Lent 3 2024
In the world of the Bible, people often had to face the same dilemmas about being a
household as we do today. Like how could they live together as a community? A
pressing question for the ex-slaves Moses had led out of Egypt on their long journey to
their new home in the Promised Land. Slavery had shaped their whole lives. The way
they saw themselves, their dreams and expectations, or lack of them. What was the
point of dreaming if you were someone else’s possession, theirs to do what they liked
with? Freedom sometimes felt tougher than they expected, and again and again, they
looked back to Egypt. “At least there we had food to eat - Now there is only manna! At
least slavery was familiar. Whose household did they belong to now? And what should
that household look like?
In our Old Testament Reading, we heard the answer to those questions in the shape of
the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord your God” they start. These people belong to
God – he is the head of this household. Why? Because “I brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” That’s the household they had been part of, but now
God declared that they will be his household, his family. That’s why the Ten
Commandments start with God. We can’t go it alone. We depend on one another, on
God’s good earth and its fruitfulness, and ultimately, therefore, on the God who gave it
to us.
The commandments remind us that God can’t be reduced to the size of a convenient
idol that we can convince ourselves we own or control. We can’t treat him, or his name,
as a lucky charm or magic formula as if we had the power to make him do our bidding.
Keeping the Sabbath day, too, reminds us that we are in God’s hands, not he in ours.
We can rest because God is in charge, not us.
When we know this, the rest of the commandments – those instructions not to murder or
steal or commit adultery or bear false witness or covet what is not ours – fall into place.
If we are God’s children, members of his household, then so is everyone else; they
deserve to be treated with respect and care.
The distinctive thing about these Jewish commandments was that they applied to
everyone equally; rich or poor, powerful or powerless. In many of the nations around
Israel, the punishments for murder or stealing or adultery were different for different
social classes. A rich man who killed a poor man might have to pay a fine to his family.
A poor man who killed a rich man would be executed.
Not so in Israel. There was one law for everyone. Of course, it often didn’t always work
out that way – it often still doesn’t – but it was an important principle, and one which our
own legal system still preserves.
So, the Ten Commandments aren’t just a list of dos and don’ts. They are about identity
and belonging. They tell us who we are, because they tell us whose we are, and we
forget that at our peril.
By the time of Jesus, the household of God had built for itself a literal house, the
Temple in Jerusalem. It was the symbolic centre of their faith and of their nation. The
place where they came together into God’s presence. It should have been the
embodiment of that way of life which treated everyone equally. But we are all flawed
and fallible, and it’s clear from today’s Gospel reading that all was not well in this
particular household.
Theologians argue about what, so enraged Jesus as he stormed into the Temple with
his whip of cords. It may have been the fact that the stalls he overturned had almost
certainly been set up in the Court of the Gentiles, the only place in the Temple which
was open to everyone, including those who weren’t Jewish. Their place to pray had
been stolen from them. They had been excluded. The selling of animals and the
changing of money may also have placed a disproportionate burden on those who had
very little, especially if the prices were inflated and the exchange rate manipulated. The
Temple was, as Jesus put it “my Father’s house”, a place where God’s people – all
people – should have been able to feel at home, part of the household, equal members
in it, but that wasn’t so. No wonder Jesus was furious.
Whose house was it? Whose household was it for? Did it belong to the Temple
authorities? Did it belong to the traders? Or did it belong to God. The God who had
brought his people out of the “houses of slavery”, places where people were exploited,
and where some lives counted while others didn’t? This isn’t a story about whether it’s
right to sell things in church. It’s a story about what it means to say we are God’s
people, what kind of household that means we should be building, and how we should
live in it together.
Households, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They may be wonderful, loving
places, or places of struggle and pain – or both at the same time. But these readings
remind us that our truest household is the household of God, a household which
embraces all humanity, all creation, in which everyone is precious. St Paul said that
God is the one, “from whom every family in heaven and in earth takes its name” (Eph
3.15). God calls us to learn to live as part of his household, and to find in it the perfect
freedom he wants for us all. Freedom not seen in go it alone independence but in lives
that are shaped by the knowledge that we belong to Him, and because of that we
belong to one another too.
Amen