Beware of the (Temple) Scribes

The following is the manuscript for the sermon Dr. Bob Coote preached in chapel on 11/13/06. Please respect his copyright, but enjoy his exegetical insight!

************************************

Mk 12:34-13:4

Beware of the (Temple) Scribes

I

At stewardship time, it may be hard to take our eyes off this poor, generous widow. We all know people like this, and we rightly honor them. How often do we see those who have the least give the most? And as usual in Mk, she is a woman: in Mk it is women who nearly always play the key role at the decisive moment. Many good sermons can be preached on this widow—I heard one yesterday. This won’t be one.

For Mark the widow and her contribution are not the point. The widow is contributing her all to a doomed institution, the temple. Jesus has said more than once, directly and indirectly, that to save your life you must lose it; but here he cannot be commending the widow for giving her all for the sake of the temple and its privileged officers. Jesus points her out to show up the thieving temple scribes who flout God’s command to care for widows and the fatherless. This widow is not a stewardship campaign’s dream, but a casualty of a political and religious tyranny represented by the scribes. Hence the makers of the lectionary rightly combined the widow’s mite with the scribes’ judgment. The subject is the larger one, the scribes. And the still larger subject is the temple, in which these scribes played a special role.

II

Mk begins when God sends the messenger to prepare the way—John, who is Elijah—and Mk ends when “the Lord whom you seek” suddenly comes to his temple. When Jesus gets to the temple, his followers all still think—haven’t they been listening?—that this is the Lord’s big arrival day, but it turns out to be the big pre-arrival day, ending in a debacle.

Once Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the story concludes with two large events: Jesus attacks the temple, and he allows himself to be tried and executed. The text today concerns Jesus and the temple. To understand the widow, we must see her in relation to the scribes, and to understand the scribes we must see them in relation to the temple. Therefore in the NT reading we took a step back, to Jesus’ exegetical slam on the scribes’ claim (and presumably an early church claim too) that the messiah is the son of David, the founder of the first temple and its leading guarantor and claimant, and a step forward, to the beginning of Jesus’ longest teaching in Mk, on the fall of the temple.

Jesus gathers his forces and a following and advances on Jerusalem. All the signs, both of deliverance and of destruction, point to a known drama grounded in Scripture. Jesus appears at the Jordan and crossing it is anointed the messiah, the son of God. He demonstrates his power and authority, attracts a great following, advances on Jerusalem, enters the city hailed as the son of David, takes up headquarters on the Mt of Olives, and shuts down the temple regime. A fig tree representing the temple withers at his word. He gets the better of the temple heads and predicts the destruction of the temple. All signs point to the imminent success of the insurgency launched by Jesus and his fellow insurgents: the Lord has suddenly come to his temple.

Between his arrival in Jerusalem and his arrest, trial, and execution, all Jesus does is to attack the temple and its leaders. He enters the temple each day for three days. On the first day he scouts it out and then returns to his station on the Mount of Olives. On the second day he ferociously overthrows the temple market for animals and blocks anyone transporting cult apparatus, invoking Jeremiah’s speech against the temple as a “den of insurgents.” The third day is a long day of verbal scuffling, as Jesus is accosted by a string of infuriated temple leaders who want to destroy him but who approach the task circumspectly for fear of the crowd. Their strategy is to isolate Jesus by shaming him in public debate on political and judicial topics. Jesus escapes their snares and heaps shame on them with his ripostes, then carries on unchallenged, singling out the administration lawyers for his concluding rhetorical assault. At the end of the day, he returns to the Mount of Olives and delivers his longest teaching in Mk, on the signs marking the destruction of the Herodian temple—which was not just the stupendous eighth Wonder of the ancient world but the very center of the Jewish universe, and the church’s as well before 70, and the foundation of the identity of the people of God—of which not one stone will be left upon another.

Just before entering Jerusalem Jesus is hailed by blind Bartimaeus as the son of David, and after entering he is hailed by those going ahead and behind, who know that the true king of Jerusalem is to arrive in triumph and humility on a colt, as coming in the name of the Lord to restore the sovereignty of David. No wonder the custodians of the Herodian temple and its services are edgy and on guard: the house of David redivivus is returning to claim its own—an old biblical story, this time reinforced by the fulfillment of prophecies in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and Malachi.

Since the first verse in Mk, the story’s hearers have been looking for the Lord to come to his temple, and we are confirmed that this is the point of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem when he sends two disciples to snatch the colt from a nearby village and tells them that if while they are taking the colt away anyone asks “What do you think you’re doing?” they should say “Its lord needs it,” a pun designed to lead the villagers to think “its owner needs it.”

