Heard about the Kerry man interviewed for a top computer job in Dublin who was asked "What is 2 + 2?" He thought briefly and said, "It's whatever you want it to be." He landed the job plus a new BMW. Truly, we swim in the Irish goldfish bowl of postmodernism and relativity, and objective truth no longer shapes our lives.
Which makes the Gospel reading this Sunday from John 2:1322 startlingly counter-cultural. The founder of the Christian Church died for this truth, as did the first martyr, St Stephen. Both were killed as a direct consequence of Jesus saying: "Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days". How could that impenetrable riddle possibly be a truth worth dying for?
John records how Jesus drove the buyers and sellers out of the Jerusalem temple and was called to account, which provoked Jesus' statement and then the religious leaders' comeback: "It has taken 46 years to build this temple and you are going to raise it in three days?"
Matthew and Mark say false witnesses came forward later at Jesus' trial and alleged: "This fellow said, `I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days"'. (Matthew 26:61). The account vividly preserves the high priest's verbal assault on Jesus inciting him to break his silence and refute a claim indicative of rampant megalomania.
Even at the cross, Mark reports, the outrage was still gnawing at the spectators' nerve ends: "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!" (Mark 15:29-30).
The scene shifts to another trial and execution. Luke records false witnesses alleged of Stephen: "We have heard him say this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs Moses handed down to us" (Acts 6:14). Exit Stephen stoned to death, while momentously, Saul of Tarsus looked on.
Did Jesus merely mean he would die and rise bodily in three days? If so, why refer to himself as the temple? John amplifies the immense scope of Jesus's claim: "After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scriptures and the words that Jesus had spoken" (vs. 21-22).
When I die, the temple dies, Jesus was saying. The whole system of sacrifices, blood flowing to make atonement for sins, all the priestly activity round this holy place where God's presence dwells - it all ends when I die, in the way the rising sun ends the need for street lights and headlights. I am in person the fulfilment of Old Testament scripture. Stephen was therefore asserting this universal truth, a truth to die for, the Christian claim that Jesus was both sacrifice and priest in his death, and in his risen life today he is the habitation of God's glory. The martyr witnessed that temple and sacrifice had served their purpose in making Israel distinct but now the people of God are no longer Israel. His kingdom is of believing people from every tribe, language and people group, congregated not in a temple but around Jesus. They are that innumerable ethnically diverse multitude of St John's vision in the Revelation.
Ponder this during Lent, therefore. The cost of being an upfront disciple of Jesus today in Ireland will not be a martyr's death, for nothing so memorable is on offer. Rather, it will consist in being considered counter-cultural, an intellectual dinosaur, holding to universal biblical truths when all around people have cast their truth away and are ready to affirm that 2 + 2 is . . . what did you say you wanted it to be?
GF