Aug 26 | The hour has come: Summer 2018 Preaching Series, Part 11
Today’s citations:
1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
Although we will officially do our final wrap-up sermon in our series on kings next week, today’s readings are, in effect, the last readings in the saga of the first kings of Israel and Judaea. Next week’s passage, with which we’ll conclude, is from the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, and so while we may imagine it as a poetic gift from King Solomon, it’s not officially part of the narrative.
This week, we have a moment in our Hebrew Bible passage where, if it was a film, the music would swell and the camera would focus on tearful faces as the ark was finally brought into the temple that God had promised would be Solomon’s legacy. God’s presence is made known by the presence of a great cloud in the temple, which may speak to us here in BC a little more deeply than we’d like.
Solomon marks this momentous occasion, this culmination of God’s covenant with the Davidic dynasty, with a beautiful, eloquent prayer. This prayer shows us that once again there is a man on the throne of Israel who knows his place in God’s world. He extols God with majestic language, even admitting that his own temple, the promised home that God tasked him to build, is not a container but a shrine.
What’s most striking about this prayer is the last part of the passage we hear. Solomon says,
“[W]hen a foreigner comes and prays towards this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling-place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built.â€
This piece is striking because it highlights what would become a complicated relationship with foreigners in the young nation. On the one hand, this request that God hear the prayers of foreigners within the temple is a lovely call to openness and goodwill, Solomon’s memory of the commandments to be hospitable to the foreigner as the people were once foreigners in Egypt. However, while Solomon is greatly beloved in Jewish tradition as the wise king who built the first temple, the writers of his story chastise him much later for his dalliances with foreign women. We learn that when Solomon is very old, his young wives and concubines turn away his heart to foreign gods, and though God attempts to get through to him a few times, she is not successful. It is then that Solomon is cursed to lose his kingdom – although not in his lifetime, out of God’s love for Solomon’s father David.
All of that’s far in the future, however. Right now, this is a moment when Solomon is on the right path, calling on God to draw all people into an embrace big enough for the whole universe. God is Solomon’s first love, and having been drawn into Solomon’s heart through the request for wisdom, God pours out blessing and glory for this beloved servant.
This is one way that our texts show us to respond in fealty to God, the monarch of our hearts.
The other is perhaps stranger, but poignant.
Here, contrasting the image of all the world streaming to the temple, is Jesus, from whom people are now beginning to turn away. While just as eloquent as Solomon, the words he says are too much for the people around him. The writer of John’s Gospel is careful to say that Jesus is not bothered by this. We must remember that the evangelist’s devotion is so strong that he paints a Jesus who is in complete control of events. Jesus knows who is destined to follow and who is destined to leave.
But folks do leave. The call to eat flesh and drink blood – taboo enough by itself but most especially the call to consume blood, which was not permitted under Jewish law – was a step too far. The temple of Jesus’ body is not going to be a place where many gather and lift up their prayers to God.
At least, not yet.
In the Gospel of John we are haunted by the phrase, ‘the hour had not yet come.’ This hour is, strangely enough, not the moment of the crucifixion, although that is bound up in it. The moment comes when Philip the disciple brings the Greeks who wish to see Jesus. Jesus responds by saying, “The hour has come for the Child of the Human One to be glorified.â€
Jesus has become, in a sense, a beacon, like Solomon’s temple, shining a light to all nations. But of course this is not the final moment of glory. For the evangelist, Jesus is first enthroned on the cross. He is lifted up, a beacon for all, and indeed pouring forth scarlet and sapphire glory from the wound in his side in a powerful image of death and birth woven together.
This may seem a shocking contrast to the triumph of Solomon, but on a broader read, you will probably see parallels. After all, there’s a reason why history refers to the first and second temple periods. Solomon’s temple is destined for destruction at the hand of the Babylonian Empire. The temple that followed it, even grander than the first, was also destroyed, this time by the Romans.
The writer of the Gospel of John was quite deliberate in the temple imagery used to describe Jesus. Most scholars agree that John was written decades after Jesus’ death, so the writer would have known of the second temple’s destruction. This would have been a devastating and traumatic time for the Jewish people – and of course the followers of Jesus still counted themselves as Jewish people then. To comfort the community, this writer, like many other Jewish writers trying to come to terms with this terrible loss, wrote of a God who could raise up temples as well as nations and lead them into a new understanding of what it meant to be a people of God, and indeed, into a new understanding of God. Here was a God who was not tethered to earth but chose to visit it with an everlasting presence of love. In the infant church the story began to reflect a God who was so close to us that there was no need to even be separate from our flesh, and so chose to take on the form of one who walked among us and knew all of our struggles, our joys, our sorrows, and our pain.
Over the last few months we have been exploring this notion of monarchy and what it looks like on earth versus how it looks in heaven. We have discovered a divine monarch unlike any monarch on earth: a monarch who calls all of us into deeper relationship rather than seeking to cement a hierarchy.
This is a monarch who is both more powerful and more generous than any earthly monarch or leader we could ever hope to see, perhaps the only real entity worthy of the title. But it is a paradoxical power made manifest in weakness. While the kings and queens and politicians of history seek to both consolidate authority and soften their image to us through the use of media or propaganda or photo-ops, our divine king comes to us wrapped only in the stories we once told centuries ago and continue to tell around this table. And yet, this monarch’s power is so great that, despite a chasm of years almost too great to imagine, those stories still speak to us, not only from this book, but in our own lives and in the world around us.
We look at cultural movements and heroic lives and the regenerative powers of the earth and the undying light of justice and see this story. We look at the cycle of stars and trees and mountains and oceans and see this story told in tongues other than our own. We look at people from every corner of the earth who have adopted the story for their own and we see this king in a rainbow of skin tones and orientations and languages and he is still ours and he is still us.
Just as we have been called to come and be known – so let us come and know this heavenly monarch, stronger than Saul, more faithful than David, and wiser than Solomon.