Lent 3
Sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis
The name Lent derives from the Old English word “lencten” meaning spring. It has the same root as the word “length”. It is the season of the lengthening of the days when all around us is growth and the promise of new life. This year, Lent is accompanied by the unlocking of lockdown. Schools reopen tomorrow; the outdoors will become once again a place for meeting and socialising, and as we come to Holy Week further restrictions will be lifted.
Our inward Lenten journey through the wilderness towards Jerusalem is thus being expressed outwardly in a movement shared with the whole nation through the sorrow of pandemic, the promise of vaccination, towards freedom and some kind of normality. This movement of hope adds extraordinary colour and depth to our Lenten observance. Next Sunday, Mothering Sunday, will be the first anniversary of the first lockdown and I am sure we shall have many memories of that time. As we bring to mind the events of the past year, we have many reasons for sorrow and penitence but also many reasons for thanksgiving.
In our Old Testament reading today from the Book of Exodus, we recall a significant point for the children of Israel in their 40-year wandering in the wilderness. They have reached Mount Sinai. Moses goes up to the top of the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. The people are prepared for a revealing of the words of God. And, accompanied by thunder and lightning, a thick cloud and the blast of a trumpet, the Lord God delivers a sign of the covenant between God and the people: the words of the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments are a code of law concerning matters of fundamental importance: for example, the greatest obligation (to worship only God), the greatest injury to a person (murder), the greatest injury to family bonds (adultery), the greatest injury to commerce (bearing false witness), the greatest inter-generational obligation (honour to parents), the greatest obligation to community (truthfulness), the greatest injury to property (theft). They form the kernel of Old Testament Law, the Torah, and what we read in the Book of Exodus is developed in the whole of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
The Ten Commandments were inherited by the Christian church and form the backbone of our moral and ethical teaching. They used to play a more significant part in church life than they do now. They used to take a central place in both the decoration and the liturgy of the Church of England. For centuries congregations, both in St Bene’t’s Cambridge and everywhere else, would worship before panels inscribed with the commandments, and as we read in the Book of Common Prayer, the Holy Communion would not take place until the commandments had been fully recited.
It goes without saying that the Ten Commandments form the basis of Judeo-Christian legal codes and influence the rule of law to this day. For this reason, nowadays our approach to the Ten Commandments remains respectful, yet we do not regard them as mandatory. For example, the fourth commandment, “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy”, is open to many interpretations in our society; while in the sixth commandment, “You shall not murder”, we do not take a hard line on abortion or the right to kill in a just war, though the sanctity of life as the gift of God remains the bedrock of medical practice.
The Ten Commandments were given by God as a sign of his covenant with his chosen people and as a code of conduct for the way of life ahead of them in the Promised Land. To keep the commandments was to honour God. The whole of Psalm 119, all one hundred and seventy-six verses of it, is an extended reflection on the beauty of the Commandments:
“Lord how I love your law! All the day long it is my study. Your commandments have made me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me…how sweet are your words on my tongue! They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.” (Ps 119 vv 97, 98, 103).
But the Christian Church, while respecting and honouring God, and putting no other Gods before him, sees this as the Old Covenant, and lives by a New Covenant, inaugurated in Jesus Christ and his resurrection.
One of the most challenging aspects of Christian theology is to reflect on how far in Christ the New Covenant has completed the Old and how far it has supplanted it. Jesus said of himself in St Matthew’s gospel, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.” Indeed, he goes on: “Till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled.” (Matt 5.17). On the other hand, in many of his parables he seems to give a different view: “no one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth onto an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak and a worse tear is made” “neither is new wine put into old wineskins, otherwise the skins burst, and the wine is spilled … fresh skins for new wine!” (Matt 9.16ff).
Our gospel reading takes this further. This is the story, as described in John’s gospel, of the cleansing of the temple. Jesus enters the temple, and finds people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and the moneychangers seated at their tables. In anger, he makes a whip of cords and drives them all out of the temple; he overturns the tables of the moneychangers and says to the dealers in doves “Take these things out of here! Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!”
The story of the cleansing of the temple is recorded by all four gospels. The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have it taking place after Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. For them, the cleansing of the temple is part of the drama leading to the sacrificial events of his final week. We shall encounter all this liturgically in Holy Week, as we approach Good Friday.
But John’s gospel has a different take on the story. He places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus has just performed his first miracle at the marriage of Cana – the water made wine. And from Cana he goes up to Jerusalem to perform another sign – the New Covenant being inaugurated by overturning and destruction. “What sign can you show us for doing this?” say the Jews. Jesus replies “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” … He was speaking of the temple of his body.”
The cleansing of the temple is a demonstration that in Jesus the old covenant, expressed in the Law is to be done away with. The sacrificial system, with its cattle, sheep and doves, and the temple currency, with its moneychangers, are to cease.
But Jesus also speaks of the New Covenant expressed in the temple of his body, which would be raised in three days. Our way to God, in other words, is no longer through the Law, inscribed on tablets of stone, but through the body of Jesus, the Body of Christ, to which we are all joined by the Holy Spirit in Baptism. As St Paul puts it “we are a letter of Christ, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts… we are ministers of a New Covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Cor 3.3)
How does this chime with our journey through Lent? I am tempted to suggest that our Lenten resolutions, entered with determination three weeks ago, may have something of the Commandments about them – a way of life to suit our arrival in the promised land, and in the end centred upon ourselves. But at this point in Lent we are reminded of the disruption of the New Covenant, and are being urged to think not of ourselves, but of Christ and Christ alone. We are to live “in Christ” for “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!” 2 Cor 5.17.
How do we live “in Christ”? Well, that is the Lenten journey: by prayer, fasting, self-denial and by meditating on God’s holy word, not that we can change ourselves thereby. But if we are in Christ, he can overturn our old ways and bring us cleansing and renewal.
