemagne, that rang out in the chants of monastic chapels, that fled persecutions, that huddled nervously behind closed doors or in catacombs, that strained to remember what it was exactly Jesus had said, before it was written down.  And, of course, deep beneath the stratified, sometimes ossified layers of all these masses, we get to the wide, wooden boards of a floor in an Upper Room, where the Twelve are reclining around a table with the Rabbi.

It is dim here, so many layers beneath the Mass we began tonight, but there is enough light to see by, and enough quiet to hear by, and to remember what this first Communion was all about: when the Son of the living God, who had been since the world began, came down to this Upper Room, and although he had the power of God, took on himself instead the girdle of service and washed the feet of those he’d called to serve him and his mission.  Down here we can still hear the echo of his ancient words, “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.”  We have had to dig down deep to get to this Upper Room, but we can feel the power of his question reverberating in the dirt and stone around us: “Do you know what I have done to you?”  Do you know?

What he has done is given us these Impossible Objects of his Body and his Blood.  They appear to us with so many dimensions: they remind us of the way he cradled his disciples’ feet in his hands as he washed the dust and the dirt from them.  They bear to us the words of his only commandment: that we love one another just as he loved his disciples.

This scant half-ounce of dry wafer and less than a half-ounce of wine transmit the truth of God’s love: the force that called light from darkness; the covenant that freed a people from their captivity and led them to a promised land; the wisdom and the strength of Solomon; the power that healed the sick, made the lame to walk and the blind to see; the voice of the prophets; the mercy that comforted the imprisoned and those who mourn; the hope that seemed to be buried with Lazarus; the beauty that glowed beneath Magdalene’s curls; the patience and strength of a Cyrenean’s shoulder; the faith of an impetuous fisherman; and the life that seemed to die on the Cross, but that was really gathering strength.  All this in a speck of bread and a drop of wine!

These are Impossible Objects!  They appear to be barely more than 2-dimensional, and we quickly realize that they cannot possibly exist in the way we say they do in real time and real space.  The bread and the wine have not changed; I have no power to turn them into something they are not.  Quickly our minds perceive the contradiction here, and yet somehow the initial impression remains.

Tonight, we are gathered together to remember that an older version of this sacred meal lies beneath the current version (which looks plenty old to so many people).  And that these days, yes, you must go down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room.

Tonight, we rejoice in that little staircase that leads downstairs to Upper Room.  We delight in the impossibility of such an object as a staircase that could ever lead us to that holy place, that holy time, that holy company, that holy communion. And, more specifically, tonight we rejoice in the Impossible Objects of Christ’s Body and Blood – barely more that 2-dimensional on the altar, it seems; practically less than 2-dimensional to so much of the world that has given up on them. 

These are Impossible Objects: this Body, this Blood.  They cannot possibly be what we say that they are, and when we look closely at them, we see the contradiction, for indeed, they appear to all the world to be nothing more than bread, nothing more than wine.  And yet… the initial impression remains even it after it has been contradicted.  And it does so because of the complicated and beautiful sedimentary layers of all the Eucharists this present one is built upon.  Because since that first Eucharist all those centuries ago, men and women have held out their hands, opened their mouths, and been fed.

Tonight we have walked toward this ancient staircase that we are told leads to an Upper Room, even though any idiot can see that it leads down, where it can only get dark, and where we are sure to encounter no one but the dead. 

But we go downstairs in faith; we taste, and see: we arise, and we live!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Maundy Thursday 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Allow me to set the scene: An omnipotent, virtually omniscient power is in charge; long ago the inhabitants of the ruler’s land rebelled against the ruler’s authority and asserted their own will, only to be punished, condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.  What’s more, the omnipotent ruler now demands payment in return for the original offence: a ransom to satisfy the ruler’s own sense of justice, and which requires the spilling of blood.  These details are the basic exposition of the fantastically popular young-readers’ novel, The Hunger Games.  And if you’ve read the book or seen the movie you know what ensues.  The ransom is to be paid in the form of tributes: a boy and a girl from every district in the land, chosen by lottery to travel to the Capital for a sort of gladiatorial contest to the death in which only one of the 24 young combatants will be left standing.  It is a perverse and cruel arrangement designed to keep the people of the districts in their place by dint of fear, and by the constant reinforcement of the idea that the rulers hold the lives of the people in their hands, and those lives can be taken from them at almost any time.

