By Andrea Lingle

It was Passover Week. The final bread was reduced to crumbs beneath the table. The linen was smudged and damp from the washing of feet. The olive grove was empty, and no longer smelled of fear and sanguine sweat. Jesus was surrounded and accused, so he said to his captors, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.”

Surprisingly, that didn’t go over well. Nothing was more sacred than the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus had chosen Passover week to make his proclamation? Prophecy? Threat? Jesus threatened to tear down what what most sacred, most precious, most valuable and give it back in a form that defies the system.

Not made with hands.

How do you measure value?

I remember my first job. I was a babysitter, and I had to charge. My mom helped me set me rate, although I never offered it unless asked because I always got more if I let parents set their own value on their time away. My rate was $2 per kid per hour. My value, to the average American family, was $2.28 per hour.

Perhaps value is the number of minutes of freedom a person can provide.

In 2017 my first book was released. It’s value was set at $17 (although the shrewd shopper can get it much cheaper than that), but the value to me is not well articulated by the number seventeen. The value to me is something separate from the words and paper and glue. That book represented a year long wrestling with what is means to be a lay person in a church pew.

Perhaps value is measured by what is done in a measure of time.

Charming anecdotes aside, we usually value things based on how much time and effort it takes to produce. By this metric, the temple was very valuable. Layer on that the added value of being a center of worship and social power, and one begins to see how devastating Jesus’s statement was.

I will tear down this temple, made and measured by your standards, and give you back something not made by hands. Something beyond the measure of this world. I will replace your ordering with an ordering, not of production, but of grace.

But he didn’t mean the building, did he?

They beat him and cut him out of the fabric of Jewish life. And there was evening and morning the first day.
And they buried him in a borrowed tomb. There was evening and morning the second day.
And there were footsteps in the garden. There was evening and morning the third day.

A new temple, not made of hands. A new way, not made of hands. A new thing entirely.