John 4:1-42 Jesus and the Samaritan Woman Part 7

I am continuing my preparations for preaching on John 4:1-42 in August by blogging my thoughts on this passage. I started an eclectic commentary from John 4:6 to 4:14, and this week I ought to get to John 4:42 if I have any chance of finishing my preparations.

John 4:15

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

When I read this, I can’t help but hear a pitiful tone in the woman’s plea. She wants her old well to work, but it doesn’t. It has become a burden and a chore, and all it yields is lifeless water that has to be replaced every day by her own efforts. As I noted previously, I believe she is speaking on two levels; on one level she is speaking about the physical well and the banality of her existence; on the other she is speaking about her culture and religion. She pleads Jesus to deliver her from the living death that she currently endures.

John 4:16

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

Here’s the catch; if you want to be delivered into life, then you’ve got to deal with the death in your life. The woman wanted the living water that Jesus offered, but Jesus tells her that she cannot have both it and the sin that brings death. You can be free, says Jesus; I open the door, but you still need to walk out of the prison.

Why did Jesus tell the woman to go and fetch her husband? It’s another query that I don’t seem able to find a fully satisfying answer to. Possibly, he’s reluctant to “convert” her in the absence of the man who should have been her guardian-protector but, if this is the case, why initiate the dialog with her in the first place? Possibly, he is concerned to “convert” her husband at the same time, though it is almost certain that he will be an embarrassing “no show”. Most likely, Jesus is already fully aware of the woman’s situation, and he uses a social nicety to get to a very tricky subject.

John 4:17-18

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

Remarkably, the woman does not deny her circumstances, but is disarmingly open and frank about them. It’s as if she is saying, “If you want to deal with me, you’ve got to deal with the real me, and not some romantic vision of me that you might have in your head”. I like this kind of bluntness. It tells me that this woman was someone to be reckoned with, and not some simple rustic who is overwhelmed into believing by Jesus’ charisma.

At first sight, Jesus’ reply looks somewhat condescending because he appears to sermonize and blunder about the subject. Did she surprise him with her answer? Did she force him onto the back foot? Such a view, however, does not fit with Jesus’ awareness of her situation because he already knows that she has had five husbands and the latest man in her life is too lazy or self-absorbed to make a decent woman of her. It seems more likely that Jesus is articulating their shared thoughts on the subject. It might be the first time that the woman had found someone who actually acknowledged and engaged in her predicament.

This, I believe, is another example of the conversation occurring in more than one dimension. Doubtless, the immediate subject is the woman’s sexual relations. However, there’s another narrative arc in play that concerns the Samaritans’ legendary unfaithfulness to God (which I explored earlier). Through this exchange, John seems to be saying, “This is the practical outworking of a religion that is faithless”. In other words, the woman’s situation is indicative or typical of the Samaritan way. It has been observed many times before, that human culture tends to take on the character of the Gods it worships. If the Samaritans had been faithless towards the One God, then they would tend to be faithless towards each other in marriage.

John 4:19-20

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Most commentators (e.g. Wright) see this as an attempt by the woman to steer the conversation away from her personal choices. I disagree; if this were the case, she might have been more evasive in her preceding statement, unless Jesus had caught her off guard and she suddenly found herself cornered.

To be fair to the commentators, most of them read this within the context of their pastoral experience, and they have grown wary of the deflections people sometimes use to evade searching questions. As Tom Wright notes, there is no better deflection than religion. Even so, if a deflection is what the woman had in mind, then she succeeded in it by getting Jesus on to the subject in his consequent remarks. I have to object to this on the basis that this supposed ability to deflect Jesus does not sit well with John’s portrayal of him. John’s Jesus is someone who cannot be deflected from his mission.

So, what is going on here? The woman has moved the topic of conversation from husbands to temples. To me, this makes sense when we view the conversation as a multi-layered sandwich, rather than a linear string of comments. If the woman’s marital situation typifies the Samaritan religion, then the conversation should turn to the issue of temples. I have previously commented on the friction between Jew and Samaritan over their respective temples, and I don’t intend to rehash it all here, but suffice to say that this very question is the burning issue of the day. This is the number one item on the agenda, and from it come all the answers to everything else, including the question of how the woman found herself in her situation with her many men. Her question about Temples provides the framework within which she takes her points of reference. The question and its context would have made perfect sense to John’s primary audience, but it looks odd to us because our Temples operate very differently from theirs.