The ‘Hunger Games’ refers to the actual contest in which the 24 young boys and girls are pitted against each other to fight to the death.  The lone survivor will be rewarded with enough wealth to banish the hunger that would normally be his or her lot in life, living in poverty in a district outside the Capital, working to produce whatever the privileged members of the ruling class require for their comfort.

One of the most perverse aspects of the Hunger Games is the way the contestants – the tributes, who have been torn from the bosom of their families and the safety of their communities to face a nearly certain death – they way they are encouraged to become willing participants in their own demise; coached to play along on the off-chance it might help them win; tutored to embrace their momentary celebrity; molded into at least apparently eager players of a game designed to kill them.

What you may not realize is that the expository outline of The Hunger Games also follows the basic contours of one of the classic and most enduring articulations of Christian theology:  An omnipotent and omniscient God holds all creation in his hand.  Long ago, the first inhabitants of creation rebelled against God’s authority and asserted their own wills, only to be punished, exiled from Paradise, and condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.  What’s more, God decides that he requires payment in return for the original offence, the original sin: a ransom to satisfy his own sense of justice, which will require the spilling of blood.

This is the short-handed version of a much longer answer often provided to the ancient question: Why did God become Man?  It’s a question that was led by a star to Bethlehem, settled for a while in a stable there, grew up in Nazareth, taught throughout the Galilee, and eventually ended up in Jerusalem, or more precisely on a green hill, outside the city wall, where a man hung on a cross between two thieves… which is where the story has brought us today.  What are we to make of this story with all its strange twists and turns, like the frenzy of palm-waving procession that only days later is transposed into shouts demanding that the man all those palms were waved for should now be crucified?

We sometimes look at the Cross and assume its message is self-evident.  But is the message of the cross any more self-evident that the wisdom of the Hunger Games, the demand for tribute in order to right ancient wrongs, and to do so with the spilling of blood?

That story opens when a young 12-year old girl is chosen to be a tribute from her district: to be sent the to the Hunger Games where she will surely die.  But her older sister, in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice volunteers to go instead, not because she believes she can win, but because she will do anything to save her little sister.  Her act of selflessness is Christ-like not only because of the generosity of self-offering, but because it will almost surely cost the girl her life.  She is choosing death out of love so that another may live.  But seeing this parallel doesn’t make the story of the Hunger Games less perverse, and it may suggest to us that the story of the Crucifixion is more so.

As fate would have it, the girl’s counterpart – the boy who is chosen as tribute from the same district – is as guileless as she is.  He, too, believes he is doomed, sure that he will be slaughtered by those more cunning and powerful than he is.  He says that his only hope is to “die as myself….  I don’t want them to change me in there.  Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”  But he knows that the Hunger Games are designed to do just that.

It transpires that the boy and the girl  - only one of whom is allowed to live and win the Hunger Games – fall in love with each other, more or less.  As the Games begin and then unfold, not only are they unable to murder each other, they find ways to help each other survive.  This turn of events is not much appreciated by the organizers of the games, the People in Charge.  And in the film, a telling bit of dialogue is added between the President of the Capital, and the chief organizer of the Games.

“Why do you think we have a winner?” the president asks, and then provides his own answer.  “Hope.  It is the only thing stronger than fear.  A little hope is effective.  A lot of hope is dangerous.  A spark is fine, as long as it is contained.  So, contain it.”

In the Christian version of this story, we, too, have become willing participants of our own demise, who must grovel before a devious God and play his games if we hope to be rewarded, if we hope to even survive.  And many’s the person who has seen the Christian story this way.  In this telling of it, we humans have been messing around in God’s games and spoiled the fun for him, and so he introduces a new character: his Son, as a sort of trump card in the game of life to ensure that his will prevails, that God wins in the end.

This version of salvation reminds me of the ironic slogan of the Hunger Games: “May the odds be ever in your favor,” which is ironic because the odds never could be in your favor, and in fact the game is rigged so that the rulers can always get what they want: the sacrifice of the tributes.  So, too, in the perverse telling of the story of salvation in which God demands a tribute for the ancient memory of original sin.  The game is rigged.  Jesus can only ever go to the Cross, and you and I can only ever be guilty for it, more or less the same way we bear the stain of guilt for Adam’s sin.  This is a desolate arena in which to live our lives, and a picture of a God I don’t much want to worship.

It would be better if we could imagine ourselves as 12 year old children this morning.  And it might be helpful if we could acknowledge that the games we play – much to our own detriment – are games of our own making.

