Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
If you’ve ever been to a big sporting event, you know that the television crew has a huge trailer that they park in front of the stadium to broadcast the game. It’s essentially a mobile production office and coming out of the trailer are dozens of thick wires that connect to all of the various aspects of making the broadcast happen – satellite dishes, cameras, microphones, generators. Now imagine someone coming along who happens to believe that college football has become corrupt. And this person takes a pair of hedge trimmers and cuts every single cord coming out of that trailer. Would we call this incident “the cleansing of the broadcast?” I don’t think so. Why, then, do we refer to this event in the Gospel as the “cleansing of the Temple?”
It’s not so much that Jesus has cleansed the Temple in this reading from John as he has shut the whole thing down. He isn’t reforming, he’s disturbing and disrupting. Some context is helpful in understanding what has Jesus so fired up. As John notes, it’s Passover, which is the biggest of the Jewish pilgrimage festivals. Jews from all over Israel would journey to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices and remember God’s salvation and liberation in the Exodus from Egypt. Part of the rule on these sacrifices was that you offer your best to God. It’s something we still strive for today, a very noble goal – offer your best to God.
Deuteronomy makes it clear that the animals should be unblemished. But if you’re transporting an animals dozens of miles from home to Jerusalem, there’s little chance that if they started unblemished that they’ll arrive that way. It was a long, dangerous, and dirty journey. And so the law allows for the purchasing of unblemished animals in Jerusalem instead of trying to bring one with you. Nothing wrong with that, it’s Biblical and practical.
At the time, Israel was occupied by Rome and so the money that you used was Roman currency, which had the image of the Emperor on it. Well, it would be blasphemous to bring a coin with the depiction of an idol on it into the Temple. So to avoid idolatry, there were money changers set up to help people in converting the common currency into the Temple shekel, which would be the appropriate money to use to buy their unblemished animal to honor God. It’s hardly a corrupt system, but actually a gracious and practical one.
Now some people want to suggest that the corruption wasn’t the what, but the how. They’ll say, well, the people selling the animals or changing the money were charging excessive fees. Maybe that was the case, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem, at least, not in the way that John presents the narrative. Jesus doesn’t condemn the pastoral allowance for an animal to be purchased rather than transported, nor does he say anything about charging exorbitant prices for this convenience. No, for Jesus, the concern is captured when he says “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
Our English translation obscures the parallelism in the text; a word-for-word translation would say: Do not make the house of my father the house of a market. The issue for Jesus is “whose house is this?” It reminds me of the athletic gear company Under Armor’s first television commercial in 2003. It depicted several athletes getting ready for a game and the team’s captain is giving the pregame speech. He gets everyone pumped up by having them chant “We must protect this house! We must protect this house!” Well, that’s what Jesus is doing, he is protecting the house of God.
It’s not so much the practices that were happening in the Temple were corrupt and needed to be cleansed, but rather the mechanical nature of it all had turned it from a house of worship into a house of commercial transactions. Were people there to worship God or to conduct their religious business? The line between the two had become blurred, and that is the source of Jesus’ prophetic action in the Temple. The disciples then remembered Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me;” and realized that what led Jesus to drive out the animals and money changers wasn’t corruption, but rather zeal for the insistence that this is God’s house.
The Temple was the place of God’s holiness, and that was getting lost in the robotic and transactional nature of offering sacrifices. There was more focus being put on making the sacrifices happen than the one to whom the sacrifices were being offered. It’s something we still struggle with in our faith – are we really worshiping, or are we going through the motions? And certainly in the Episcopal Church, in which we are blessed with one of the richest, deepest, and most beautiful liturgical traditions in Christianity, the danger of worshiping the worship is real. We must always remember that worship is only a means to an end, not the object of our worship. Our liturgy and tradition point us to God, and if it becomes more than that, it is idolatry and Jesus would be justified in coming in here and ripping up some Prayer Books.
And notice that the Temple leadership knows that Jesus is right in his condemnation that the Temple had become a home for the market more than the home of God. They don’t confront or debate him on those points. When you’re involved in a dispute with someone who you know is right, but you aren’t ready to admit it, what do you do? You attack their credentials and question their authority. Haven’t we seen that this past week in the news? The students of Stoneman Douglas High School have been pleading their case to legislators for some reform on gun laws. Notice that the pushback isn’t against their ideas, but rather the pushback against these students has been along the lines of “You’re just a kid, what do you know?” There isn’t much new under the sun; this is the exact same thing that the Temple authorities are doing with Jesus.
