The Legacy of Solomon’s Temple

• Before Solomon built the temple at Jerusalem, worship was done in a number of sanctuaries, most prominently Shiloh, which was destroyed by the Philistines.
• Solomon’s temple: 1 Kings 6-7
• “Solomon constructed the temple as a central element of his successful efforts to centralize the power of the king office in Israel.” (AK location 3709)
• Solomon also implemented a system of tax districts
• “Under Solomon’s administrative policies the concern for equitable distribution of economic resources reflected in the covenant law codes is displaced by an economics of privilege that begins to create sharp class divisions of wealth and poor within Israel.” (AK location 3721)
• “The construction of the temple on ‘Mount Zion’ creates in Israel a tradition in tension with the prophetic/Torah tradition.” (AK location 3731)
• “For Mosaic faith, Israel serves a transcendent God, not simply a God who supports Israel’s interests whatever they may be.” … “With Solomon, God enters Israel’s life at the beck and call of the king and his minions. The king’s servants control access to God.” (AK location 3745)
• “Israelites came to see the temple as evidence for God’s support of Israel.”
• “The prophets, at their most intense, portray the temple as being opposed to God.” (AK location 3798)
• Jeremiah 7 contains harsh words for the temple and its leaders. Jeremiah 7:9-11 (AK location 3808)
• “In violent and daring ways, Ezekiel makes clear that all to which Yahweh has been committed is revocable.” (AK location 3823)

The Second Temple

• Solomon’s temple is destroyed in 587 BCE by the Bablyonian armies
• Most the Judean ruling class from Jerusalem is deported to Bablyon, then after the Persian Empire conquered the Bablyons the Jewish exiles were allowed to return to Palestine. The Persian’s allowed the Israelites to rebuild the temple on a much more modest scale. (Ezra 1-2)
• This second temple was constructed under the leadership of Zerubbabel in the years 520-516 BCE
• Walter Brueggemann: “..a miracle wrought by the Judeans themselves. They were the only people in antiquity exiled from the homeland and national religion who maintained their religious and social identity in captivity.” (AK location 3838)
• “That the elite of the empire approved the rebuilding of Israel’s temple and its faith community indicates that they saw such efforts to serve the empire’s purposes.” (AK location 3853)
• In the years that followed, Jews exhibited various attitudes towards the second temple.
• Beliefs linked with the first temple — the temple as the dwelling place of God, unique in all the earth. Both Ezekiel and Zechariah seems to acknowledge this.
• Others rooted in the story expressed more hostility toward the temple. “This more negative viewpoint found expression in the emergent apocalyptic expressions of faith that arose during the inter-testamental period.” (AK location 3867)

The Temple in Jesus’s Time

• “The temple housed the one Jewish altar on which the high priest performed the sacrificial rites of atonement once a year for the entire Jewish world.” (AK location 3879)
• Forgiveness of people’s sins
• After the Romans gained control of Palestine, they established Herod as their client king. Herod embarked on an ambitions building project, expanding the temple greatly.
• “As many as 18,000 priests participated in the temple activities.” (AK location 3892)
• The temple treasury functioned as a huge national bank. Devout Jews living beyond Palestine traveled to the temple three times a year to celebrate religions festivities.
• Feast of Passover – deliverance from Egypt
• Feast of Pentecost – thanks for the first fruits of the harvest
• Feast of Tabernacles – gratitude for the completed harvest
• Day of Atonement
• Holiday in autumn
• High priest sacrificed a goat for his own sins and sent another one into the desert for the sins of the people.
• Only the high priest, in purity, could part the curtains and enter the holy of holies in the very presence of God once a year on the Day of Atonement.
• The Sanhedrin, the final Jewish authority in religious, political, and civil matters, made their home at the temple, along with the high priest.
• The high priest became the most powerful Jewish leader in relation to the occupying Roman leaders.
• The religious party that centered in Jerusalem and made up most of the Sanhedrin were known as the Sadducees.
• The Sadducees rejected the oral tradition and professed skepticism about personal immortality, including the resurrection.
• Generally came from the wealthy upper class
• Accepted Roman occupation and cooperated in order to keep the temple viable
• “Unlike with Leviticus, for the temple in the first century sacrifice served as a means to connect with God that required the mediation of the religious institution whose wealth and power served the king’s interests.” (AK location 3949)
• “Sacrifice in Leviticus stems from an experience of God’s mercy and serves the community as a whole, not only the power elite.”
• “As a ‘conservative,’ that is, one who drew directly from the tradition of Moses as filtered through prophetic critique, Jesus ended up on a collision course with the temple hierarchy — a course that exposed the true nature of religious institutionalism, its violence and subservience to political authoritarianism.” (AK location 3949)