It’s us who allow our neighbors to starve, or to sleep in the cold, not God, who has given us everything we need to clothe and feed and shelter the world. 

It’s us who have so perfected the art of war that we simply can’t resist doing a better job of it, looking for places to practice it, and people to practice it on.

It’s us who remember we once heard the phrase “an eye for an eye,” but forget that we heard it when the Teacher was telling us what a stupid way to live that is, so we cling to vengeance all the same.

It’s us who pretend that the poor are poor because of their own fault, and that we are rich because of our virtues, even though we know this is not true.

It’s us who would rather go to brunch on Sunday than to spend an hour in the worship of the Almighty.

It’s us who have exchanged a golden calf for the cash that it would cost to buy one, and who kneel before the altar of our money day in and day out, obsessing about it, dreaming about it, hoarding it if we can, like nothing else.

These are our games, not God’s.  We made up these rules, and we have perfected the ways we live by them – and we have been doing it for thousands of years.  God hasn’t placed us in a cruel arena to fight to the death – we have chosen to live this way.  Even when Paradise was no longer an option, God sent us out into this amazing, beautiful, and sacred globe, where everything we need can be found, and then some, even if we do have to work for it.

We have devised the games that upset our lives.  Cain raised his arm against Abel without any prompting whatsoever from God, and the games began.  If the odds were not in our favor, it’s because we devised games with very bad odds – people still play roulette every day in Las Vegas, after all.  And so as we live our lives, it remains to be seen what these games we play will do to us.  Will we be changed into some kind of monsters that we were not made to be?  Or will we be the people God made us to be?  Will we play along in the Hunger Games, or will we search for a different way?

When we are tempted to see God as the perverse and awful power that demands the sacrifice of blood in exchange for our sins, then we are projecting an ugly image of ourselves onto God.  And the truth is that he sent his Son into the world to show us a different way.  Even at his most triumphal, at the height of his popularity – on Palm Sunday – Jesus could do no better than to ride into town on the back of a donkey, to be greeted by a meager crowd that had only palm branches to wave, and their own clothes to spread on the path before his way.  This is not the entrance of a majestic lord of the universe; it is the humble beginning of a sad procession to the Cross.  Jesus bears no sword and wields no power.  His crown is not yet woven, but when it is, its thorns will be the first instruments to draw blood from him.  The entry into Jerusalem had been a sign of hope – a spark.  But that spark has been contained.  Victory seems unlikely for him now.

How many ways has your hope been contained in this life?  How many times have the odds been stacked against you?  How often does it seem that you have been sent to an arena to fight for the death – but for what?  For what reason or purpose or cause?  Just because the Powers That Be require it of you?

The powers of this world prefer fear to hope.  Hope is only useful insofar as it can be contained.  Life is like the Mega-Millions jackpot: you have to be in it to win it.  But the odds are profoundly not in your favor, you are virtually certain to lose.  But were you a willing participant anyway?

Into these Hunger Games of life – which you and I cannot ever win, we are sure to die – steps One who can only ever die as himself, who cannot be turned into some kind of monster that he is not, because he is love incarnate.  He is our brother, our sister, our friend.  He heard your name called, and mine, at the hour that a ransom of death was being called for, and he stepped in to volunteer: to take our place in the Games that death would like to play with us: games whose rules he knows better than we do, even though we made them up as we went along.

For reasons too mysterious for me to understand, the Hunger Games have not ended, even though he has come into the world and offered himself as a sacrifice for the whole world.  Perhaps the Games have not ended because he still has a lesson to teach us while we live: he still calls us to learn to love one another, to see how futile is the fight to the death, and how holy is the life of love.

Why do you think we tell this story of a man who dies on a Cross, bearing pain the way we do, every bit as human as you and me, but who we know to be the Son of God?  Why do we tell it year after year, and remember the details, and sing about it the way we do?  Why do you think we have carved the image of this scene in every conceivable way: hoisting it high above our heads like some gruesome symbol of some awful, bloody games?

Hope.  Hope is the reason.  Because hope is the only thing stronger than fear.

A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.

And this hope, that hangs from a Cross, that proclaims with every drop of blood that spills from it, “I love you;” this hope is dangerous because it casts out fear and makes room for love.

And do you know that though many have tried to suppress it, this hope cannot be contained; it cannot be stopped, it cannot be killed, it cannot be turned into some kind of monster that it is not.

This hope volunteers to save your life and mine.  This hope promises that the Games we seem to play, in which the odds are stacked against us, will not end the way it seems they must.

