THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD

                                             

Sermon delivered on the Third Sunday in Lent, the 15th March 2009 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

 Scriptures: Exodus 20: 1-17                    1 Corinthians 1: 18-25               John 2: 13-22

 

John 2: 15  “Making a whip of cords, Jesus drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and He poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And He told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father's house a house of trade.”

 

THE SAME JESUS

Someone might ask: Is this really the same Jesus that in S. Matthew 5:39 taught, “Do not resist one who is evil. If any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”? The answer, of course, is that it is indeed the same Jesus. If we find it difficult to reconcile Jesus' actions with His teaching here, it should be taken as an invitation to us to stand back and give a closer examination to the action in the Temple and to the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and the context of each one. Our apprehension of the Person of Jesus, and certainly the evidence of the total record of His words and actions that we have, leave no room for us to judge that His actions and His words would be in any way inconsistent.

 

ETHICS OF VIOLENCE

In ways of thinking that are prevalent in modern times violence of any sort is considered to be something wrong or bad in itself, and no doubt there are many who would see Jesus’ actions in the temple as evidence that He too could sometimes have a bad day. For Jesus is recorded to have employed here the threat, at least, of corporal punishment with a whip, and it must have taken quite a while for the temple accountants and auditors to get things straightened out after the human whirlwind had gone through and upset everything. If violence is always to be deplored, then Jesus’ actions here would have to be judged deplorable. As Christians we should stand back from such an assessment and adopt an independent position, one that understands that there are circumstances that justify compulsion, as in fact carefully written Conventions and Bills of Rights also do, and sometimes even violence. We would accept that this should be justifiable and proportionate.

 

KILLING OR MURDERING

In the Ten Commandments, which comprised our Old Testament Lesson today, the sixth commandment, in our usual way of counting them, is, “You shall not kill”. That is rendered in the Prayer Book and in the Revised Version as “Thou shalt do no murder.” The Authorised Version, which the Prayer Book usually follows, sticks to the form “Thou shalt not kill.” So, does the commandment refer to all killing, or are the Prayer Book and the Revised Version correct in judging that the killing being prohibited is the crime of murder, and not the sanctions of capital punishment or the killings that military personnel are trained and authorized to carry out in the circumstances of war? The witness of the Old Testament comes down heavily on the side of the Prayer Book. The Mosaic Law clearly prescribes and regulates capital punishment, and this could not therefore be understood to be prohibited by the very commandment that the regulations seek to enforce. Similarly, there are many occasions in which the children of Israel are urged to war. The killing that this necessarily entails is never understood to infringe generally the Mosaic Law.

 

NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

You might ask, though, whether Jesus' own teaching might not supersede the Old Testament teaching  and forbid absolutely all killing. In S. Matthew 5: 21-26, Jesus points out that the anger itself that gives rise to the personal killing of someone by his brother or neighbour, is under the judgment of God. By anger or insults against our brother or neighbour, we become murderers already in God's eyes. Yet Jesus is recorded as having conversations with authorities that had the power to enforce capital punishment, and with a centurion who, no doubt, was trained to kill in time of war. Although it is dangerous to argue from a negative, it is true that nowhere does He convey the sense that their occupations are fundamentally necessarily wrong about this. From the earliest times the Christian church included those in soldierly service to the state. Other apostolic teaching in the New Testament specifically states, and this would be arguing from the positive, that the governing authorities, established by God, have the duty of bearing the sword and of using it for just purposes. In the New Testament as well as in the Old, therefore, there is a distinction drawn between personal killing, including in the New Testament personal character assassination, and the exercise by secular authority of its powers of just punishment even to the point of capital punishment, or of its rightful use of the sword of war, as our Article 37 may confirm. Modern social theory, on the other hand, regards or is close to regarding capital punishment as abhorrent on the grounds of being always cruel and unusual, or in other words as of a similar character to the very crime of murder for which the sentence was administered.

 

JESUS IN GOVERNMENT

Let us turn back now from these ethical issues to the meaning of Jesus' actions in driving out those who were profiting financially from the money exchange arrangements in place in the temple in Jerusalem, invalidly displacing the true place of prayer within the Court of the Gentiles. We have seen that His words about not resisting one who is evil and turning the other cheek did not prevent Him from using force, albeit non-lethal force, in these circumstances. We can note first that this was not the action of someone who had been personally slighted or injured by anyone; rather, they were the actions of one who considered himself to hold rightful authority or government. It appears that He was putting into effect the will of His Father, and being His Father's Son He possessed the authority to do it. The principle was :“You shall not make My Father's house a house of merchandise”. He was exercising His Father's government in His Father's house, and this government like all government required some force.

 

AUTHORITY THROUGH SACRIFICE

Right government, however, requires a spirit of sacrifice from those in authority, perceived in the modern lexicon sometimes as “responsibility” or “duty”, and even in this short episode of the exercise of authority by Jesus, this also comes to light. For when He was asked for His credentials for taking the action He did, or as they said for a “sign” for doing it, He said “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” He was speaking enigmatically so that they could not understand that He was referring to His own body, and even the disciples did not understand until the resurrection. His credentials for taking the action in the temple that He did would not become clear until, in the words of St. Paul, He was designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead. Probably none of the temple authorities at the time would have accepted that He had any authority whatever to have taken the action He did. Only through the victory of His own sacrifice would it eventually become clear to anyone that He actually did have rightful authority, conferred upon Him, as He all along implied, by His Father.

 

THE TRUE STRENGTH