Faces in the Crowd: The Religious Leaders
Luke 19:45-20:8
We continue our Lenten sermon series “Faces in the Crowd” this week. For those of you who were out of town last week (which was quite a few of you!) we began this new series that is focused on looking at the background of first century Israel and exploring how people in that world responded to Jesus and his message. My premise for the series, again, is that it’s really important for us to understand the background of the times in which Jesus lived in order for us to fully grasp (as much as is possible) what he was about. In doing so, I think we can also draw some parallels to our own time and how we might respond to Jesus today.
So today we look at the religious climate of first century Israel and, in particular, the religious leaders who engaged and opposed Jesus. The religion of Israel, of course, was Judaism—the ancient faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses—a unique faith in the ancient world because it was monotheistic, worshipping one God. The Jews were the covenant people of God, having been given the law and brought by God to this land, returning to it again in the centuries after the Babylonian exile. They were still an occupied people, under the government of the Roman empire, but their religious fervor and hope was that God would once again restore the people of Israel, cast out the pagan Romans, and that God would again dwell with them in glory. The Messiah was to be the one to usher in this new age.
The central symbol of Israel was, of course, the Temple in Jerusalem. In Moses’ time, the Israelites carried with them a tent or “tabernacle” that housed the Ark of the Covenant—the golden box that carried the stone tablets of the commandments and represented God’s dwelling and presence among the people. Once Israel had been established as a nation in the land of Canaan, the Ark was brought to the new capital of Jerusalem by David and plans were made to build a permanent home for the Ark—a dwelling place for God. Solomon, David’s son, would build the first Temple but it would be destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC when the people were taken captive into exile. The Ark of the Covenant would also disappear during this time—either being hidden, destroyed, or taken as booty. Various theories have tried to explain where it is (Indiana Jones notwithstanding).
After the return of the people from exile, various building projects sought to repair the Temple, but it wasn’t until Herod the Great that the Temple would be restored to its former glory. Herod enlarged and refurbished the Temple as part of legitimizing his royalty (even though he was a client of the Romans). Herod’s Temple, also known as the Second Temple, was one of the grandest buildings in the ancient world. Even though the Ark of the Covenant was not present, the people of Israel still considered the Temple to be the “navel of the world”—the place where heaven and earth meet.
By the first century, however, the Temple had assumed much more than a religious role. It was still the assumed dwelling place of God and still the only authorized place where the people came to make sacrifices of atonement for the forgiveness of their sins. By the time of Jesus, though, the Temple also had become a political symbol and, in many ways, the center of Israel’s local government.
The Temple authorities—described in the Gospels as “the chief priests, elders, and scribes”—were men taken from the wealthy aristocracy. To be in this elite group, religious convictions were less important as political clout. By the time Jesus began his ministry, the office of high priest had been subsumed by Roman authority and it was the empire who would authorize the appointment of the high priest. Caiaphas, who was high priest during Jesus’ ministry, had been politically astute and collaborated with the Romans, staying in office for 18 years. The elders were wealthy laymen, while the scribes (also known as the lawyers) were lower level administrators who provided legal advice. The Temple authorities had three main objectives as far as the Romans were concerned: they were to be loyal to and collaborate with Roman authority, they were to maintain peace and order in a volatile religious environment and, perhaps most importantly, they were to collect taxes and pay the annual monetary tribute to the emperor. To that end they also maintained the records of debt for the whole country in the Temple.
To sum it up, the Temple had become part of the system that dominated the people religiously and economically while at the same time being the symbol of the people’s ultimate hope. It had become a corrupt system and that corruption would be a target of Jesus.
But while the Temple dominated the landscape, it was by no means the only religious entity. We can’t really speak about “Judaism” in the first century in a monolithic way. Just like there are many different Christian denominations, there were several different “judaisms” in the first century—several different ways that people were thinking about what it meant to be Israel and how to achieve that in cooperation with or, more often, in spite of what was happening in Jerusalem and the Temple. Think of them kind of like different denominations of Judaism, if you will. Jesus would encounter some of these groups in his ministry, and his conflict with them as much as with the Temple forms much of the basis of his teaching. Let’s briefly look at these groups one by one.