Jesus and the Temple

• “Jesus had a nuanced attitude toward the temple and its sacrificial system” (AK location 3960)
• He understood the sacrificial system as peripheral to the dynamics of salvation (“I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” Matt 9:13 and 12:7 quoting Hos 6:6)
• The two birth accounts, in Matthew and Luke, give a mixed perspective on Jesus’s relation with the temple.
• Luke tells of his parents dedicating him in the temple (Luke 2:21-40), their dedication frame as adherence ‘to the law of Moses.’ Encounter to old ‘saints’ Simeon and Anna, both who praise God when they see Jesus for God’s work of salvation.
• “So, Luke presents Jesus coming from a devout family that observed temple rituals, and he shows that in the temple itself people are found who understand Jesus as an agent of God’s saving work for the whole world.” (AK location 3990)
• “The impression in Matthew’s birth story is subtler. For one thing, Matthew does not actually mention the temple.”
• Up until Jesus’s final entry into Jerusalem, the temple plays a peripheral role in stories of Jesus’s ministry. In particular, when Jesus pronounced people forgiven, he circumvented the temple’s role in the process of dealing with sins.

Jesus’s Conflict with Religious Institutionalism

• “The problem with the temple is that it has failed to be ‘a house of prayer for all the nations.’ Instead, the temple had become a center for religious exclusivism and economic exploitation.” (AK location 4053)
• “For Mark’s Gospel, there is a clear connection between Jesus being put to death and Jesus’s conflict with the temple, Jerusalem’s center of religious institutionalism” (AK location 4117)
• Mark 11:12-13:38
• Mark 13 begins with the foretelling of the destruction of the temple
• “Mark’s treatment of the temple concludes in Mark 15:38. When Jesus died, ‘the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.’ The torn ‘curtain of the temple’ juxtaposes Jesus and the temple as alternative places of divine presence. (AK location 4101)
• “In the end, though Jesus’s death does not signal that the religious authorities were victorious. Jesus’s death actually signifies the opposite. The temple curtain is torn. Jesus, even on the cross, fulfills what the temple was meant to and did not — he engendered worship of God by Gentiles as well as Jews. The Gentile centurion confesses, ‘surely this was God’s son’ (Mark 15:39)
• “So, in effect, the old temple must be torn down, and a new, open and inclusive temple based on Jesus himself must take its place.” (AK location 4143)
• “Institutionalism stifles creativity. When institutional survival takes priority, then order, security, peace at all costs take precedence.” (AK location 4143)

Cultural Exclusivism (Law)

• “I will argue that Jesus died because he challenged the main cultural and political Powers of his day — the law, the temple, and the empire.” (AK location 3156)
• 1. he overtly critiqued the Powers
• 2. he established alternative social practices that bypassed the Powers’ domination
• Walter Wink: “The death of Jesus was not ‘necessary’ because God needed Jesus killed in order to save the world. Rather, Jesus was killed because the Powers are in rebellion against God and are determined to silence anyone who slips through their barbed-wire perimeter with a message from the sovereign of the universe.” (AK location 3169)
• Disagreement with the Pharisees over how to best understand and apply the law.
• Jesus recognized that the temple had not been part of Mose’s original mediation of God’s will for God’s people. Recognized how it was being used to exploit the Hebrew people.
• The conflict with the empire seems indirect, but “if we take seriously Jesus’s message of God’s kingdom, we will recognize that he articulated a vision for social life that overturned the values of empire.” (AK location 3191)

