The Lectio Letter - Issue #93 - Chasing Money Changers and Pouring out Perfume this Easter Week

“If man had his way, the plan of redemption would be an endless and bloody conflict. In reality, salvation was bought not by Jesus' fist, but by His nail-pierced hands; not by muscle but by love; not by vengeance but by forgiveness; not by force but by sacrifice. Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.”

― A.W. Tozer, Preparing for Jesus' Return: Daily Live the Blessed Hope

“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”

― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Hi Friends,

Welcome to Issue #93 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter normally contains music, film, and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

But this issue has a slightly longer article for Easter week, but without the normal miscellany, which is more time-consuming than you’d imagine, so that we keep some kind of rhythm up for you all while we are out on the road.

In Holy Week the Church rehearses Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem. He pronounces Judgement on the failure of God’s people to be the people of God for the sake of the Nations and affirms an outlandish act of devotion in the midst of naysayers. Becoming ‘Easter People’ I contend, means removing the man-made barriers subtly present in our Christian cultures that keep out those who God intends to welcome in Jesus.

As I heard someone memorably state, “we are welcome as we are, but not to stay as we are”. To be welcoming and affirming are considered one and the same in our modern progressive culture, but the Jesus-way is that we are all welcomed as we are, but in order to become who He is.

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Chasing Money Changers and Pouring out Perfume this Easter Week

It is easy to abstract Easter into it's theological outcomes and forget the very flesh and blood realities right at the heart of the story.

After all, Easter is the climax of a story about bodies. Bodies placed in a garden, bodies wandering the wilderness, God become a body in Jesus Christ, that body being judged and killed, and that body being raised up again.

A little later on, in the Church's way of telling time, we will make our way to Pentecost where God's breath, life and Spirit will breathe once again on a body of people who will become, the body of Christ on earth.

That body of people will be a faithfully-waiting-forestaste of the realm of Spirit (heaven), filling the realm of the body (Earth) and all things being made new again.

But in this time between the times, we don't like our bodies very much. We often abuse our bodies, become numb to them, or seek to escape them, and yet as I've rehearsed above, God's story is inherently a story of bodies.

So, this week is all about the in-bodied human Jesus rescuing humanity through recovering the vocation of Adam, to be an in-body representation of God.

Jesus recovers this in His incarnation, His life, His death and then the first act of God's new creation is the resurrection of Jesus body.

In Mark 11, we read that in the last week of Jesus' life, he returns to the centre of the world for God's people; Jerusalem. In the week before violence is done to Jesus' body, we see him bring a form of violent judgement on what God's people had understood to be the Holiest place on Earth.

15 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 16 and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 17 And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'

18 The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

19 When evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

The temple wasn't just the centre of religious life for the jews, it was the centre of the world for them. It was the very presence of God amongst them.

It was the place God had given them to be a reminder of the temple-palace-garden that was set up in Eden. Eden was intended to be a basecamp for making something beautiful out of God's wider creation in partnership with His image bearers.

The Genesis story shows us that God's creation was intended to be a temple where God's presence was to be manifest. At the centre was the image bearer, Adam, representing God to the creation as a Priest and King. Throughout the story of Israel, a desire to recover this sense of God's presence dwelling with them is a constant.

The interior of the temple was actually laid out as a garden, the roof as the cosmos of stars. The temple and, particularly, the holy of holies, was the space of the expected new creation. The place where the spaces of heaven and earth overlapped.

The purpose of the temple was to mediate that presence and that one day the temple would be like an atom bomb of the new creation. This tiny space on earth expanding God's redeemed space, heaven and earth united.