If I were to paraphrase the question, it would be something like this; “We know that our self-identity was given to our forefathers by God, but the well that our forefathers gave us does not deliver life. We know that the way passed to us by our forefathers has become a chore and a burden, and we now find ourselves in a kind of living death. We are looking for a way out, and you Jews have told us that you have it. The problem is, your way is no better than our way, and you only seem intent on obliterating our traditions and self-identity in order to get us to qualify for entry into your Temple. No thanks. We don’t want to come to your party.”

John 4:21-24

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

Dear reader, please pay careful attention to what Jesus does not say. If the purpose of Jesus mission was to create a new religion, or even to promote an old one refurbished and made-over, he should have launched into a diatribe at this point about how his temple was better than anyone else’s. But he doesn’t. In fact, he says that neither of the two temples in the shared experience of Jew and Samaritan would be the locale for true worship. Jesus statement is unbelievably revolutionary, even blasphemous. We can only imagine how shocking and scandalous this message would have been in the ancient world.

Jesus emancipates the true worship of God from the bounds of the temple system, but on what basis? Jesus is no proto-humanist, so he is not giving way to a laissez-faire religion in which everybody can do whatever he or she likes, or even decline to take part if they so wish. These options are simply not available in the remainder of John’s Gospel, or in the rest of the Bible. Nor is Jesus promoting the kind of internalized, privatized and psychologised religion that prevails in current western culture (Jesus’ religion was something that was expressed in public and embraced the community, in which the individual was seen as a vital component but not the end-goal). The true worship that Jesus sees is “in the Spirit and in truth”. What I think matters to Jesus is not the location of the worship, whether it be in this building or that, but whether it connects to life outside the temple.

The reason for this paradigm-shift is profoundly simple; God is Spirit. He is not bound in the confines of any temple (even one ordained by God Himself); therefore His worshipers have access to Him wherever they are. Now, we are comfortable with such a notion (partly because we have had 2000 years to get used to it), but if we play it out in the context of first century Judaism, we get some extraordinary and noteworthy results.

I apologize if I repeat myself ad nauseam on the topic, but we have got to understand how profoundly important the temple was in the context of this encounter. The temple was many things, including the focus of the community, the source of its physical sustenance and the bank-vault for its treasures. Over and above these community functions, the temple provided the vital connection between the community and its God; the temple is where you went for forgiveness, cleansing, teaching and worship. The worst thing that could happen to you as an individual would be to be excluded from the temple, or to fail to qualify for entry into it in some way. This is because you would be cut off from all those vital things that you could only get in the temple. You would have no access to forgiveness, for example, and your sins would kill you. In the Biblical idiom, if you were cut off from the temple, you were cut off from life.

Yet, Jesus does away with the temple system.

Why?

Because all the things that the temple held forth are now found in Him. Jesus is the true Temple (see Revelation 21:22).

Jesus does not promote a religion or a temple. He claims that everything that the Temple system offers is found in him, and when he comes to you with his living water, you come to life.

If, like the religion of the Samaritan woman, your God-given religion, culture and tradition have become lifeless chores and burdens to you, I suggest it’s because Jesus is absent. He is not interested in obliterating your self-identity, culture, or even religion, though there are some aspects in all these things that you will need to leave behind if your are to embrace Him. He is interested in working with you to bring you to life.

John 4:22

You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.

My reading of this is that Jesus is contrasting his heritage with the woman’s. I believe he is saying something like this; “You have some idea of God, but it’s a pretty crude picture and you don’t know it all. We Jews have the right collective experience (through the Temple and Exile) and the means to interpret that experience (the Scriptures, especially the post-Mosaic prophets that you reject). God has chosen it such that the means of your salvation has come into the world through this Jewish heritage. That means of salvation is me, and you can only make sense of me if you understand the Jewish heritage that brought me here.”

John 4:25-26

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

The Samaritans had a pretty strong idea that the anointed prophet would come to them to redeem them, much as Moses had done in the past. Jesus audaciously places himself in this role.