But Jesus has other ideas than to reclaim the temple as David returned. He does not take back the temple, to purify and reform it and rebuild it, but pronounces its end. The temple is like a fig tree with leaves but no fruit, as Jeremiah declared, fit only to be condemned. The trust in God that brought Jesus and his cohort this far make it possible to pray to have this mountain—on which the temple and entire judicial system, administrative lawyers and all, sit—lifted up and thrown into the sea of chaos on which it was first constructed, its ritual and judicial services to be replaced by mutual forgiveness, the premise of baptism beginning with John.

Retired professor Anne Wire has shrewdly suggested that Mk is a prophetic sign account writ large—that is, a story like the stories that Josephus and, more briefly, Luke tell about Jewish prophets who appear in the desert, mark or embody signs of God’s deliverance, and march with their followers on Jerusalem to take it back from the Romans and their collaborators: the “Egyptian” (he must have been Jewish), Jonathan, Theudas, Judas the Galilean, and others—all insurgencies easily crushed. As usual with such stories, Mk’s Jesus focuses his attack not on the foreign occupier, but internally, on the temple.

III

After shutting down the temple, Jesus is confronted first by the chief priests, scribes, and elders, then by Pharisees and Herodians, then Sadducees, and then by one of the scribes. Having silenced all these opponents, he keeps going against the scribes. Thus Jesus’ temple opposition starts and ends with the scribes. The priests, Sadducees, and Pharisees all appear in one episode each, the scribes in four. Again, these scribes are not just copiers or academics. The NIV makes them “teachers of the law.” They’re not teachers but lawyers themselves, here administration or court lawyers. Why are they given special attention in Mk? Mk has three parts: Jesus in Galilee, on the way to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem. The first focuses mainly on Jesus in relation to Moses and the third in relation to David. In Mk, Jesus substitutes his own law for the law of Moses. It is hard to overstate the outrageousness of this in an early Jewish and church context—the reason Paul faced such opposition in the church. The law of Moses, the Jewish constitution, was the basis of Jewish autonomy wherever it could be negotiated throughout the Roman and Persian empires. It was the very foundation of continued Jewish existence and integrity as an ethnic minority, and on this foundation the Jewish people thrived like no other minority in the Roman world. But to be applied the law needed to be interpreted. Each group shown opposing Jesus engaged in such interpretation, but the scribes, the administrative lawyers, were the specialists at it, on whom even Pharisees depended.

Not just the scribes but the entire Jewish judicial system is under attack in Mk, as one of the cornerstones of the Jewish struggle for liberation against Rome. Since religion and judicial sovereignty were inseparable in the biblical world, the law was tied to the Davidic temple, by the Torah implicitly and the Prophets explicitly. Church and court were completely intertwined, whether temple, synagogue, or church. The temple leaders were the Jews’ leading magistrates. Each temple group opposing Jesus had a particular magisterial function. The scribes’ function lay at the heart of this jurisdiction: the copying, reading, and articulation of the meaning of the law. That’s why the spotlight is on their condemnation.

A scribe asks Jesus which is the primary law. The scribe approves Jesus’ response, but the scribe’s reply reveals the poverty of his trust in God. He is one word away from the kingdom—“not far”—but that one word is psyche, “life,” with which the scribe will not love the Lord, which makes all the difference. After that retort and all the others Jesus has just delivered, “no one dares to ask him any question.”

But unprompted Jesus keeps going after the scribes. “How can the scribes say the messiah is the son of David? David said, ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.”’ If David calls the messiah ‘my lord,’ how can he be his son?” Jesus has dropped an exegetical bomb. Ignoring the contradiction to their triumphant welcome of “the Lord” to Jerusalem, the crowd, who are excited by such talk about enemies but who will soon clamor for this messiah’s blood, “hear him sweetly,” which must mean not “gladly,” or “with delight,” as it is often translated, but “with momentary pleasure,” like Herod, who, after hearing John the Baptist, Jesus’ precursor, “sweetly,” cut off his head.

Jesus says to beware of these administration lawyers—including the one asking which law comes first—and accuses them of making a sartorial show of status, seeking honorific salutations in public, front seats in the synagogue (that is, the local magistracy gathered for worship and adjudication), and privileged seats at banquet, where they dine on the temple endowments of widows and make a show of lengthy prayers. The scribes’ vocation was “to grasp the case, to comprehend the matter for judgment.” Thus Jesus condemns these scribes with a nice pun: “They will get the greater judgment.” The administration lawyers, who are of superior intelligence, as Jesus has acknowledged, may comprehend the uncommonly difficult case, a welcome imputation, but they will also receive the uncommonly great sentence. The judgment falls in typical measure-for-measure terms: in the temple, all the lawyers are above average—so they will all receive above-average sentences.

For his last strike against the scribes, Jesus takes a seat opposite the temple treasury and points out to his disciples the poor widow who in her poverty gives her all to the temple. Her virtue is not his interest. His interest is in what her act says about the temple scribes who devour widows’ endowments. His interest is in what her act contributes to God’s judgment against the temple. Her plight is an affront. For Mk’s Jesus, she is not an exemplary donor but representative prey. (Though the matter is uncertain, it is likely that her donation is different from the endowments on deposit that the scribes devour, but Mk connects the two while keeping the focus on the scribes.)