Torah and Cultural Exclusivism

• “The post-exilic existence of the Jewish people was always uneasy, a struggle to sustain their identity without being a nation-state.” (AK location 3249)
• Out of this struggle came strategies to maintain identity with the establishment of “boundary markers” to make clear who was in the community and who was not.
• Male circumcision
• Kosher eating habits
• Observing the Sabbath
• Prohibiting marriages between those who were in the community and those who were not in the community.
• “In the prophet’s view, when boundary markers reminded people of God’s already given mercy and their calling to bless the nations, they would be creative and life-sustaining.” BUT “They could be absolutized, seen to provide a sense that our community’s survival in and of itself matters most.” (AK location 3269)
• Jonah is believed to be written at about the same time as Ezra. Ezra and Nehmiah portray sympathetically the necessary and creative efforts to sustain peoplehood in the context of colonialism.
• Grimsrud says the tensions between Ezra and Nehemiah versus Jonah prefigure the tensions we see in the Gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees.
• Jonah is likely intended to challenge an uncritical tendency to absolutize the boundary markers
• “The character of Jonah echoes the mindset of Hebrews who think only of their internal life when he rejects the call to share the word of God with outsiders.” (AK location 3279)
• Not just any outsiders, but the Ninevites lived in the capital city of Assyria, the great empire that plagued Israel and Judah
• God is way bigger than the boundaries of Israel
• “This story reiterates the ‘light-to-the-nations’ calling and implies that efforts to sustain the community still need to keep that calling in mind.” (AK location 3290)
• Jonah concludes with an open question: “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” We are not given Jonah’s answer.

The Traditions of the Pharisees

• Jesus did not affirm the Pharisees’ use of the oral law. The Pharisees gave more authority to traditional interpretations that sought to apply Torah more widely.
• After the Bablyonian exile, the Jewish community sought more faithfulness to Torah. A verse-by-verse commentary known as Midrash was developed.
• Midrash applied specific laws more directly
• Midrash was passed on by word of mouth over generations, hence “oral law”
• A second type of oral law emerged about 200 years before Jesus
• This second type, the Mishnah, concerned itself with applying Torah to circumstances not spoken of in the biblical writings.
• A written version of the Mishnah, called the Talmud, was not produced until the 4th century CE.
• The Mishnah also came to be called the oral law, or as in Mark 7:5 the “tradition of the elders.”
• “The Pharisees probably emerged around the same time as the beginnings of the Mishnah, and may have understood their role to be the main guardians and appliers of these teachings.” (AK location 3302)
• “The Mishnah guided religions practice among Palestinian Jews, attempting to speak to all kinds of religious issues that might arise.” (AK location 3314)
• Can laborers on top of a tree or wall offer a prayer?
• If one is naked and makes a dough offering from barley in one’s house, does that make the offering unclean?
• Can a man divorce his wife for burning a meal?
• “The Pharisees sought to give clear direction to observant Jews concerning how to apply Torah to concrete living.” (AK location 3325)
• Black and white
• “Theologically, the calamity of 586 BCE was seen as God’s judgement upon Israel because of its corruption by the practices of the nations.” (AK location 3325, quoting Borg)
• Mishnah devotes 240 paragraphs to Sabbath behavior, outlining in detailed specificity what could and could not be done.
• “When the central concern became to sustain boundary markers more than to celebrate God’s mercy, the tone of Sabbath legislation changed.” (AK location 3337)
• Because the Sabbath had become crucial for a sense of community identity, violation of the Sabbath threatened the entire community.
• The Mishnah devoted 185 pages to laws of defilement and purity.
• Kosher eating practices stemmed from a concern about maintaining purity
• Should a pure person share a meal with an impure person, the latter’s pollution was understood to be contagious.
• Circumcision stood as a central externally apparent boundary marker throughout the biblical period
• By the time of the prophets it had become an ambiguous symbol
• Jeremiah 9:25-26 criticizes Israel, said to be “circumcised only in the foreskin” but “uncircumcised in heart.”
• “Throughout the biblical tradition we see tensions concerning the use of these boundary markers.” (AK location 3385)