There’s a nuance here that’s not fully conveyed in the English translations. In the Greek text, Jesus simply states “I am”; the “he” is added to our English versions to round off the grammar (ἐγὼ εἰμι, egō eimi, see http://biblos.com/john/4-26.htm). Sharp-eyed readers should know that there is only One who can make this unqualified statement of being; the “I am” of Exodus 3:14. So, Jesus is not only holding himself up as the Messiah that the Samaritans were seeking, he also claims to be the very object of their religion. He is the One to whom their religion should be leading them, which is as clear an allusion to Jesus’ divinity as you can get.

Time is against me, so I’ll have to (reluctantly) skip the interactions between Jesus and his disciples in John 4:27 and 4:31-38.

John 4:28-30

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

John, the master of apparently incidental detail, notes that she left her jars –the symbols of her empty life – at the feet of Jesus. She retains her doubts and reservations, but she dares to hope to believe in him. Her change in heart is evident in the message she takes to her neighbors, who are persuaded to follow her “out of town” towards Jesus.

In reflecting on this, I can’t help but think that faith in Christ is not the “final product” that will push you over the line into a sense of unchallengeable certainty. Rather, it is something that compels you to walk out of your old ways, despite the doubts and reservations that you will always carry with you. This tells me that it is not a sense of certainty that we need to seek, but rather the courage to put one foot in front of the other and to believe that as long as we walk towards Christ, we walk towards life.

John 4:39-42

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Having started the walk towards Jesus, the entire community began to make the connection with him. It started with one person, but grew and spread to all. I can’t help but sense that this community found itself coming to life, confronting its demons and reconciling its members to each other. The woman, who entered the story as a despised outcast, had opened the door to the community’s renewal. Jesus had given them common ground on which they could to talk to each other. They had been emancipated from a temple-system that they all knew could not deliver. It was like the lights had been switched on and, suddenly, they knew that Jesus had saved them. This new life was not only theirs to claim, but they saw that it could flow out into the world beyond their small town.

John focuses on the receptiveness of these Samaritans to the message of Jesus, but there is sad irony in his account. The Jews, who should have known, found it much harder to receive Jesus’ message (as the author recalls in John 1:11), with the exception of a sizable, dogged minority. John’s implied rebuke to the Jews is something that we would all do well to hear; why try to persuade people to come to your Temple, when you should be persuading them to come to the One to whom your Temple points?

For John, in his delightful account of the Samaritan town, the answer was simple; the One to whom the Temple points is Jesus.

To be continued…

Bibliography
• Clements, Roy “Introducing Jesus” Kingsway Publications, ISBN 0 85476 321 X, 1996

• Guthrie, Donald, Commentary on John in The New Bible Commentary, 21st Century Edition, Inter-Varsity Press, ISBN 0 85110 648 X, 2002.

• Kruse, Colin G “The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries – The Gospel According to John”, Inter-Varsity Press, ISBN 0 8511 327 3, 2003

• Wright, N.T. (Tom) “John for Everyone, Part 1, Chapters 1-10), Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, ISBN 0 281 05302 2, 2003

Jesus and the Pharisees

Why did Jesus give the Pharisees such a hard time?

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in (Matthew 23:13, KJV)

I've had it with you! You're hopeless, you religion scholars, you Pharisees! Frauds! Your lives are roadblocks to God's kingdom. You refuse to enter, and won't let anyone else in either. (Matthew 23:13, The Message).

Growing up, I was told that Jesus fiercely condemned the Pharisees because, basically, they were the “bad guys”. Their seminal sin was their hypocrisy; they taught one thing, yet they did another. The message I received was a warning against insincerity.

Now, after many years considering the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees, I now believe that my earlier assessment was unduly harsh and a little misguided. It’s not that I now think that Jesus was unjustified in his criticism – he certainly was, rather that it’s not all about insincerity and it has much to tell us in our modern 21st Century environment.

Let me start by proposing that the Pharisees were not the pathological “bad guys” I had been led to believe.

I say this because I don’t believe the Bible separates people into pathological “bad guys” and pathological “good guys”. I believe that this tendency to separate people into pathologically “good” and “evil” camps actually arises from Gnosticism, and the Bible is staunchly anti-Gnostic. It also arises from Hollywood, but that’s another story.

