Lenten blog | March 4, 2024

Solomon's gold and Jesus' body

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 4th:  1 Kings 6:1-4, 21-22; Psalm 84; and 1 Corinthians 3:10-23.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Solomon’s Temple was richly adorned, as the 1 Kings passage lets us know.  Gold was everywhere.  This was intended to honour God.  The other side of the gold bar, however, is that this opulence sowed the seeds of Israel’s civil war and laid the groundwork for the diminishment of the Davidic kingdom. 

David’s city was Bethlehem of Judah, and Judah was favoured among the tribes of Israel even after David formed the unified country of Israel.  Jerusalem was a strategic choice of a capital.  Its story is much like that of Washington, D.C.  When the United States existed primarily along the Atlantic coast, Washington, D.C was located between the North and the South.  Additionally, it was independent of both.  It could not be claimed by either section of the country so that it could be claimed by the entire country.  Jerusalem stood between Judah to the south and the ten other tribes to the north.  Plus, it was captured from its Canaanite inhabitants so it belonged to no particular Jewish tribe.

When Solomon turned David’s rather provincial capital into a cosmopolitan city, it was expensive.  This is when we begin to hear of “forced labor.” (1King 4:6)  Solomon also superseded the traditional tribes of Israel.  He created twelve new administrative districts that were each charged with supplying the monarchy for one month each year.  You count those twelve districts in 1 Kings 4:8-19, but then it is written:  “And there was one official in the land of Judah.”  It seems as if Judah was exempt from this tax that the rest of Israel paid.

The opulence of the Temple magnified the divisions among the people, and after Solomon’s reign the nation separated into Israel in the north and the much smaller Judah in the south.  The Temple was replaced by other holy sites in the north where the majority of the Israelites lived.  The division led at first to different ways of worshipping Yahweh, and eventually to the worship of other gods, as well.  The Temple’s opulence remained, but at the cost of the people of God.

In yesterday’s Gospel reading in church, Jesus challenged the Temple authorities, “‘You destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’” (John 2:19)  John inserts an editorial comment a couple of verses later and writes, “[Jesus] was speaking of the temple of his body.” The center of our worship as Christians moves from place to person.  Jesus becomes our living temple.  Churches become sanctuaries because they are places that help us feel closer to Jesus.  If the church building were destroyed by fire on a Saturday night, the church could still gather in the fullness of its worship on Sunday morning because Jesus is our temple.  The richness of gold is replaced by the closeness of Christ.

Paul takes this another step further today when he writes, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”  The Bible begins with the truth that we are made in the image and likeness of God.  The Jesus story begins with His birth as one of us in this world, thus reaffirming the sanctity of all creation.  And Paul tells each of us that the Holy Spirit abides within us and we are, therefore, “God’s temple.”  I can’t imagine that the God of all creation is impressed by shiny gold, but the life and death of Jesus surely testify to the fact that God values us even more than God’s own self.  What an unbelievable richness this is. 
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.