They ask Jesus, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” In other words, “What authority do you have to come in here and disrupt the Temple?” Jesus hasn’t done anything wrong, if he had, they would have questioned him on that, or they would have arrested him right then and there. But Jesus isn’t wrong in questioning if the Temple is about God or religious transactions, and so they skip over that and try to undermine Jesus’ authority so he can be dismissed as a misguided prophet.
Jesus’ answer, of course, isn’t one that they understood or accepted. He says that he will destroy the Temple, and raise it up in three days. Of course, this was absurd. For one, it would take an army to destroy the temple, it wasn’t a one-man job. But furthermore, the Temple took 46 years to construct, there’s no way you’re going to rebuild it in three days. John, though, wants to make sure we don’t miss the fact that Jesus is speaking allegorically and adds “But he was speaking of the temple of his body” and notes that after his Passion and Resurrection this incident made sense.
And that last point is one that we must always keep in mind – nothing makes any sense when it is not viewed through the prism of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. But the notion of a Crucified Messiah and life coming after death are just so counterintuitive, we always need that reminder. As St. Paul put it in today’s Epistle, “the message about the Cross is foolishness” and is a “stumbling block.”
For Jesus, this isn’t about restoring or redeeming the Temple, it’s about the recapitulation of the meaning and purpose of the Temple. The Temple was the place where God’s presence rested, it was the place where sacrifices were made, it was the place where prayers were offered to God. Jesus is not eliminating any of these things and he is not merely tweaking the way they are done. Rather, he is retelling the story by making it known that the Temple is no longer a place but rather a person, and that changes everything.
Two chapters later in John, Jesus will say to the woman at the well “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” No longer must prayers be offered only at the Temple, but Jesus is our great mediator, bridging heaven to earth. No longer must you worry about converting currencies or transporting animals to make a sacrifice, rather you can offer your gifts, your money, your life to Jesus directly. And not only that, not only is Jesus the place of the sacrifice, but on the Cross, he also becomes the sacrifice itself.
And there are clues in the Greek that John uses to indicate that this is what Jesus meant. In the first part of the passage, the word used for Temple is the word that refers to the entire Temple complex, but when Jesus speaks of destroying the Temple, the word used refers to the sanctuary, the place of God’s holiness. The insinuation is that no longer will God’s presence be located in one place, but will be available in every place through him. And the word used for “raised up” is the very same used on the third day to speak of Jesus’ Resurrection. The Temple authorities are thinking in terms of construction and building a new temple, Jesus is speaking in terms of new life. They’re not even having the same conversation.
As we are at the half-way point in the Lenten season, preparing ourselves to see the grace of God fully revealed at Easter, this story orients us towards that grace. But if we don’t train ourselves to recognize grace when we see it, we’ll end up thinking it is foolishness or a stumbling block. Once we realize that the grace of God is seen hanging bloodied and beaten on the Cross, only then we can fully understand that the glory of God is not the glory of the world. Only then can we realize that love is more powerful than violence. Only then can we trust that God has gone to the depths of sin and death and that all is redeemed in his Resurrection.
The grace of God is a free gift to all, and it is to be encountered by all. It isn’t a transaction that simply bestows the status of “saved” or is something we mechanically receive. Rather, grace is the abundant life that God intends for us and which Jesus enables. As this disruption at the Temple shows us, grace is not something to be used, but something to grow into. And so if your prayer life seems mechanical, remember that it isn’t about the prayers, but the one to whom the prayers are offered. If you are questioning your faith, don’t spin your wheels trying to find the answer or sit on the sidelines until you figure it out, but rather dig deeper into it by engaging in the faith – sing the hymns like you mean them, serve the poor like your life depends on it (because it actually does), love like it’s the only thing that matters (because it actually is). And before you know it, that grace of God will be the most obvious thing in the world.
This is what Jesus is getting at in the Temple – faith isn’t a transaction, not a rote custom to be done. Faith is a way of being, a way of living. And that sort of faith doesn’t need a static temple made of stones, it needs a living and breathing body. And that’s what Jesus is as our Temple. By the grace of God, we are made parts of his Body, the new Temple of God. And what we will soon celebrate is the sacred gift of God’s grace in which we receive the Body of Christ. What you are given isn’t merely bread, it is the Temple of Jesus’ Body which was torn down and then Resurrected. And as you receive that Body of Christ, you are incorporated into that Body, that you might receive grace upon grace.
