Reading: Luke 14:15-24

One of the company, after hearing all this, said to [Jesus], 'Happy the man who shall sit at the feast in the kingdom of God!' Jesus answered, 'A man was giving a big dinner party and had sent out many invitations. At dinner-time he sent his servant with a message for his guests, "Please come, everything is now ready." They began one and all to excuse themselves. The first said, "I have bought a piece of land and I must go and look over it; please accept my apologies." The second said, "I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies." The next said, "I have just got married and for that reason I cannot come." When the servant came back he reported this to his master. The master of the house was angry and said to him, "Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town, and bring me in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame." The servant said, "Sir, your orders have been carried out and there is still room." The master replied, "Go out on to the highways and along the hedgerows and make them come in; I want my house to be full. I tell you that not one of those who were invited shall taste my banquet."'

I have spent much of the past two sermons trying to unravel the historical Jesus and the mythological Jesus from each other. Now I'm going to try to put them back together. Today and next week I will deal with the Jesus story itself and make no effort to discern which parts of the story reflect the historical Jesus and which other parts reflect the mythological Jesus. Concentrating all of our energy on sorting these two Jesuses out ultimately destroys the story itself and short-circuits our imaginations.

In last week's sermon, I shared my belief that the "scene" Jesus created at the great Temple in Jerusalem probably led directly to his execution less than a week later. The more I read about and ponder Jesus' life, the more convinced I am that the disturbance at the Temple was perhaps the pivotal moment for Jesus. In the companion class to this sermon series, we have been viewing and discussing contemporary films about Jesus. The Temple scene has been central to the plot of each movie.

The Temple in Jerusalem was the sacred center of the Jewish cosmos. The Temple was the place God connected with earth. One Jewish Midrash makes the centrality of the Temple abundantly clear:

Just as the navel is found at the center of human being, so the land of Israel is found at the center of the world...and it is the foundation of the world. Jerusalem is at the center of the land of Israel, the Temple is at the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is at the center of the Temple, the Ark (of the Covenant) is at the center of the Holy of Holies and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which spot is the foundation of the world.[1]

This is precisely the spot Jesus chooses to create a disturbance. He drives out those selling items in the Temple complex; he overturns the tables of the people who exchange Roman coins for Jewish coinage; he upsets the seats of the sellers of pigeons. Jesus says, "Scripture says, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer', but you are making it a robbers' cave."[2]

 These actions were sure to create quite a commotion in the heart of the Jewish cosmos.

The scriptural account of this scene at the Temple leaves much unclear. How big was the disturbance Jesus created? Was just about everyone in the complex aware of his act, or did just a small number witness it? Why did he pick the Temple for this provocative act? Was the scene more symbolic than anything else? Just what did Jesus mean by his action? What exactly was he so angry about?

Many answers have been given to these questions for two thousand years. Typically, the story leaves enough unsaid to invite a wide variety of answers and explanations and interpretations. Each person who has wrestled with the meaning of Jesus' actions at the Temple applies his or her own experiences, understandings, politics and biases to the story and speculates on the answers to all of the questions the story engenders. Here is how I make sense out of the scene.

I start by trying to understand the social structure that dominated Jewish culture in Roman-occupied Palestine. At the center of this social structure was an elaborate system of purity. The purity system established and communicated clear boundaries between what and who were considered holy and righteous on the one hand and what and who were considered polluted and sinful on the other. The purity system incorporated everything and everybody and every action into a hierarchy from the holiest down to the most ritually polluted.

Such clear-cut purity systems are typical of cultures that are withstanding the insidious attack of foreign domination. Foreign domination calls into question the fundamental identity of the occupied people. The purity system attempts to keep the identity clear: who's in and who's out--in this case, who's a good Jew and who's not a good Jew. An analogy in our own time is the Amish people. Always threatened with being overwhelmed by popular American culture, the Amish erect literal and social fences to keep clear the boundaries clear, to identify what is Amish and what is not Amish.

