The Tip of the Iceberg

“The Tip of the Iceberg”—Mark 14:55-59

Now the chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none.  For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony did not agree. Some stood up and gave false testimony against him, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’.” But even on this point their testimony did not agree. [Mark 14:55-59]

I never thought I would say this, but Jesus and Al Capone have something in common.

The famous Chicago gangster was notorious for organized crime, bootlegging, political corruption, and orchestrating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but he was only finally convicted on… tax evasion.  Everybody knew he was trouble, but the thing they finally caught him on seems a sort of side issue, almost something of a technicality.  And yet, tax evasion was, in fact, one part of his whole operation, even if it seems like it’s just the tip of the real iceberg.  Capone was a real threat, but the feds only ever caught him on something that, in the end, was small potatoes compared to the real menace he posed to law and order.

The same was true in the end with Jesus.  In the end, at his trial, the one charge the witnesses keep coming back to is some remark about destroying the temple and rebuilding it in three days (which John’s Gospel says was really all about Jesus’ death and resurrection on the third day all along), but that’s really only a small piece of what Jesus was really about.  Jesus really was a threat to the established order of things, even more subversive and more radical than most of his accusers even realized he was.  But a comment about the temple was just barely the tip of the iceberg.  Jesus was indeed dangerous to the order of the day—just not in the way any of the powers of that day understood threats to their existence.

The priests and religious establishment took offense at the idea of anyone threatening their Temple.  It symbolized God’s presence with the people--or more to the point, it symbolized access to God, which the respectable religious folk could control.  It served as the locus of sacrifice, as the meeting place between God and the covenant people, and kept people’s lives ordered with a system of “clean” and “unclean,” “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”  Threatening to knock down that Temple (which is not really what Jesus said, but what they all heard) would have interrupted all of that religious system, and after all, who did Jesus think he was?  If Jesus threatened the Temple somehow, he was a threat to all their order and control and neat, tidy piles of "good" people and "bad" people.

Well, that’s just the thing: Jesus wasn’t claiming just to be a troublemaker or rabble-rouser who wanted to knock things down.  He wasn’t a protester criticizing the corruption of the priestly system or an anarchist just looking to smash things—he was, in his own person, undermining not only the temple building, but the whole system of religion it stood for.  Jesus was offering himself as the last sacrifice and the new meeting-place between God and humanity. Jesus was placing himself as the new temple, and that put him on a collision course with the old one, and the whole priesthood and sacrificial system that went with it.  He was a wrecking ball, but Jesus had bigger fish to fry, frankly, than just knocking down walls of a worship space or driving out money-changers for a day.  Jesus was intent on ending a whole way of thinking and acting.  And he was spoke as someone who claimed God’s authority to do all of this.  That was a bigger threat than any of those false witnesses could have made up about Jesus.  He really was subverting the old order—but Jesus’ accusers only saw the brick-and-mortar side of it, not the complete overthrow of their understanding of how to relate to God.

The Romans had the same trouble with Jesus.  The only way they could understand him was as a political revolutionary or a military threat.  They heard him talk of the Reign of God/Kingdom of God and could only make sense of that as a threat to start a riot or an insurrection.  They saw the world as a huge game of King of the Hill, and that Jesus was one more upstart trying to challenge the empire and to take its place with one more new empire, the way the Romans had done to the Greeks, and the Greeks had done to the Persians before them, who had done the same to the Babylonians before them, and on and on back in a long chain.  They saw Jesus as a potential leader of a rebel army, when Jesus really had something even more radical in mind.  Jesus’ teaching, life, death, and resurrection called into question the whole game of King of the Hill that Rome had been playing.  He wasn’t trying to replace Caesar and make himself tyrant over the nations—Jesus set his sights on the whole notion of empires and their way of ruling at the point of a sword.  Jesus came to rule from a cross and to reign with a servant’s towel, and frankly that was something so revolutionary that Rome couldn’t event comprehend it.

Jesus was a threat, in other words, not just to the priests who happened to be in office or the emperor who happened to be in power, but to the whole system of priests and emperors, and the whole worldview that went with them, where coercion is how you get things done and animal sacrifices get you access to God.  Jesus was challenging that all of that.  He was a threat to that way of seeing reality. Jesus was going to attack death itself, and the system of sacrifices and military rule that came out of a world run by the fear of death.

Jesus, in other words, is intent on completely transforming each of us, too, and shaping the way we think, believe, speak, and act—not just making himself the next king of the hill. He is just that radical.

 And to think, the prosecution only nabbed him on an off-hand remark about knocking down the walls of a building.  Sounds like just the tip of the iceberg to me.

Lord Jesus, let us take in—as well as we are able—the fullness of your vision, and let us invite you into our lives to completely remake us and our ways of seeing the world.  We surrender to you.