Jesus and the Pharisees

• Recall the escalating conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees noted in Chapter 5
• “The similarity between Jesus and the Pharisees — sharing the same tradition, struggling with the same questions, competing for the allegiance of the same people — accounts for the depth of the conflict between them.” (AK location 3421, Borg)
• “For Jesus to enter the scene as one who rigorously observed Torah and gained a public following but did not join the Pharisees meant he would be seen as a direct rival.” (AK location 3441)
• Matthew 12
• Mark 2:27 has a slightly different phrasing behind the meaning of the contrasts highlighted in Matthew 12. “the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”
• “One emphasizes that the deeper meaning of the law (i.e., mercy) allows for flexibility in how the details are practiced, as long as we are serving human well-being. The other points more to strict consistency, assuming that each piece of the regulations carries equal weight and that to violate one is to violate the whole” (AK location 3474)
• “The issue is not law or no law; the issue is how the law is interpreted.” (AK location 3486)
• “What is at stake in this conflict? Why would the Pharisees conspire to destroy Jesus because of these altercations? We may see at the heart of the Pharisees response, according to these stories, the conviction that the integrity of their purity project might require the use of violence to be sustained.” (AK location 3498)
• Pharisees core = purity to replicate in their social life the holiness of God by maintaining the holiness to which God has called the people in Lev 19:2
• Jesus core = forgiveness because he views God as a God of mercy, Luke 6:36
• “The Pharisees became convinced that they determined who did and who did not have the possibility of gaining God’s favor.” (AK location 3547)
• “With the covenant community so concerned with its own survival, the original vocation given this community — to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 49:6) — may be pushed to the side.” (AK location 3557)
• Does this issue sound familiar? The role of women in the church? Sexuality? Biblical authority?

The Law and Retribution Toward Jesus

• “Jesus and the Pharisees differed sharply over the relative weight to be given to strict adherence to regulations as compared to mercy-oriented flexibility.” (AK location 3557)
• We see in Matthew 12:1-14 a direct conflict between the forces of cultural exclusivism and the true God.
• Cultural exclusivism and its reliance on the law understood in a legalistic way proves itself to be a Power in rebellion against the true God.
• Conflicts with the Pharisees continued. In the years following Jesus death, the Pharisees led violent opposition to Jesus’s followers. (the stoning of Stephen in Acts) The early Jesus movement rejected cultural exclusivism and that led to the inclusion of Gentiles as Gentiles into their version of the covenant community — and ongoing conflicts. (AK location 3606)

The Powers and the Story of Jesus’s Death

• “The story tells us that the logic of retribution was an instrument of the fallen Powers, not God–and that Jesus’s followers should see in the story a direct refutation of that logic.” (AK location 2600)
• “We have not resolved the issue of salvation until we face the fact that people resist God’s love.”
• Jesus faced resistance from three types of sources:
• 1. Cultural exclusivism: the interpretation of the Torah by the Pharisees
• 2. Religions institutionalism: temple practicies
• 3. Political authoritarianism: the government of the Roman Empire
• “The law, temple, and empire may be understood in terms of the Powers analysis developed by Walter Wink.” (AK location 2611)
• “Wink presents the Powers in terms of the basic social structures of human life.”
• “The Powers rely on belief. As long as we believe in their ultimacy, trusting in them for security and meaning, the Powers rule. Jesus challenges human beings to change our allegiance.” (AK location 2632)
• “That Jesus died as he did shows that the logic of retribution reflects a rejection of God’s will, not its fullfillment.” (AK location 2643)
• “The Gospels understand Jesus’s death as the key event in the story they tell. My question is this: why is Jesus’s death so important to this story?”
• Jesus’s death links with salvation in that:
• 1. it exposes the fallacy of the logic of retribution
• 2. it exposes the direct link between this “murderous” logic and the institutions that exploit it
• 3. it exposes that the spiral of violence set loose by this logic may be broken only by non-retaliation and mercy in the way Jesus embodied them
• 4. it sets the stage for God’s act that vindicates Jesus through his resurrection

Setting the Stage: Birth Narratives

• Matthew and Luke’s birth narratives foreshadow coming conflicts, particularly King Herod’s response to the knowledge of Jesus’s birth.

Initial Tensions

• Temptations of Jesus as recorded in Luke. Luke points to coming conflicts when he concludes after the temptations: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed until an opportune time.” (Luke 4:13)
• Luke then goes on to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in his home and after an initially positive response Jesus pushes the issue with two examples of how God’s blessing came to Gentiles in the time of the past prophets Elijah and Elisha, in part due to the hard hearts of the Hebrews. The synagogue is filled with rage and seek to kill Jesus.