In first century Roman-occupied Palestine, a person's purity status depended on many things, starting with the type of family one was born into. Being born into a priestly or Levite family was a sign of righteousness and holiness; being born into a Samaritan family or a Gentile family gave a person a polluted, sinful status. Purity status was also based on one's occupation and wealth: priests were good; tax collectors were viewed as polluted and sinful occupations. Prostitutes were even worse. Gender also conferred status, with males viewed as generally more holy and righteous, females as generally more polluted and sinful. Finally, one's health also determined purity status. The sick and people with chronic disabilities and diseases were seen as polluted. The purity system provided a definitive map of the social world.

Jesus consistently challenged this purity system in both word and deed. His parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, is a challenge to the purity system. The people who pass the injured man by without stopping to help are all people the purity system labeled righteous and holy. The one who has pity and stops to help the man would have been considered inherently polluted and sinful by virtue of being a Samaritan. The polluted and sinful one is the good neighbor.

Jesus challenged the system by whom he called to be his disciples and by the kinds of followers he attracted. By all accounts, the disciples and his other followers were in the purity scheme of things a pretty disreputable lot. Among his followers and friends were the most despised and marginal people: tax collectors, peasants, not just poor but destitute people, maimed people, and a significant number of women, including perhaps some prostitutes.

Let's talk for a moment about the tax collectors so that you can get a sense just how despised they were in Roman-occupied Palestine. Now tax collectors are not terribly popular in any culture, including our own. Indeed, they were a target of one of the candidates in our recent presidential election. They were even more despised in Roman-occupied Palestine partly because they often demanded far more tribute for their Roman lords than people could afford. Worse, the tax gatherers put such a squeeze on people that many had to decide whether to resist paying the Romans (and risk horrible punishment) or withhold taxes from the Jewish Temple authorities. And guess what: withholding taxes from the Temple meant a loss in purity status. What a terrible choice for faithful Jews to have to make. Worst of all, most of the tax collectors were Jews. It felt as their own people were putting many Jews in the position of having to withhold their Temple taxes. And it is the tax collectors with whom Jesus continually associated.

Jesus most acutely challenged the purity system by the "bad characters" with whom he ate.[3]

Nowhere were the purity rules more evident than in eating. It was bad enough that he and his followers ate and drank heartily--the gospels report that Jesus was accused of being "a glutton and a drinker."[4]

No, worst of all, he sat down to table with all the rejects and outcasts and nobodies who followed him. To dine with outcasts was a profound challenge to the purity system.

Jesus also challenged the purity system through his healing touches of the sick, the maimed, and the disabled. No one was more untouchable than a leper or a person with chronic hemorrhaging. Jesus' healing touch of these untouchables challenged the system in the same way Mahatma Gandhi's touching Untouchables challenged the Hindu caste system.

In short, Jesus metaphorically attempted to overturn the tables of his society. This takes us back to his scene at the Temple, where he literally overturned tables. There was no better place for a statement challenging the purity system than the Temple, the foundation of the world, the center of the social and religious map, the place from which the rules and customs of the purity system emanated, the place God connected to Earth. Jesus' disturbance at the Temple was a judgment against the social system of his society.

I believe Jesus meant this disturbance to be a symbolic act in the tradition of the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Like Jeremiah and Amos and the other prophets, he challenged through word and deed what he saw to be the sins and evils of his society. He called his people--the Jewish people--to repent and return to the ideals of their religion. Like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Jesus challenged in particular a failure to be a socially just people. He presented a different social vision.

Through his anti-purity acts, Jesus reached out in love and compassion to those maimed by the divisions and the exclusions of the purity system. I think Jesus was attempting to establish the Kingdom or Realm of God not in the future and not in Heaven. He was attempting to establish the Realm of God in the here and now, at his table and in his synagogue and in the Temple. His vision of the Realm of God on earth was an inclusive one, where in the words of Paul there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor freed person, male nor female.[5]

His vision was a table where all sit together in peace and justice and equality.