Sure, the Bible talks about the “righteous” and the “wicked”, most prominently in the Psalms and Wisdom literature, but it also describes saints who sin (e.g. David in 2 Samuel 24:10), and sinners who do the right thing (e.g. Rahab in Joshua 2, see also Hebrews 11:31). The picture that emerges is not that we are either pathologically “good” or “evil”, but that we all have the same potential to do good or evil, and we all live out those potentials to greater or lesser degrees.

It follows then, that no human being is pathologically evil, not even the most Pharisee-est of the Pharisees. Incidentally, that’s how Paul described himself before his conversion (Phil 3:4-6), but the fact that he converted at all demonstrates my point.

This doesn’t solve the problem of sin, because none of us are pathologically good either; that’s a quality that belongs to God alone (see Luke 18:19). There is sin in all of us and it is present in all we do, even when we are at our best, and no amount of religion can purge it from us (see Hebrews 10:1-4).

If we are all in the same boat, why, then, do the Pharisees get singled out for a special roasting from the Boss (so to speak)? Let’s pick up the story from before Jesus’ entry onto the scene.

Its worth noting that its probably wrong to view the Pharisees as a religious cult that was based on a systematic theology. In my view, it’s better to regard Pharisaicism as a religiously conservative movement that considered itself to be the guardian and custodian of Jewish culture and identity. Josephus describes the Pharisees as a popular and powerful faction, ascetic in lifestyle, concerned to present themselves as rigorists for the Torah (Antiquities 18:12-17) (New Bible Dictionary, IVP, 2004).

The story of the Pharisees starts in post-exilic Judea, in the period between the Old and New Testaments. The Jews have returned from exile, having been chastened by their experiences. Their prophets interpret the exile as God’s judgment on them for their sins, and their restoration to the land as God’s faithfulness to His covenanted people. Not wanting to repeat the experience, the Jews took their scriptures to heart, in particular such passages as Leviticus 25:18;

Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land.

This experience of God’s judgment provided the spur for improving the religion of the Jews. I imagine that the reasoning would be something like “we got kicked out because we failed to properly obey the law, so we need to get better at doing religion.” Among others, the Pharisees then set about codifying the law and extrapolating it so that it governed every aspect of life in the community.

For example, the commandment to desist from work on the Sabbath was well established, but when did a legitimate activity, such as traveling, qualify as “work”? The Pharisees’ solution to this particular quandary was to define an allowable distance that one could travel on the Sabbath without falling foul of the prohibition on work. This is evident in the phrase “a Sabbath-day’s walk”, which is used to describe the distance from Jerusalem to the Mount Olivet in Acts 1:12. It’s about 5/8 of a mile or 1 kilometer.

Other instances would seem to us, particularly with respect to maintaining ritual cleanness around the most important feasts of the year…

A fascinating example of the lengths to which rabbinic precautions could go concerns a man who had a boil and wanted treatment for it at [Passover]. If a physician cut it off, then the moment it was severed from the body it became dead tissue. Contact with it would render anyone unclean and physician or patient or both were almost certain to be disqualified from keeping the feast. So the procedure was that the physician cut enough to leave the boil hanging by a thread. It was still part of the man’s body and thus living and not defiling. The patient then stuck it on a thorn and pulled away from it smartly, thus severing it from his body. In this way, neither of them touched the defiling tissue and both were able to keep the feast (Kerithoth 3:8)! (The Atonement, Leon Morris, page 94)

It would seem that an inordinate amount of effort was spent in avoiding defilement and ritual cleansing. I believe that this would lead to an unresolved tension between those who focused on doing the law, and those who focused on doing what the law was for, much like the tension between the Temple Cult and the Old Testament Prophets in the centuries preceding the Exile.

However, this movement also fostered two developments that are vitally important to my current enquiry;
1 The Temple in Jerusalem consolidated and grew as the focus of the community’s religion and self-identity
2 A genuine missionary effort was launched from Jerusalem to take the scriptures into surrounding provinces, including Galilee.

