Ever-loving God, give us the grace to trust
that in seeking first your Kingdom, all that we need will be given to us as
well ☩ in the name of
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The English scholar and Bishop NT Wright gives us a modern retelling of this episode from the second chapter of John that might give us a better sense of the scandal and shock of it all. Imagine that it’s the day of a really important test at school – maybe end-of-year testing or the SAT. Well, one particular student walks into the classroom and heads straight for the teacher’s desk and picks up the pile of exam booklets and begins ripping them apart and tossing them out the window. He then turns to the teacher and the principal who happened to be in the room for such an important test and says to them, “This whole thing is a disgrace and you ought to be ashamed of your behavior. This whole system is full of corruption!” Stunned, the principal says “And just who do you think you are to be telling us this?” The disruptive student says, “Look, you can fail me, expel me, it doesn’t matter. But I’m going to college and I’m going to study law and I’ll be back one day to put an end to corruption like this. Your system is done for.” Our student then slips out and marches on out of the school.
That
level of defiance and disruption is what Jesus is up to in John this morning.
It’s Passover – the biggest holiday in the Jewish year, both a religious and a
political event. Imagine Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled up into
one. One of the things that happened at the Passover was the sacrificing of
animals on behalf of the people. Sure, there were daily sacrifices made at the
Temple, but Passover was different. Passover is a pilgrimage festival – so, yes,
maybe you usually worship at a synagogue in Galilee or somewhere else in
Israel, but at Passover, many traveled to Jerusalem to take part in the rituals
at the Temple itself. And the way this worked is that you want to offer your
best to God – so an unblemished dove or lamb. And this is something we
understand. My guess is that a fair number of you are perhaps in your
loungewear or pajamas still – but back in the days when we could actually come
to church, many of you wore your “Sunday best.” Well, it’s the same idea, we
bring our best to God.
The
problem is that when you’ve got to travel hundreds of miles from home to get to
Jerusalem, it’s sort of hard to bring an animal for the sacrifice. Maybe that
lamb started out pristine when you left home, but now it’s a bit dirtier after
the long journey. Not to mention, it’s a lot more of a challenge to travel with
the animal than it would be to travel without it. Recognizing this, in one of
the outer courts of the Temple you could purchase an unblemished animal.
Amazing! Sort of like Amazon Prime for the sacrifice.
The
other problem is how you pay for this convenience. You’re living under Roman
occupation – all of your money has the head of the emperor on the coin. Maybe
that works for buying grain or olives back home, but you can’t bring that sort
of coin into the Temple, that’s blasphemy. We heard it right in the first
reading this morning: “I am the Lord
your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for
yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The
coin is a clear violation, you can’t buy a pure and unblemished dove with an
idolatrous and dirty coin – that pulls the rug out from the whole endeavor.
So,
some entrepreneurially minded person had an idea – how about we set up an
exchange table? People can bring their Roman coins and we’ll just change them
out for Temple shekels, then then they can buy their sacrifices. It’s a great
system – pilgrims can come to Jerusalem for the Passover and purchase an animal
for the sacrifice. But this rebel Jesus sees a problem.
We
tend to view this event happening on the afternoon of Palm Sunday – right after
Jesus has entered into Jerusalem on a donkey, he goes to the Temple and
overturns the tables. That’s how Matthew, Mark, and Luke depict this event. But
we’re not hearing from Matthew, Mark, or Luke this morning. No, we’re in John’s
world and John has a different way for us to understand this episode. Lest we
think that Jesus is the sort of person who is going to help us to be better
people or help us out with our problems, like when we run out of wine at the wedding
banquet as he did earlier in chapter 2. No, for John, this episode often called
“the cleansing of the Temple,” sets the tone for all that will follow – Jesus
is a disrupter, someone who will make us question our motivations, someone who
pokes at our assumptions, and provokes us to exasperation.
Clearly,
Jesus was trying to make a point. Like the student in the opening analogy, it
was more than not wanting to take a test, it was an enacted op-ed. But if we
misunderstand the actions, we’ll misunderstand the message. I want to point out
a few things that are not happening in the cleansing of the Temple. The first
is that Jesus is not condoning violence here. We saw it happen twice in the
last year. When protesters supporting the cause of Black Lives Matter over the
summer were questioned about whether or not disruptive protests like this were
helpful, many cited Jesus flipping over the tables in the Temple. They’d say
things like “Violence is never the first choice, but sometimes that’s the only
language people will understand.” And on the other side, when insurrectionists
infiltrated the Capitol in January, their remarks suggest that they viewed
their actions as the righteous cleansing of the Capitol and not an act of
terror. To be clear – both sides are wrong.
Many
Biblical scholars have noted the fact that the words in the Greek of John make
it clear that the whip that Jesus uses is only to drive out the animals and was
not used against people. Jesus did not harm anyone nor did he destroy any
property. Yes, he clearly disrupted things, but that is not the same as
violence. This passage is not about using violence to protest.
Secondly, this
passage is not about critiquing the worship and sacrificial system of the Temple.
If that were Jesus’ intention, he would have gone to the inner courts of the
Temple, not the outer. Jesus does nothing to challenge the religious rituals
themselves. Jesus is Jewish, and so any reading that makes Judaism look bad is
a bad reading of the text.