With whom would Jesus eat today, in our own country? As in his own time, he would eat with the despised, with the people left out. I think he would sit down to eat with the homeless and with prostitutes, with Death Row inmates and people with AIDS, with drug users and non-white immigrants, with those we are about to kick off the welfare rolls and whoever else are among the lowest of the lows in our society. Last week I talked about the mythological Jesus experienced by Christians not as a faraway historical figure but as a living presence in the here and now. This is exactly how many of the despised in our society and in others experience Jesus. Jesus never ate with the despised and the oppressed. Jesus always eats with the despised and the oppressed. Henri Nouwen writes that for the oppressed in Central and South America, Jesus

is their companion in suffering. If they are poor, they know that Jesus was poor too; if they are afraid, they know that Jesus also was afraid; if they are beaten, they know that Jesus too was beaten; and if they are tortured to death, well then, they know that Jesus suffered the same fate. For these people, Jesus is the faithful friend who treads with them the lonely road of suffering and brings them consolation. He is with them in solidarity.[6]

Though judgmental against the evils of his society and ours, I believe Jesus' mission was far more about forgiveness and love and compassion than about judgment. The Jesus Seminar scholar Marcus Borg argues that for Jesus, compassion replaces the purity system. Purity is no longer dependent on social norms, but is a matter of each person's heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart," Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount.[7]

The central ethical task in life is, as Jesus says in Luke, to "be compassionate as God is compassionate."[8]

Borg notes that in Hebrew, the word "compassion" is related to the word for "womb." What a rich image for compassion!

A few years ago, I talked with you about Steven Covey's recommendation that individuals write personal mission statements. I have chewed on my own mission statement ever since. Lately I realized that reaching out in compassion to other people is central to my personal mission. My life work is bringing people together--together in this Fellowship, together across the racial, ethnic, theological, gender and sexual orientation lines that divide and oppress and diminish individuals. This is why I work on the Martin Luther King interfaith service; it's why I have lunch with a nun one day and the spiritual leader of the mosque in Neenah the next; it's why I am dedicated to this Fellowship being a truly welcoming congregation; it's why I volunteer at the Harbor House Domestic Abuse programs. As with any human mission, I am sometimes faithful to my mission and at other times totally inattentive. I sometimes succeed at reaching out in compassion; sometimes I fail utterly. My mission prods and judges and inspires me.

My mission to reach out in compassion has two primary sources: our Unitarian Universalist principles and the story of Jesus of Nazareth. I really don't care about the historical accuracy of the Jesus story. I care about what Jesus is doing in my neighborhood today--and what he's doing in my neighborhood has everything to do with what I and others who profess to follow Jesus are doing. Through our actions, we embody to message of Jesus.

I close with these words from the African American Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka. These words evoke the spirit of my mission:

Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do, failed to overcome.

Be still my inner self
let me rise to you, let me reach
down into your pain
and soothe you.

I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of
the city, the worn tapestries of
brokerage firms,
drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag lady's cart
rage and pain in the faces that turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.

This common world I love anew,
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.

From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope
and I begin anew
the legacy of caring.[9]

A complete bibliography will be included in the final sermon of the series. All scriptural readings are from the New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) unless otherwise indicated.

Copyright 1997 by Roger Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Midrash Tanhuma, Kedoshim 10, quoted in J.Z. Smith, The Map is Not Territory (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), p. 112.
[2]Mt. 21:12-13.
[3]Lk. 15:1-2.
[4]Mt. 11:19.
[5]Gal. 3:28.
[6]Henri Nouwen, Letters to Marc About Jesus, p. 32.
[7]Mt. 5:8.
[8]Lk. 6:36.
[9]"The Legacy of Caring" by Thandeka, Reading #666 in Singing the Living Tradition.