I consider that, like modern Christian missionary efforts, the missionary thrust of the Pharisees focused on taking the scriptures to “all nations” with the intent of discipling them in the ways of the Lord. Given that previous efforts relied on individual initiatives (e.g. Jonah), the Pharisees might have been the first, organized missionary movement. Hand in hand with this proclamation was an effort to increase the literacy of the common folk to such an extent that many of the adult males could read, though only a few could write. The irony here is that we Christians owe the writing of the New Testament largely to the Pharisees (whom we love to hate) and their commendable efforts to educate their Galilean neighbors in the art of reading and writing.

It’s not as if the Pharisees failed to create and sustain a law-keeping system either. In fact, they not only succeeded in implementing it from generation to generation; they optimized it.

These outcomes might seem counter-intuitive, but consider the thrust of Jesus’ denunciations in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23:15, Jesus acknowledges the missionary efforts of the Pharisees and the extraordinary lengths they went to in their proselytizing. In Matthew 23:16-22 Jesus addresses their elaborate methods for arranging oaths in a kind of hierarchy (which they used to get out of certain commitments). In Matthew 23:23-24 Jesus addresses their tithing. What is striking about these judgments is not just the ferocity of the language, but that Jesus does not condemn them for failing to practice their God-given religion successfully, and this is the critical point I wish to make.

The fact is that the Pharisees were successful at practicing and implementing a religion that had been ordained by God. So why, then, did Jesus give them such a hard time?

The question could be answered, rightly, with the word “hypocrisy” but, again, we need to set this word in context to see just what Jesus meant when he used it.

One of the oddities of the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ Galilean ministry is that though they are firmly set in the landscape of Galilee they make no mention of the biggest town in that region at the time – Sepphoris ( see http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/sepphoris.htm). Sepphoris was predominantly Jewish and wealthy enough to support a new-fangled luxury of modern life – a theater. The good citizens of Sepphoris would retire there for an evening’s light entertainment and watch the actors. The Greek word for actor is “hypocrités”, the Latin is “hypocrita” and the literal English rendition is “hypocrite” (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, 2008). Though our modern word conveys a pejorative sense, it’s meaning in Jesus’ day meant, literally, someone pretending to be something that they weren’t, and it could be used in the legitimate sense of play-acting.

I might add that religious conservatives reviled the acting profession because the “actors” occasionally (often?) performed lewd live or simulated sex acts. For example, Clement of Alexandria advises a Bishop to require a converted actor to change his profession, probably for these reasons (citation needed). Also, potential disconnects between the actors’ “real” lives and on-stage personas might have been common knowledge, so its not unlikely that the first century term “hypocrite” could have had the negative connotations that it does today.

In its unadorned state, then, Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees is that they were pretending to be something that they weren’t. They performed their religion in public but it was disconnected to their inner, private life. When they were “on stage”, they would make a great show of their piety, but when they weren’t they would use their religion to cheat, lie, steal and murder. They had taken God’s Holy law and used it for their own nefarious purposes.

The way I think of it is that they drew a very definitive line between those areas of life that were controlled by their religion, and those areas in which they did what they pleased. The worst of them found ways of using their religion to abuse their neighbors, but its probably unfair to regard all Pharisees so negatively. Many of them, I suspect, were simply trying to live Godly lives, much like the religious conservatives of today from the Southern US to the middle east.

However, their God-given religion and Temple had failed to deliver them to God; else they would not have done the things they did and they would not have suffered under his judgement. This is plain enough from the Gospel narratives, but it leads to a nagging question; why did their God-given religion fail to deliver? This, I believe, is a profoundly important question, and it probably provides the impetus for the writing of the New Testament. I call it the failure of religion.

According to the scriptures the God-given law of Moses and the Temple system should have delivered its devotees to God and yet it didn’t. The solution to this problem, as presented in the New Testament, was not that the religion needed to be improved – Jesus and his followers had seen that the Pharisees and other rigorists had already optimized it. No. The solution offered in the New Testament is that no religion, not even an optimized God-given law and Temple, could possibly deliver a person from bondage to sin into the Kingdom. There are no paths that we can follow that will lead us to God. Instead, we are wholly reliant on God breaking into our world. It is He, and He alone, that delivers, not our religion, our temple, our law or our anything-else.

