Lent 3

John 2:13-22

After a few weeks of being immersed in Mark’s speedy and reckless gospel this week we have a bit of a break and take our gospel reading from the more ponderous John. I like to think of John as the man who values using five words when only one would do, but he is the absolute expert at the craft of layering up a story. So, this morning we get to breathe deeply rather than try to catch our breath as we keep up.

Now you may already be breathing deeply, but for slightly different reasons. The story in front of us is one of very few where Jesus gets angry, ugly angry. The sort of anger that has an edge of being out of control. The sort of anger that to witness it, even, I would suggest, simply by reading about it, gets the old fight or flight nerves jangling. Deep breaths all round. So, it’s really odd that the disciples in the story itself aren’t responding in this way. Instead, both times they are mentioned they are “remembering”. In verse 17 there they are in the real time of the story remembering a piece of Jewish scripture to help them understand what Jesus is doing. In verse 22 the writer, John, adds a narrator’s voice to tell us that a lot later on the disciples remembered what Jesus had said during this episode and that helped them understand the whole of what Jesus was about. I’m sure the disciples did recall things both in the moment and afterwards to help them understand, it’s a natural thing. But they did other stuff as well. After the resurrection for example, we know they were frightened and went into hiding and talked and doubted just as much as they remembered. John’s fixation on remembering is odd and worth looking at a little more deeply. Especially, I would suggest, because we are in the season of Lent which started with that haunting instruction “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”.

John’s gospel, like the other gospels, came into some sort of stable state as a text way after the events it talks about. It’s a retrospective, a piece of writing about a time when the people it was written for were living relatively steady lives under occupation. Since then, they have gone through an uprising which led to a war they didn’t win during which the Temple which this particular story refers to, is destroyed. John, very pastorally I think, gifts this group of people these characters of the disciples to identify with. Remember, he says, as they remembered, that Jesus got furiously angry that under occupation the Roman and Jewish authorities colluded and collaborated, so much so that the priests of the temple largely did the occupiers bidding. Remember, Jesus too had zeal and passion for the building and what went on there and all that it signified. So, John says to them, it’s OK to care, to love the very walls of the temple, to grieve its loss, to be angry, ugly angry even at such a beautiful building meant for worship got drawn into the nasty web of relationships of complicity between occupiers and the occupied. Remember too, though John says, as the disciples remembered later on that the presence of the Temple is not as crucial as you have grown up to believe. Even those of you with family members who died fighting for it. Remember the life of Jesus is more crucial than the Temple. Remember, he advises them to put whatever it is you are facing and living through into a bigger picture, a bigger story, the story of Jesus and God’s relationship with humanity. Remember, we would perhaps say today the metanarrative.

I would like to suggest that John’s advice about remembering here is very useful, even, perhaps especially for those of us who because of trauma find remembering an incredibly difficult thing.

Despite Johns longwindedness sometimes there are some words that seem like extras in this story that I think are crucial. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this. After he was raised, not after he was crucified. In the other three gospels Jesus’ actions here are the reason he got arrested and ultimately crucified. They place this story right in that place to do that in the narrative. For them, it’s explanatory. But for John, Jesus’ actions here, for the disciples, have something to do with resurrection. For him, it’s a symbolic event. It’s about placing Jesus’ fight against the misuse of power, of tyranny and abuse of people into the bigger picture of the resurrection. In Eastern Christianity often icons of the resurrection aren’t of an empty void, or a gentle superhuman, they are of Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of the grave, one in one hand, one in the other. Humanity redeemed, reconciled to God, pulled away from all that destroys. In all of our remembering, especially perhaps, the remembering of exploitation and tyranny, this has to be the bigger picture, that the work of God is to somehow reconcile all to all. And let me be clear, it is God’s work, a mysterious dynamic which may only be completed in the fulness of time. Reconciliation is not the responsibility of a victim by their own power to attempt to build and complete.

And right at the heart of remembering, says John is truthfulness and accuracy. How easy it would have been for him to find a way to downplay the awfulness of what people lived through in the occupation or even just not raise it at all. But he has Jesus, God’s word made flesh, as he described him just a few sentences before, experience white hot anger, fury, at what is being done. Don’t diminish wrongdoing or the pain it causes, don’t lessen it, or try to soften the experience in some way. Don’t go for the option of cheap grace, of perpetrators forgiven before they have done any hard work to recompense their victims. For God’s work of reconciliation to happen, then God’s experience of the suffering brought by exploitation, tyranny, and abuse, is part of that. Resurrection and reconciliation involve the hard work of truthfulness and all its consequences because that’s the only way to integrate what we remember from the past in ways which enable us to remake and renew our histories, our present and our futures.

Remember. It’s hard not to at the moment. It’s there right in our face with the misery of occupied people and tyrannical leadership around the world and what feels like the daily grind of yet another story of corruption. It’s hard to get some stuff from the recent news out of your mind. In many ways it’s cathartic, at this point in history, to have the only time in the three-year cycle of readings where we hear the story of Christ getting angry at exploitation and corruption. We can feel his solidarity with those suffering in a powerful way. And yet we are pulled beyond that. Lent pulls us towards remembering. Week after week the Eucharist pulls us towards remembering. The Holy Spirit, whose very task it is to help us remember pulls us towards remembering. Remembering so that Gods story of reconciliation becomes like muscle memory in our hearts and souls and lives. All so that we can live as disciples making sense of the world in the light and love of Christ’s death and resurrection.