3rd Sunday after Pentecost

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last week we pondered the situation of the People of God in exile. The Babylonian army had captured the nation and deported thousands of people into captivity in Babylon.

All the way leading up to that national disaster, the prophets had warned the people. They had pointed to the covenant between God and people and highlighted all the ways in which Judah fell short of the will of God. In their treatment of widows, orphans, and strangers, in their corrupt justice system, in their attraction to other gods, in their lackluster worship, in their love of luxury while other children of God went hungry, in countless ways they had broken the law of the covenant. This would lead to the nation’s collapse and the loss of the Holy Land, the prophets warned.

The moment this actually happened, the prophets changed their message. Now that God’s people had indeed lost the Promised Land and sat in captivity far from home, the prophets spoke God’s word of hope to them. God would eventually bring them home again. There would be another exodus: Once again, God would break the chains of slavery and free his people and bring them home to the Promised Land.

 A lot of the Bible passages we read during the Advent season come from this time: God will make a highway in the desert for you to walk on; he will raise the valleys and lower the mountains for you; there will be water in the desert; God will provide guidance and food, and gently lead the mother sheep. The return will be glorious and God’s nation will once again shine.

 After about 50 years of exile, the Persian army overpowered the Babylonian kingdom and allowed God’s people to return home. Spurred on by the words and visions of the prophets, they embarked on the long journey. They expected to come into a messianic kingdom, but what they found instead was a huge mess.

Jerusalem was still in ruins from the war. Everything was destroyed. Now what?

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe what happened next: These two leaders rallied the people into rebuilding. Ezra the priest led the construction of a new temple. Nehemiah the government official led the effort to rebuild the city wall and make Jerusalem safe again.

Much more important for understanding the backdrop of Jesus’ ministry, however, was not the rebuilding of physical structures, but the rebuilding of the religious teachings and practices of the people of Judah. In fact, it is these returning exiles rebuilding the religion and the nation who are first called “Jews”.

The religious teachers were trying to make sense of what had happened to God’s people. They remembered the warnings God had given them through the prophets, warnings to be more faithful to the laws of the covenant – warnings they had ignored, and look what happened!

 As a result, the focus of the religion now became obedience to the law. By obeying every one of the commandments, the nation could avoid another disaster like the exile from ever taking place again. Obedience became more important than covenant relationship and grace.

The law became a merit system, and eventually seemed like a tool to manipulate God: If all Jews obeyed the law, God would never let them be deported again. If all Jews obeyed the law, then God would send the Messiah. In fact, some people thought that if all Jews would obey all the laws for two sabbaths in a row, then the Messiah would come.

 This focus on obedience to the law helps us understand why Pharisees and religious leaders would always get so upset when Jesus broke sabbath rules. Every time he did that, he chanced Israel’s expulsion from the Holy Land. Every time he did that, he delayed the coming of the Messiah yet again. Looked at it from this perspective, one can understand why they were so adamant about stopping Jesus.

 Talking about the Messiah: That was another huge focus of the Jews in Jesus’ time. For most of their history, the nation had been occupied by one superpower or another. Only at those times when one superpower was waning and the next not quite at its zenith of strength, did Israel have a little breathing space for independence and expansion.

 One of those times happened when David was king. Under his leadership, the country was the largest it would ever be. In the nation’s mind, the days of King David became the glory-days.

 People yearning to be united in a free and independent nation remembered the covenant God had made with house of David: There would always be a descendant from the House of David on the thrown of Judah. God would be faithful to this promise. God would send someone, a descendent of David, a mighty ruler who would unite the nation under God and make it glorious again, a Messiah!

 In the days of Jesus, Judah was occupied by the Roman Empire. The Jews hated that. The more they chafed under the taxes and burdens and restrictions of being an occupied people, the more desperately they longed for the Messiah who would free them and establish God’s kingdom on earth.

 The hope for the Messiah is expressed in our reading from the Prophet Isaiah: It will be a strong, but faithful and just leader who will kill the wicked and bring peace to God’s people. And he will be a shoot from the stock of Jesse, who was David’s father.

 What is one of the first things most gospels tell us about Jesus? That he was from the house of David.

 And what do the disciples expect from Jesus after the resurrection? “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Are you now, finally, going to be the kind of Messiah that we hoped for all along? Now that you have risen from the dead and demonstrated your divine power, is now the time that you will throw out the Romans and rule a freed nation?

 Even the disciples who had spent so much time with Jesus were this caught up in the vision of a powerful, military Messiah. When we ponder the life and ministry of Jesus, keeping this strong expectation in mind helps us understand his sermons, his miracles, his parables, and the confusion of many of his listeners.

 We heard in our sermon series how central the temple became to the religious life of the whole nation. That was extremely pronounced in Jesus’ day. The temple was the only place in the whole world where faithful Jews could bring their prescribed sacrifices. It was the holiest place on earth because it was the place where heaven and earth met.

King Herod the Great decided that he wanted to rebuild the small temple Ezra had constructed after the exile, and he was going to make it big, and I mean BIG!

Here is an image of the size of the temple and its platform in comparison to the size of the city of Jerusalem and the houses of regular people. To this day, the temple platform King Herod created dominates the city skyline. Today, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque sit on that platform, and one of the supporting walls of the platform is the famous wailing wall, the closest Jews can currently get to where the temple used to be.

 King Herod began construction in the year 19 BC. When Jesus and his followers were in Jerusalem, it was not finished yet. It was finally completed in the year 63 AD, only to be completely destroyed by the Romans seven years later.

In the temple was a chamber called the Holy of Holies where only the high priest was allowed to go only once a year on the day of atonement, to sprinkle the blood from the lamb slaughtered for the forgiveness of the sins of the people. (Recall that Jesus is later called the Lamb of God who dies for the sins of the world.)

Because this place in the temple was so holy, it was also very restricted.

Let’s look at the image to get an idea about those restrictions:

Most of the temple platform was open to everyone. Under the colonnades around the outside, rabbis would sit and teach. Jesus would do the same. This building at the end is where the Jewish Council ruled, and over here is the Fortress Antonia where Pontius Pilate resided when in town.

If you look loosely, you see a low balustrade surrounding the temple. No non-Jew was allowed past that wall. Signs in three languages warned that any non-Jew caught beyond that wall would be executed.

Inside the temple, there were increasingly restricted courts. The women could go only into the first one. Men could get into the next one. Priests could get one further, and only the High Priest could go into the Holy of Holies.

So you see how protected, guarded, and restricted access to God’s presence was. In light of this, Jesus’ ministry of bringing the presence of God to anyone anywhere was a complete upending of the religious teachings of his time. No wonder the leaders hated him, but those on the outskirts of this restrictive system loved him.

There is so much more I would love to tell you, but we are running out of time.

I am sorry that there was more teaching than gospel proclaiming in this sermon. However, I think knowing all this about the religious landscape in the days of Jesus helps us understand what he came to do:

He was the expected Son of David, but he was a Messiah more worried about freedom from sin and death than political or national freedom.

He upheld the covenant with God, but focused on the grace of God more than on the law and offered a loving relationship with God.

He lifted all restrictions in terms of access to God: Anyone at all was now welcome in God’s presence.

After the devastating experience of destruction and exile, the people of God managed to rally and rebuild a worship life that gave them meaning and hope. Jesus built on that in his ministry, life, death, and resurrection.

After more than a year of restrictions and losses due to COVID, we are rallying and rebuilding our worship life in a way that gives us meaning and hope. May it be less the laws of God and more the grace of Christ that guides our efforts. Amen.