The picture that emerges in my mind is a Pharisee praying towards the altar, and Jesus tapping him on the shoulder. The Pharisee ignores the interruption, and concerns himself with finishing his prayers. The irony is that the true object of his prayers, and the true answer to them is standing right behind him, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus gave the Pharisees a hard time not because they failed to be sincerely religious but, ultimately, because they had rejected him. He had a right to be angry with them because he was the one whom their religion should have delivered them to, and he was the one who alone could deliver them from their sins and into their true inheritance.

Like the Pharisees, what we need to learn from this is that we should cease to put our faith in our religion, our righteousness or our anything-else, and begin to put it in the One who can, and does, truly deliver.

The Myths of New Atheism - Part 2b – People are good, religion is evil

The myth of the New Atheism is that it’s not a myth.

I’m using the term “myth” loosely to describe a tenet or dogma that’s not supported by observed fact or deductive reasoning. I have my dogmas, and I’m not ashamed to name them. I wish atheists had the honesty to do likewise.

Last week’s blog was the first installment about the myth that people are good, but religion is evil. I argued that “true” or “pure” atheism had no basis on which to judge something to be objectively “good” or “evil” and that the whole hypothesis of good and evil rests upon a theistic foundation. Without God, “good” and “evil” becomes nothing more than my self-interests verses yours. If you want to call people “good” in an objective sense, then you need to do it in a theistic context, which, of course, the Christian Gospel provides.

So, I agreed broadly with the statement about people being “good”, but I don’t see how it is compatible with pure atheism. It’s more at home in a Christian context.

I’m going to do the same with the statement that religion is evil. Again, I’ll ask that you please follow me carefully here because I’m going to argue that religion is neither good nor evil of itself; it can be (and has been) used evilly, but, more to the point, it cannot deliver.

What’s more, I believe that Jesus and his followers knew this; that religion cannot deliver. It was the major impetus behind the writing of the New Testament. To support this hypothesis, I’m going to have to take you on a journey through some Biblical theology.

The Bible is a big book. In fact, it’s a collection of writings that was put together over a long period of time by a large number of people (contrary to the urban myths that in one of my previous blogs). It’s an unfolding story, and the people in the middle didn’t live to see how the story ended.

Incidentally, one important feature of the story of the Bible is that the later authors could not change what the earlier authors had written because the earlier writings were already in circulation, which blows holes in the commonly held misconception that the Bible had been radically re-written to suit the particular agenda of a minority group some time after Christ (the Catholics, for example).

A legitimate reading of the story from Genesis to Revelation is that it’s the story of the Temple. I know Evangelical Christians like to read it as the story of God’s interactions with humanity, but I would add that the theater of these interactions is the Temple. We understand these interactions better if we see them played out in the context of the Temple.

What’s this got to do with religion? Well, if by “religion”, we mean the rites, self-identity, habits, culture, focal point, authority and legitimacy of a community, then the Temple is the personification of religion.

One problem us Westerners have here is that we’ve got no first hand experience of how the Temple operated or what it meant in the ancient world. We’ve got some vague notion that it was the place where worship happened, but it was much more than that. Here are my observations on some of the important, but overlooked features of the Temple;

• The Temple was the focal point of the city. Think of the Acropolis in Athens. Ancient cities grew up around Temples and they drew on the resources of the surrounding lands to sustain and maintain the activities that revolved around the Temple. They were built on high places as a statement to the worlds, saying “We are here, and these are our gods”. (See Jesus’ assessment in Matthew 5:14 “…a City on a hill cannot be hidden.”). The Temple was the expression of civic pride.

• The Temple symbolized the presence of the gods among the people in a tangible, practical way. The Temple was perceived as the incarnation of heaven on earth.

• The Temple housed the important treasures of the King and his people. Part of the reason Temples were guarded so jealously, was that they were the “banks” of the ancient world. Guarding the Temple was synonymous with national financial security. In this respect, the Temple was like Fort Knox.

• The Temple was the source of fresh meat and food for the city. The livestock that was slaughtered there was divided into ritual sacrifice (burnt offerings and the like), and consumption. In this respect, the Temple was something like the supermarket sitting in the center of town.

• The Temple was the repository of knowledge and the forum for communicating that knowledge to the people. The writings were secured in the Temple, and they were read out and preached to the people in the Temple. In this respect, the Temple was the central library; it was the central repository for the Word of God.

• The Temple was the place of forgiveness, cleansing and healing.