Conflicts Intensify

• In this section Grimsrud focuses on Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees, with the conflict between the two increasing.
• “Jesus makes clear an inevitable, unavoidable link between following his way and conflict with the Powers that were so hostile to him. The inevitability of conflict reflects the nature of the Powers. They will not relinquish their domination without a fight.” (AK location 2796)
• “When they [the Pharisees] criticize him for welcoming so-called ‘sinners’ and those labeled ‘unclean,’ they reveal that their own priorities lay contrary to the actual priorities of God.” (AK location 2826)
• Luke 11:45-52. “Jesus links himself with the prophets of old who were killed by the lawyers’ ancestors in Israel. Understandably, given the vehemence of Jesus’s critique, Luke reports that the lawyers and Pharisees ‘begin to be very hostile toward him…'” Luke 11:53-54 (AK location 2849)
• “The die is cast. Jesus faces deadly foes”
• “The system is corrupt; the hold of the Powers must be broken. And conflict will grow, because the Powers will not surrender.” (AK location 2863)

Jesus’s Final Days

• Begins with Jesus’s entry in to Jerusalem in a kingly manner, although rather than with a show of power, he road on the back of a donkey.
• Jesus’s opponents change from the Pharisees to the chief priests and Sadducees, the temple authorities.
• Jesus then moves on to the temple. Jesus charges that the temple has become a den of robbers. “Unlike with the Law, Jesus seems to see the temple as a dead end, not a structure that can be restored to an original, life-enhancing purpose.” (AK location 2926)
• “So when he curses the fig tree, drives out the merchants, tells the parable of the vineyard, and predicts the actual physical destruction of the temple, Jesus sets himself firmly against the religious structures that dominate his culture. Jesus exposes the collaboration of religious institutionalism with political authoritarianism–and thereby makes clear that both stand in opposition to Israel’s true God.” (AK location 2955)
• “Pilate mostly, though, treats Jesus as a tool to manipulate the Jewish leaders and to transfer the crowd’s support for Jesus into support for Rome. Pilate’s intention is not placate ‘the Jews’ but to humiliate them.” (AK location 3027)
• Grimsrud then details how Pilate manipulates the Jewish authorities to get what he wants, a public confession from the chief priests of the emperor’s sovereignty. “The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king by the emperor'” John 19:15
• “Jesus was one of those thousands of Jews executed publicly on crosses, because what they represented had to be suppressed in order to safeguard law and order in the Roman state.” (AK location 3055) (McClaren, Pax Romana)
• “How is the story of Jesus’s death related to the Bible’s portrayal of salvation?” I believe that at the heart of the saving relevance of the story we find an exposure of the Powers of cultural exclusivism, religious institutionalism, and political authoritarianism as responsible for Jesus’s death. They too easily become idols that claim trust that is due God alone. As such, they become the very forces from which God’s saving work means to liberate human beings.”
• “The resurrection adds a profound message of vindication to the entire story.”
• “From start to finish, Jesus’s message totally reinforced the original story. His resurrection vindicates this message. (AK location 3083)
• “Jesus died to illumine the ages-old truth–God’s mercy seeks healing for all who trust in it. This mercy perseveres even in the face of the powerful violence of its enemies.” (AK location 3095)

Tension between Jesus teaching and practicing a ministry of love and that Jesus died a criminal’s death. Three options for deciding how to interpret the relationship between these two:

• 1. The logic of retribution resolves the tension by minimizing the significance of Jesus’s teaching and practices. For salvation only two points matter: (a) Jesus was sinless and (b) Jesus died a sacrificial death and therefore Jesus’s crucifixion is the means to achieve salvation.
• Grimsrud says the problem is that this notion of salvation was foreign to Jesus and to the Old Testament salvation story.
• 2. The other extreme, all that actually matters is the truthfulness of Jesus’s message of love.
• Grimsrud says this is closer, “however Jesus’s execution may have importance for how we understand salvation.” (AK location 2561)
• 3. The approach taken in this book: Jesus’s crucifixion is crucial for how we understand the Bible’s salvation story, but not because it adds a needed element that makes salvation possible. “Rather, Jesus’s crucifixion illumines what is at stake in God’s efforts to bring healing to the world, what forces oppose these efforts, and how those forces may be overcome.” (AK location 2573)
• In other words, Jesus’s crucifixion says more about those who oppose God than about God himself.