The Sadducees were the ones closest to the Temple power base and were religiously and politically conservative—looking to maintain the status quo in both the practices of the Temple and collaboration with the Romans. Being from the wealthy class, this makes sense—they didn’t want to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs for them! Their theology was focused solely on the laws of Moses and they rejected the ideas of fate, resurrection of the body, and rewards and punishment in the afterlife. In fact, they really didn’t believe that anything happened after death, which made them solely focused on what rewards they could gain in the present.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, were primarily a lay movement among the common people. They were politically and religiously active, opposing the corruption of the Sadducees and Temple authorities because, in their view, they subverted the law of Moses. The Pharisees believed that only strict observance of the law would restore Israel, so they became the watchdogs of ritual piety, mixing the biblical laws with their own interpretations concerning practices like ritual washing, food laws, tithing, and observing the Sabbath. They were strict in their habits, wearing the proper tassles on their garments and phylacteries on their heads (phylacteries are small leather boxes containing a small scroll on which is written the Shema—Deuteronomy 6:4-9—You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The passage says to “fix these words as an emblem on your forehead” which the Pharisees took literally, as do some orthodox Jews today. They were strong believers in the resurrection of the dead and in fate, thus they were popular reformers among the people who were looking toward an ultimate time of judgment when the Messiah arrived.
You’ll recall later in the New Testament that Paul was a Pharisee before becoming a missionary for Christ. So zealous was Paul that he had persecuted the Christian sect of Judaism because they were not observing the law properly. He was on his way to Damascus to enforce the Pharisaic way on them when we encountered the risen Jesus on the road and was changed.
Another group not mentioned in the Gospels but clearly having some influence were the Essenes. They were more of a monastic movement that moved out into the desert around the Dead Sea to establish a community of purity apart from Jerusalem and Temple, which they believed had become utterly corrupt. They lived a spartan life there in the desert according to a strict discipline and began to copy portions of scripture—those pieces we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were hidden in caves when the Romans cracked down on Israel militarily between 66 and 70 AD. John the Baptist was operating in that same area at the time of Jesus, living a similar kind of lifestyle. Some scholars think that he was an Essene or was at least sympathetic to them.
The Samaritans, who lived between Jerusalem and Galilee, were hated by the Jews because of their heritage. They practiced a form of Judaism, but one based in their own temple on Mt. Gerizim. They were the descendants of the ten northern tribes who were absorbed by the Assyrians through intermarriage. Jerusalem Jews considered them to be half-breeds and false Jews, thus a pious Jew would walk all the way around Samaria when passing from Jerusalem to Galilee.
These are just a few of the major groups operating at the time of Jesus. As you can see, the religious climate was quite intense as disagreement often flared into hatred and, sometimes, into violence. Everyone was taking sides, trying to determine Israel’s future in their own way. They had little in common—until Jesus came along.
Jesus was a Jew (another fact that some Christians forget), yet his understanding of Judaism and Israel was completely different than that of his contemporaries. Almost from day one, Jesus challenged and, in many ways, judged these groups and their practices. We like to think of the postcard images of Jesus as a shepherd or “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” but the reality is that the Gospels portray Jesus as one who brought conflict into the first century world in his teaching and practice. Eventually, all these groups that hated each other (in particular the Temple authorities, the Pharisees, and Sadducees) would unite in their opposition to Jesus.
The crux of the conflict that peppers the Gospels has to do with symbols. Every culture relies on symbols for its identity—be it a flag or an emblem, a building, an idea or another icon that carries meaning for the people of that place. First century Israel was no exception. Its symbols were bound up in very ancient words and practices that dated all the way back to the time of the patriarchs—symbols of law and ritual, the symbol of the Temple itself. Jesus would first emerge as a Jewish prophet, but instead of affirming the symbols of the nation, he would deconstruct them. Let’s look at some these symbols.
Take Sabbath, for example. God had commanded the Israelites to set aside one day per week, from sundown to sundown, as a period of rest—just as God had rested on the seventh day of creation. No work was to be done that day. The intent was to set aside a period of time for rest and worship of God. Jesus, however, would push this symbol to its limit. He healed someone on the Sabbath, which caused the Pharisees no small amount of consternation. Is healing someone a kind of work? Jesus would say that God made the Sabbath for the benefit of humans and not the other way around. Wouldn’t God want people to be restored to health, even on that day?
