THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

March 7, 2021

St. Uriel’s Church, Sea Girt, N.J.

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 

I Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul writes of Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” A helpful theme for our reflections this morning is thus God’s power and God’s wisdom.

When we think about it, wisdom and power are a good combination. King Solomon won God’s favor when, in response to the offer of anything he desired, he asked for the gift of wisdom to govern God’s people well. A powerful ruler who lacks wisdom is capable of doing all sorts of harm and damage to his realm and those under his care. Conversely, a wise ruler who lacks power may have all kinds of great ideas for the betterment of humankind but will likely be unable to put them into effect. So, then, wisdom and power together are the optimal combination.

A key component of the biblical definition of wisdom, moreover, is the capacity and inclination to know and choose the good and to refuse the evil. The devil may be intelligent and cunning, but he’s devoid of wisdom—and so are all who follow his path of choosing evil over good. By contrast, when we say that God is infinitely wise, we’re also saying that God is infinitely good. So God combines in himself power, goodness, and wisdom.

In today’s Old Testament readings, God proclaims both his power and his wisdom. Giving the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, God first identifies himself: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” It was a uniquely powerful God who could defeat Pharaoh and his army, liberate a collection of Hebrew slaves from bondage, and give them a new identity as a free people. That sort of divine power was unheard-of in the ancient Near-Eastern world. Most deities reinforced the social status quo rather than turning it upside-down. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was clearly a God of unprecedented power.

But then this all-powerful God reveals his wisdom by giving the Law, the Torah, summarized in the Ten Commandments. In Psalm 19 the psalmist celebrates the divine wisdom embodied in this great gift to God’s people Israel: “The law of the Lord is perfect, and revives the soul … The statutes of the Lord are just, and rejoice the heart … The commandment of the Lord is clear, and gives light to the eyes … The judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether … By them also is your servant enlightened, and in keeping them there is great reward.” The Law was not burdensome or oppressive but, on the contrary, the great gift of God’s wisdom for ordering the life of his people Israel.

Today’s New Testament readings reveal, however, a gap—a great chasm, in fact—between divine wisdom and what passes for human wisdom, expressed most clearly in the difference between conventional human understandings of power and the way in which God’s power actually operates. Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians that God has made foolish the world’s wisdom. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles …” 

The “signs” that Paul describes his fellow Jews as seeking are mighty acts, like the Exodus of old, that demonstrate God’s power at work in the world. The cross, by contrast, signifies not power but weakness, suffering, and apparent defeat, and so functions as “a stumbling block” to those seeking signs of victory and glory. For the very same reason, the cross also seems “folly” to Gentiles, since it contradicts the worldly wisdom which values power and success above all else.

Nonetheless, Paul affirms, to those who are called, both Jew and Greek, the cross reveals Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” In other words, on Good Friday, by his suffering and death on the cross, Christ exercises the divine omnipotence, an unimaginable power to forgive sins, to heal and to restore a fallen creation, according to a divine wisdom that runs infinitely deeper than the wisdom of the world.

But the cross is not God’s last word. In today’s Gospel from John, we hear again this demand for signs. After Jesus cleanses the Temple in Jerusalem of the vendors and moneychangers, the Jewish authorities ask of him: “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” The Lord’s response is somewhat cryptic and enigmatic: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” But, as John remarks, “He was speaking of the temple of his body.” The ultimate sign, then, vindicating Jesus’ identity and authority as the Messiah is his Resurrection from the dead on the third day. And it’s no accident that the early Christians saw the Resurrection as recapitulating the Exodus from Egypt. Just as in the Old Covenant God gave the great sign of his power by delivering Israel at the Red Sea, so in the New Covenant God gives a far greater sign of his power by raising Jesus from the dead.

After the Resurrection, John tells us, the disciples remembered that the Lord had said this. They’d already recognized his righteous anger in cleansing the Temple as fulfilling a verse from Psalm 69, “Zeal for thy house will consume me.” They were so immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures that they had absorbed the wisdom to understand at least some of what Jesus was saying and doing. And then, after Easter, they were able to recognize his resurrection as fulfilling his saying, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” As John puts it, the disciples “believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.” So the disciples relied on the divine wisdom to interpret the divine power at work in the Lord’s life, death, and resurrection.

Today’s readings thus invite us to immerse ourselves in the divine wisdom revealed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and most especially in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, who is himself Wisdom incarnate. That wisdom teaches us in turn to trust that God is most powerfully at work precisely in those places in our lives where we feel weakest and most vulnerable. In our discussions in the Wednesday Lenten Study on Grace in the Wilderness, a number of the comments expressed a sense of fear and insecurity born of a situation so beyond our control. But the same God who, in infinite power and wisdom, delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Christ from the dead, will surely bring us through all this, and safely home to our journey’s end.