IV

We now reach one of the great turning points in Mk’s story. Until now, all the signs, including Jesus’ denunciation of the temple regime, have pointed to the vindication of the messiah as foreseen by the Prophets. But the story involves more than signs. It also involves Jesus’ words, and these constitute a running contradiction of the signs. Jesus is not going to take back the temple, but sees it destroyed for good: it should have been a temple of prayer for all and not adjudication for Jews only. Jesus will not triumph in Jerusalem, but will die. God’s messenger has already come—John/Elijah—and he fell: they did to him as they pleased, Jesus says, “as is written (in Isaiah) of me.” He advises his followers to save their lives by following him to the cross, the punishment for failed insurgents. Those who survive must, like him, serve rather than be served, and serve rather than rule. The last shall be first. Honors are not Jesus’ to hand out. He is not the vanquishing son of David. The disciples hear these words but find it hard to pay attention. What about the signs? What kind of insurgency is this?

As soon as Jesus finished denouncing the scribes, the disciples hear him predict the end of the temple. Mk’s hapless disciples are at the breaking point of perplexity. Where are all the signs leading? How can they be squared with Jesus’ words? As Jesus sits down on the Mt of Olives—will it now at last split in two so we can get on with it?—his top four lieutenants gather around him to press one last question on him: what is the sign that this final destruction is about to take place? When will Jesus return, and the angels, God’s special forces, with him, for the real conquest, the real triumph? Just how close are we to the conquest we signed up for? Jesus’ answer makes things worse: this war will continue, with many more signs, but not yet, don’t be fooled, don’t be misled, it could happen any time, you won’t get any warning. At the end there will be no sign: as always in this Gospel, an ironic conclusion. If Mk is a prophetic sign story writ large, then it is also an anti-sign story. Stop looking, Jesus says, for the signs of victory and power around the corner; just get ready by listening to what I say and following me on the way of this gospel.

V

Mk was written for the early church as a Jewish sect, in the midst of the Jewish war of liberation against Rome in 67-73 CE. Mk confronts the church’s expectation that this war was to bring the culmination of the church’s hopes and dreams. A glorious and awful time it was, when Jerusalem was rife with faction, among Jewish collaborators and even more among Jewish insurgents, “convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion,”[1] terror and bloodshed among all, no end in sight—Jerusalem during the first Jewish War, Baghdad in 2006. Mk addresses Jews, including the followers of Jesus, engulfed by the Jewish War against Rome, arguably the most important event in the thousand years of Jewish history from the Babylonian exile of the house of David to the Christian imperial suppression of the Jews in the fifth century CE.

This war presented a tremendous dilemma for every Jew and every professed follower of Jesus, and this is what Mk addresses: am I on the side of the liberation forces, fighting in defense of nation, religion, and place, or on the side of the imperial occupation. Mk’s answer: neither, and taking that stance in public on location will get you into mortal trouble. The middle ground is no-man’s land, as Mk’s Jesus proves. Mk’s Jesus does not step back from the conflict or keep his head down in desperation of any solution short of God’s direct intervention, as you or I might do if we were Iraqis in Baghdad today. Jesus makes clear: nothing is rightly intact, not nation, administration, religion, or place. Jesus dies—abandoned by everyone, including nearly all his followers, obedient to a God he thinks has abandoned him too—to show that the only thing intact is trust in God, not nation, administration, religion, or place.

In our time and in this nation, what it means to be Christian has been defined quite differently from this. Why do we read and hear the Bible? To know who we are and what we are to do, as James Sanders succinctly put it—which may not be who we now are or what we are now doing. For the last six years the United States has been governed by an administration more explicitly Christian than any in our history. We have faith-based justice, social services, science, health, and faith-based war. Over half the White House staff attends regular Bible study at the office. Our Christian generals promote American power in the world in the name of war against Satan, having apparently forgotten that it was Satan who tempted Jesus—and Peter and James and John—with world domination. The Society of Biblical Literature will be meeting in Washington next weekend. Next Sunday, many in Washington will not be in church, but at the Lincoln Memorial standing in silence with a black armband to protest this nation’s faith-based war in Iraq. This is now a majority sentiment in this country so the risk is small, and such a protest is not what Jesus would do, and most protestors will not be Iraqis, but it is a gesture based on hearing a different story of Jesus, and I face the question, will I be there with a black armband too.

It’s a question of what story we hear and what story we tell. We must read and hear the Bible not “sweetly,” but prepared to be disrupted. Does the story confirm or disrupt? What story shall we love to tell?

RBCoote

11/13/06

---

[1] Anthony Shadid, “Life in a Shattered City,” The Week, Nov 10, 2006, 44.