This hope knows our hunger, and fills us with love.

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, and the people flinch. They have heard enough from this insistent prophet Jeremiah to know that whatever is coming cannot be good. They have heard, day after day, that God’s great reckoning has come upon them because of their chronic unfaithfulness. They have heard God call them degenerate and false, wild, perverse; they have even heard the word whore. They have heard God tell them that He will smash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel, that He will “bring such disaster” upon them that the “ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.” They have cried, “Peace, Peace!” but there is no peace, and terror is all around. The days are surely coming, they think, when…what? When you will utterly forsake us? When you will finally wipe us from the earth? When you will leave us to fend for ourselves while you go find another nation to bless, another people to call chosen? The days are surely coming, says the Lord, but the people already know how that sentence will end. For they have heard the hardest words of disappointment and judgment, and they have taken them to heart. Nothing good can possibly be coming.

The days are surely coming, we hear, and we, too, flinch. For we have seen enough of the terrors of this world to worry that whatever is coming cannot be good. We have heard, day after day, that there is to be a reckoning upon us because of our waste and our arrogance. We have heard that Creation itself is spinning out of control because of our abuse, that this vibrant, vulnerable planet will burn and storm and rage more and more. We have heard that our best days as a nation are behind us, that the great American experiment will fall victim to terrorism, or greed, or an ever-widening and aggressive polarity. We have heard that we can no longer hope that future generations will live better than we do, that the rich will only grow richer and the poor poorer. We have even heard that the Church is dying, that one day the seduction of secularism and the drain of our busy, busy, busy-ness will simply prove too much, and that on some Sunday in the not-too-distant future this church will offer its last Mass, whisper its last prayers, and close its beautiful red doors forever. Peace, we cry, but there is no peace, and terror is all around. The days are surely coming, we hear, when…what? When the planet finally becomes uninhabitable? When the United States is shattered like a piece of pottery? When the Church stumbles, finally falls, never to rise again? The days are surely coming, we hear, but we can already imagine how that sentence might end. For we hear the threats of the world, and it is so easy to take them to heart and imagine that nothing good can possibly be coming.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, and at first the people flinch. But then the Lord continues to speak: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will do something new, when I will reach out to you again, my own people, heart of my heart, and rescue you. This time, there will be no tablets of stone that you can break into pieces; no, this time, I will engrave my promises upon your very souls. This time I will plant my own righteousness deep within you so that you cannot, finally, forget me, so that even when you turn away from me you will take me with you in your own hearts. This time, I will make my words so shine within you that you will only have to gaze upon each other to see my promise. Yes, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will do this new and wondrous thing for you.

How remarkable this is – that “The days are surely coming” turn out to be words of blessing, not of condemnation. After everything that His people have put Him through, God chooses them again. They have broken His covenant, but He will not destroy them. They have betrayed Him, but He will not forsake them. Instead He chooses to do something different, to offer himself to them in a new way so that they cannot be lost to Him forever. He will not walk away; He refuses to give them up, for he is God, and God’s righteousness is not like our righteousness, His mercy is not like our mercy.

And what you and I cannot forget, what we must never forget, is that God has not changed. The God who offered Himself to an old man named Abraham and made of him a people, the God who rescued that people by the hand of a man named Moses, the God who remained faithful to that people through forty years of whining and wavering in the wilderness, the God who showed loyalty to that people even when its kings rose to great power and fell in great disgrace – the God who touched the lips of the boy-prophet Jeremiah and sent him to speak words meant to shock this people to their senses and then chose them again even when those words did little good – this God does not change. This God remains true, righteous, and merciful, yesterday and today and forever. This God, our God, will not walk away, refuses to give us up.  

The world wants us to forget this. The world wants us to think that things have changed, that God is dead, that our problems now are too modern and too grand for our ancient faith, that religion is so co-opted by politics or weakened by scandal that it has little hope to offer anymore. The world wants us to listen to the words of doom spoken by prophets and madmen alike and to take them to heart, to worry that the days that are surely coming will be filled only with destruction. Even in the Church, perhaps particularly in the Church, the world wants to trap us in a web of woe, discourage us from our mission with words of death and darkness. But these are not the words to take to our hearts. God has already written words of hope and forgiveness there, words of renewed covenant and never-failing love, of trust and mercy and constancy. These words are already etched deep within ourselves; all we need do is look to our hearts to find them.