Thirdly, nowhere
in the text does it suggest that the money changers or animal sellers were
overcharging people for their services. Again, that’s just an anti-Jewish trope
that is unfounded in the actual words of the Bible.
And fourthly, this
passage is not about anger. There’s a word in Greek for anger that John could
have used, but he doesn’t. Instead, Jesus quotes from Psalm 69 saying, “Zeal
(not anger) for your house will consume me.” Zeal is not anger, we know this.
Zeal means that you have a lot of passion for something; it’s about enthusiasm,
not anger. And this word that is used is translated as “jealous” as often it as
zeal. It’s the same word that we heard in the Ten Commandments from Exodus when
the Lord says that “I am a jealous
God.” We tend to think of jealousy as a bad thing, and it certainly can be. But
jealousy in this sense is rooted in a deep and intense concern for us. God does
not want us to give our allegiance to any other gods, not because of what that
does to God, but because of what it does to us when we turn away from the
loving and liberating God of grace. This jealous zeal is what has Jesus fired
up – he knows how wonderful the Temple can be, but it is not functioning as it
could. His actions are an example of passion, not anger.
So, what then is
Jesus up to here? He is intensifying things. When it comes to things like
devotion, generosity, and faith, Jesus turns the dial all the way up. We see
this in places where he says, “Forget adultery, don’t even look at someone with
lust” and “You’ve heard it said that you shall not kill, but I say don’t even
get angry.” Well, this is what Jesus is doing here – he’s inviting us to take a
deeper look at what it is we do when we claim to be worshiping.
The problem isn’t
so much that people were there to facilitate worship – the people selling
animals and exchanging money are something like the ushers that we used to have
at church when you actually came here to worship. They’d hand you a bulletin as
you entered. There’s nothing wrong with what they were doing. The issue is the
mindset that was accompanying all of this. One Jewish scholar says that people
who were defrauding people and ignoring the poor in their daily lives were
coming to the Temple, exchanging money that they perhaps made not in the most
holy of ways, buying animals that they did not raise, all in the name of being
forgiven for their sins without any repentance going on. This is the message
that Jesus hammers throughout his ministry – the Kingdom of God has come near,
so repent. That is, see things differently and live differently. The Temple
more than a place that was promoting justice and obedience to God had become a
transactional marketplace. It’s not so much that there was buying and selling
happening in the Temple, it was that the Temple itself had become a market
where forgiveness was on sale. The notion of transformation had been lost in so
many transactions.
And so Jesus
drives out the objects of the transactions, the animals and the coins. Behind
the sermons in Lent, I have in mind the Human Nature section of the Prayer Book
Catechism. The questions for this week are about why it is we live in disunity
from God, and the Catechism says that is because we misuse our freedom as we
rebel against God and put ourselves in the place of God. In other words, we are
idolaters. This is what happened at the Temple – people were in the process of
obtaining salvation for themselves, or at least thinking that’s what they were
doing, by exchanging in these transactions. We do this just as much – we make
up our own rules to live by, we decide what needs to be forgiven and what
doesn’t, we try to make ourselves worthy. But it is God who does these things.
Whether it’s the
Ten Commandments or the Great Commandment to love God and love neighbor, God
makes the rules. We waste so much time trying make ourselves look good – it
didn’t start with the pandemic, we’ve always been wearing masks. But God sees
right through all of that. As we often pray at the start of our liturgy – to
God all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from God no secrets are
hid. God sees us and God loves us. And to make this clear, he gave himself in
Jesus Christ.
So often we think
worship is about what we need to do – so we focus on the music, the vestments,
the prayers, the bulletins, all of that stuff. And while those things can be
helpful, they aren’t the point because it gets the equation backwards. Worship
isn’t something we do for God, it is something that God does for us. Now I
don’t mean that God is worshipping us, but I mean that in allowing us to
worship the Holy Trinity, we are given all that we truly need in life and in
death. But this gets lost when worship becomes something we do on auto-pilot.
This is what leads to the zealousness that we see in Jesus this morning – the
Temple was becoming a chore, a transaction, and errand. There was no
repentance, no transformation, no grace. And I think that if Jesus came to
worship with us, he’d find some clutter to clear out so that we understand that
worship is a gift that we are given, not a ritual to perform. Worship is where
we can hear the truth. Worship is where we can come together as the people of
God. Worship is where we are assured of God’s love and mercy for us. Worship is
where we are fed with the very Body of Christ, which was, indeed, destroyed and
raised up on the third day.
I know it’s been at
least a year since most of you have been in church, and thanks be to God, it’s
starting to look like in the coming weeks and months that you’ll be able to
slowly and safely return. As you do, know that God zealously awaits your
return. Not because God needs more praise, but because God can’t wait to let
you know just how much you are loved through the praising. God is zealous about
us coming back together as beloved community. God is zealous to have us all
back in this beautiful church where people have found comfort and peace for
generations. God is zealous to again
feed us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation. So as that day draws
near when you can return, start preparing for it now – we heard it in the Ten
Commandments, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.” For your sake, for
your family’s sake, for our community’s sake, be zealous about coming back to
worship and in doing so, we will encounter God who jealously, zealously, and
graciously loves us all.