Then there was the symbol of food. The law stated that not only were there restrictions on foods could and could not be eaten, but also who could and could not eat with. Jesus shared meals with the Pharisees, but also dined with sinners—tax collectors and women of ill repute and others who were outside the boundaries of the law. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was breaking in, that the great banquet was beginning and all were invited. This was good news for the outcasts, but bad news for those who wanted to keep a strict hold on who was in and who was out.
Family was another major symbol. Remember that gender, genealogy and geography marked who you were in the first century world. Your family was the source of everything. Jesus would say things like “unless you’re willing to leave your family, you can’t follow me” or on an occasion when his mother and sisters and brothers were trying to get him to stop this preaching nonsense and come home, he said “Who are my mother and sisters and brothers, but those who do what God commands?” Jesus redefined the family in a much broader context than blood.
But perhaps the most important symbol that Jesus attacked was that of the Temple itself. The passage that we read from Luke 19 illustrates this powerfully. Jesus turns over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. Now, we have most often read this passage as a prohibition against selling things in church and there may be an element of that here. Holy places are not necessarily market places. But that’s not the real thrust of what Jesus is doing here. Jesus was, in fact, proclaiming and enacting God’s judgment on the Temple and all it had become.
Remember that one of the primary functions of the Temple was to mediate sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins. The understanding was that only God could forgive sins. Notice that often when Jesus healed someone he said, “Your sins are forgiven.” That, more than anything else, connects our understanding to Jesus as God in the flesh. When Jesus turned over these tables, he was interrupting the sacrificial system, making it impossible (if only briefly) for people to buy animals to burn on the altar. It was a way of saying that God had judged the Temple and found it wanting. It would no longer be the center of worship and sacrifice. In fact, Jesus said, the Temple itself would be destroyed by Israel’s enemies—not one stone left upon another. That would happen in 70 AD, when the Jews finally revolted militarily against the Romans who defeated them and razed the Temple and the whole city.
The Messiah was supposed to rebuild the Temple, not tear it down. Jesus was saying, however, that a new temple was being built—a new temple in his own person, God dwelling in the flesh among his people. It was a temple that would only take three days to build after its destruction—a reference to Jesus’ own death and resurrection. The center of worship, the mediator for the forgiveness of sins, the place that held all the dreams of the kingdom of God would no longer be a building made of huge stones—it would be Jesus himself, God’s own son, the true Messiah.
You want to know why Jesus was crucified? It’s because he was imminently crucifiable. One does not attack and reinterpret longstanding symbols without paying the price. History tells us this is true even after Jesus as people like Abraham Lincoln, who challenged the institution of slavery, and Martin Luther King, who challenged centuries of racism were also killed because they challenged the symbols of their time.
This all gets me thinking about what symbols in our culture Jesus would challenge if he were among us today (which I believe he is, in spirit and in truth). For example:
• I think Jesus would challenge the workaholism and obsession with recreation in our culture as being a corruption of Sabbath. Truth is, we need to rest and to worship regularly if we are going to be the people of God.
• I think Jesus would challenge our own ideas of food, too. Our overconsumption and rampant American obesity should be a source of extreme conviction for us while others around the world are starving. At the same time, we don’t spend time sharing with the poor and the outcast, choosing instead to build bigger and more luxurious homes farther and farther away from them.
• I’m sure Jesus would also challenge the mixture of nationalism and religion that has characterized our politics. We can’t pound our chests in patriotism while we breed violence and oppression in the rest of the world. We can respect the flag, but we are to worship God.
• You know, I think Jesus would especially challenge the church that bears his name. We’ve become religious institutions competing in a market place of religious goods and services instead of working together to transform the world according to Christ’s kingdom vision.
Yes, Jesus most certainly was crucifiable then. I’m sure he would be the same if he were to walk among us today. Yes, the Gospel means good news…but good news can often mean bad news for someone else.
That’s something we need to think about, if we’re going to claim that we follow him. Are we willing to challenge the symbols of a wayward culture? Are we willing to look hard at ourselves and where we have bought into the status quo? Are we willing to follow Jesus, even when he leads us into conflict with the values of the world?
Those are the questions that are challenging me this Lent. How about you?