The question is, when the world comes shrieking its curses and threats, can we act like we believe what we find there? Can we not only treasure the promise of God in our hearts but sing it out with our voices and dance it with our feet? When we hear the hardest words of judgment, the direst predictions of doom, can we shout our hope to the rooftops, can we shine that light which we know to be in us into the path of all those who walk in darkness? Can we paint a vision of what we know the days that are surely coming really look like, can we help to finish that sentence when others flinch in fear at what the future holds – tell them with faith that the days are surely coming when the Church will grow and thrive and do its work, when all of Creation will be made new, when all people will be reconciled one to another, when peace and justice will reign? Can we live like we believe the words written in our hearts?

Of course we can.  Not because of our own strength or because of any rosy-eyed optimism, but God’s great gift has made it possible. In these latter days of Lent, the days are surely coming when we will hear the story of this great gift again, the gift of this new covenant, written in the spirit of his only and eternal Son, sketched into our world with bread and wine, with water and blood, with iron and the hard wood of the cross. We will hear hard and beautiful words of how our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified and died in order to bear much fruit, how God transformed the barren wood of the cross into a glorious spring of eternal life. We will take to heart the story of how God looked down upon His people, broken and sinful and lost, and chose us, called us to work for His kingdom, where there will always be good news for the poor, release for the captives and recovery of sight for the blind. These words have already been fulfilled in your hearing; these words have already been written on the walls of your heart. This kingdom has come and is coming. These blessed, glorious days will surely, surely come.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

25 March 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Grieb's sermon here.

Preached by the Rev. Dr. A. Katherine Grieb

18 March 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

I have always loved to read. Indeed, I have been a bookworm from my mother’s womb, a trait I inherited honestly from both my parents, who were never, ever without something to read. I was reading on my own by the age of three and devouring chapter books by the time I started Kindergarten. So when I entered middle school, of course, I decided that it was time to write my own novel. Longhand. With a Papermate erasable pen. I can’t remember the subject matter, although I have a vague recollection that it had something to do with a long-abandoned cottage in the woods that was tangled in the vines of an overgrown garden…and in my own florid, overwrought prose. But in my ten-year-old mind, the more adjectives, the better. What tripped me up was the dialogue. I felt pressure, for some reason, to place an adverb after every single line. How else would the readers (of which I imagined there would be many) know what the speakers were thinking and feeling? So line after line of the text ended with phrases like, “…she said, sadly,” “he said, bravely,” “she said, happily, simperingly, fabulously, tearfully, frustratedly…” and on and on and on. I remember my mother – my loving, patient, wonderful mother – reading my first draft and suggesting that, perhaps, there wasn’t a need for quite so many descriptors. But without my adverbs, I was lost. What to do? So my first great novel languished in its notebook and was eventually lost to time. And oh, how I wish I had that notebook now!

There is a decided lack of adverbs in scripture. Remember that the earliest texts of Holy Scripture were stamped letter by letter into clay or scribed onto paper that was both rare and expensive. So every letter, every word mattered. And apparently the writers of scripture did not feel the need, as I did, to provide an emotional context for every single statement, or, for that matter, for many at all. The Bible doesn’t offer us many phrases like, “…Moses said, petulantly,” or “Jesus told his disciples, exhaustedly.” There is little verbiage about the emotional state of speakers in scripture, even in the Gospels. Very occasionally, the Gospel writers will provide us with a clue as to Jesus’ emotional state – he weeps, he loves, he is amazed, he is moved with compassion, or pity. Mark’s Gospel offers more descriptors than any of the other three – Jesus looks at the Pharisees “with anger,” he sighs “deep in his spirit” when asked for a sign, he is “indignant” when the disciples try to prevent the little children from coming to him. But for the most part, we are left to imagine what Jesus was feeling in any given moment. When he spoke words to the disciples, or the Pharisees, or the centurion, or the woman with the hemorrhage, was he smiling? Frowning? Laughing? Outraged? Most often, we just don’t know.