The Israelites were not unique in having a Temple, nor were they unique in claiming that it was divinely commissioned. Even so, their Temple was unique in at least two respects;

• The God it housed was the God of the entire cosmos, not just the city kingdom centered on the Temple

• The Israelites candidly recorded the careers of their Temples (and those records made their way into the collection of writings that we now call the Bible)

It’s this last point I’d like to follow. In brief, the Temple started out as a mobile tent until Solomon got to build a permanent structure in Jerusalem around 950 BC. Though the Temple building was a national success for Solomon, it’s fortunes waxed and waned from there on, mostly waning, despite the warnings of the Old Testament Prophets, until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, and the people taken into exile.

Upon the return from exile, a chastened remnant of Israel rebuilt the Temple and consecrated it in 515 BC. Again, it’s fortunes waxed and waned under successive empires until Herod the Great decided to rebuild it in 19 BC (this is the same Herod whom Matthew holds responsible for the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem in Matthew 2:16-18). Herod’s vision, or perhaps the vision of the Jews, was to reform and reconstitute Israel around the New Temple and they embarked upon a lavish building program and missionary effort to impress the importance of the Temple on the Jewish people.

Maybe it was this resurgence of national pride and its inevitable opposition to the powerful Roman Empire that prompted a re-think of what it was all about in Galilee. I can imagine the Pharisees coming up to the provinces from Jerusalem, reading their scrolls to the synagogues, and some of them wondering whether the lessons of the past had been truly learned. Didn’t they know that pride goes before a fall?

Jesus and his followers, I believe, must have pondered this question, and the solution they came up with was truly revolutionary – a stroke of pure genius. They believed that Jesus was the true Temple.

Remember all the functions that I listed for the Temple above. Every single one of these functions is fulfilled in Jesus, according to the New Testament. That is why the writer to the Hebrews writes about the true Temple that cannot be touched and that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12:18-28) and John writes in Revelation 21:22 that “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Finally, Christians had an eternal Temple in which God’s name would dwell forever (see 2 Chronicles 7:16), unlike the stone buildings that had been successively raised and razed in Jerusalem.

OK, so we’ve established that having a Temple cannot save you, not even a God-ordained Temple replete with all the proper rites and furniture. Religion, we can safely conclude, cannot deliver. Furthermore, it will get you into trouble, as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 and the diaspora of the Jews testifies.

But why is this so?

The main reason why, and this is an opinion I might actually share with the atheists, is that religion gives a person a sense of entitlement. If I subscribe to this religion and go to that Temple, then I am entitled to land, honor and riches.

If there is one thing the Bible rails against more than any other, it is this sense of entitlement. It persistently and repeatedly warns us against relying on our own sense of worthiness, from Deuteronomy 9:4 “do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness”, to Matthew 3:9 “And do not think you can say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.” to Galatians 3:11 “Clearly no one is justified before God by the law” to Ephesians 2:8-10 "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast."

Get the message? You cannot rely on your religion. Those who did so got slaughtered and exiled and they had their Temples destroyed in front of their own eyes, before they got their own eyes gouged out. You’d think we would have learned it by now.

Religion does not deliver. But what does?

Christians like to call Jesus the Son of God. One rather odd feature of the Gospels is that Jesus preferred to call himself not the Son of God, but the Son of Man (Bar Enosh – strictly, the son of a human being). On a quick counting at www.biblegateway.com, the phrase “Son of God” appears about 30 times, in various contexts, including the pejoratives used by the demons. “Son of Man” appears 76 times in all four Gospels, mostly in the context when Jesus is talking about himself.

The reason this is important, I think, is because Jesus wants to impress on his followers that what’s important is not a system of religion, but a person. To put it in religious language, the center of God’s plan is not the system of religion, or a Temple; it’s a person. That person, uniquely, is Jesus Christ. However, he is the true human being as his favorite epithet states. In him we find our true humanity and we become the people we were created to be. Can he deliver? According to the logic of the New Testament, he has already passed through death and having done so, we can pass safely through when we are in him. Jesus delivers when the Temple does not.

There’s much, much more than this brief summary provides, so I just want to return to the question in conclusion; is religion evil? Atheism cannot answer the question, but the Christian Gospel can, and does in spades.