Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 3 March 2024.
‘Moses and Aaron with the Ten Commandments’ by Aron de Chavez, c. 1675 (Source)
• First Reading: Exodus 20: 1-17 (The Ten Commandments)
• Epistle: 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25 (‘Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? Jews demand signs and Greeks wisdom. We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’)
• Gospel: John 2: 13-22 (The cleansing of the Temple)
Every town had one – and every city or major centre had several. Not just their sports teams, but their gods as well. And who was to say which god was supreme?
Did it have to be those of the cities of Rome or Athens or Memphis or Alexandria? Apart from their size and the power of their armies, just what was so special about them?
Their armies might be powerful and their trading ships far-reaching, but just what made any local god special? Folk tended to see success in battle and conquest as critical but then they started to wonder about the character of their gods and the quality of their worship and the lives of those who followed them.
Now it was getting complicated. And as the children of Israel followed Moses out of Egypt and towards their Promised Land, they were moving away from the array of Egyptian gods and their burial customs and towards something quite different.
And the first thing that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with was a slab of rock with 10 Commandments. The first of which was that there was only one God – they had already seen the proof of His deliverance – and now they were to follow Him and Him alone.
The God of Israel was not going to be a first-among-equals because there were none others of any note anyway and He was definitely not going to be equal with anything that Egypt or Greece, Rome or Canaan had to offer.
They were either with Him or without Him. God had made His choice clear – these were His chosen people but they also had to commit to Him.
Once they had done that, He would explain their relationships with Him and with one another. But first: only one God and He was to be without rivals or competitors. This was not a beauty contest of the heavens.
By the time of Jesus the formal religion of Israel was firmly established.
God was in heaven and was to be worshipped, the worship would be controlled by the priests, and the people would do as they were told.
Except: God was doing a new thing among them, He had taken human life and flesh and was to be seen teaching and reproving, healing and forgiving, straightening out the law and the customs of the land.
More than that, He was making Himself to be the visual aid. Look at Jesus and you see God so far as He can be seen. Listen to Him and you hear God. Serve Him in the things of your life and you are already worshipping God.
Take away everything except Jesus and you still have a fully established life of the spirit to lead you in your relationships and transactions.
And more than that, He would take the emerging conflict with the established religious bodies to its conclusion, dying in the process and yet He would be vindicated from death and in His resurrection.
Now Jesus was really for real, even when He had ascended into heaven. Greeks might want wisdom and Jews might want signs, while Romans only understood power.
But Jesus was the sign of the power and the wisdom of God in action and upon the earth. Divine revelation became submission to death on the cross which the resurrection would overrule and vindicate.
The wisdom of God would be there in their teaching on holiness and forgiveness in the atonement of Jesus.
And Rome would never be able to counter the power of the resurrection of Jesus in overruling the finality of death.
There would be no turning back from this critical point in human history.
People would either accept it or reject it – they could never be neutral or ambivalent or indifferent to it.
What was true then remains today. Folk might try to massage the atonement of Jesus out of the way – substituting all sorts of political action or entertaining spectacles or even good works founded on guilt but not the glory or wonder of God.
In our day we also are presented with Jesus as the power of God over death, the wisdom of God in the management of human actions and relationships, and the demonstration of God in lives renewed from doubt or despair, from guilt and hopelessness.
It all comes back to where we are starting from. Is it self, in which self is the measure of all that we do and are?
Is it humanity in its many forms of community and its political doctrines, each locality choosing its own model?
Or might it be God – the One who is and always was. This is the One who is forever – and yet who desires to be united with each person in His creation. This is the One who has achieved it in Jesus Christ – if we will follow Him and Him alone.