But today’s Gospel has long been seen as a clear example of Jesus’ anger and indignation boiling over. For centuries, people have imagined him striding into the outer court of the Temple, disciples in tow, spoiling for a fight. As he had suspected, he finds not a serene and holy gathering of God’s people making their way into the inner courts to offer their yearly Passover sacrifices, but a wholly tangled mess – animal-sellers hawking their wares, the incessant buzzing of bargaining in the air, queues of anxious pilgrims all knotted up in a jumble by the trade tables where corrupt moneychangers sit at tables, inscrutable and hidden by piles of coins – and always the braying and bleating of cattle and sheep and doves, oh my. Faced with this frenetic scene, Jesus stands alone with clenched fists, furious to see this Saturday-at-the-Philadelphia-Flower-Show, Target-on-Black-Friday, McGillan’s-on-Saint-Patrick’s-Day kind of mob scene in this most sacred place. And so he grabs a whip and goes nuts – flailing the animals and the animal sellers alike, kicking over tables, hurling fistfuls of coins into the air, spinning and shoving until finally he stands alone in the middle of the court, his whip dangling at his side, panting and covered in sweat and dust and pigeon feathers.

And this is a completely fair picture of what this scene may have looked like. I have no doubt that Jesus experienced anger, and this moment known as the “Scourging of the Temple” may be the best example we have of Jesus’ letting loose some of his long pent-up frustration. But without that long stream of repetitive adverbs, is it possible that there is another way to look at this story?

The Scourging of the Temple is one of really only three stories that appear in all four Gospels. But John, as is John’s wont, treats this story very differently than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. First of all, in John’s Gospel, this story takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. There is no long build-up to this event in John, so there is no sense of stifled frustration with the religious authorities after a Gospel’s-worth of confrontations and arguments. Secondly, it is only in John’s Gospel, in fact, that Jesus uses a whip. But notice what the text says here, “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.” This was no handy whip that Jesus seized on an impulse; this was a whip that Jesus made himself, wove together out of reeds or grass, to help him get the animals up and out of the court. And finally, we can see that Jesus’ core complaint is different in John’s Gospel. In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus is full of righteous indignation. He accuses the moneychangers of corruption, of cheating the pilgrims who needed to trade their Roman coins for temple shekels, which were the only coins that could be used to pay the required temple tax. But here in John, there is no fiery accusation of robbery, only the command to stop making the house of his Father into a house of trade.

And so what if we pictured the scene this way – Jesus enters the Temple courts on Passover because he is a faithful Jew. As he ascends the Temple mount he feels at the root of his being the sympathetic vibration between his body, where the fullness of God dwells, and the innermost room in the Temple, the Holy of Holies, where the fullness of God dwells. He knows a deep consonance between the place where he stands and the body he stands in; he knows that he is the place where God’s love will be most powerfully contained. He knows what he has to offer to the world, he knows the sacrifice he will make for the people who press in all around him…and yet no one else knows it. No one else can even see him through the maze of people and sheep and never-ending queues. What to do? Clear out the court, he says. He braids a cord to help him control the animals and sends them on their way. But that doesn’t grab the attention of the people who are afraid of losing their place in line, so he knocks over the tables so that there is no longer anything to be in line for. And only then does he stand in the middle, his impromptu cattle prod hanging at his side, his face intense and earnest – stop what you are doing, he says. Look up from your queue, look at me, for I am the temple of the full, final sacrifice, I am the temple that will be raised up in three days. No queue, no buying and selling, no trading necessary here.

Seen this way, this Gospel story is not only a Scourging but also, importantly, a Cleansing. A cleansing of the Temple – a clearing of the way so that all of the people could see with unobstructed view and undistracted attention the invitation that stood before them. See me. Follow me. Jesus’ coming into Jerusalem was the coming of something new and astounding, something that required space and attention. And His coming into our lives means precisely the same thing. Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple put it this way: “His coming means a purge. So it is always, not less with the shrine of our hearts than with the Jewish Temple.” Jesus’ coming clears away those things that distract us, drives out those things that get in the way of our truly seeing Him, unclutters our hearts so that Christ may be enthroned there. What is it that blocks your view? Fear? Busy-ness? Over-scrupulousness or anxiety? Judgment, of others or of yourself? Are you reticent to forgive or be forgiven? Do material things get in the way of remembering that it is the Lord who is your strength and your redeemer? Do the great commandments of God seem like walls that are impossible to scale instead of hand-holds that help you love God and your neighbor? What stands between you and Christ? And are you prepared to have it cleared out? Because our Lord Jesus Christ has come, is coming, and will come again; he stands ready to cleanse you, body and soul. He stands here, at this altar, now, offering your heart a good old-fashioned spring scourging. “Take these things out of here,” he says to you, “Stop making the shrine of your heart anything less than fully my own.” What to do, what to do? Say yes, Christ says. Yes, we say, finally, humbly, thankfully.                                          

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

11 March 2012

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia