Our Lenten journey continues, summoning us to draw near to the Lord who drew near to us once and for all on his path to Calvary. Today already we find him in Jerusalem, already in the Temple driving out beasts sold for sacrifice and the money-changers there. That is because today we find ourselves in the peculiar gospel of John. John is different. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this story, traditionally called the cleansing of the Temple, comes at the end. But in John it comes at the beginning. In the others, it is last thing Jesus does which provokes the authorities to take action against him. In John, it is the first provocative thing Jesus does. What is going on here? It is as if John wanted to signal: this is what it is all about! This is what the whole story of Jesus is about.
It is, in other words, it’s all about worshipping God in spirit and in truth. It is not about a mountain top in Jerusalem or Samaria or Mecca or Rome or Wittenberg or anyplace else but about the community of disciples who abide in Jesus’ word, as children in truth sharing in his own true relation to God as his heavenly Father in the powerful love of the Holy Spirit. It is not about buildings made with hands, not about buying and selling the relationship to God; it is not about the religion business. It is about what Jesus did on the cross once for all people, therefore the free gift of new life in his name. As Paul tells today: Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Let’s look and see!
The Passover of the Jews was near… Passover, you recall, was the annual holy day commemorating the escape of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. To remember their salvation, once a year in the Spring Jews slaughtered a lamb for a feast, recalling that dreadful and awesome night long before, when the angel of death passed over those houses signed with the blood of the slaughtered lamb but slew the first born of the slave-masters in all the rest. Thus Jesus, like generations of Jews before him, went up to Jerusalem to worship this judging and liberating God of Israel, who casts down the mighty from their thrones but exalts them of low degree. But what does he find? What’s going on in the Temple?
Does he find a community gathered around the Word of the Lord, studying his liberating commandments that they might also be instruments of God’s righteousness in the world, setting free the oppressed? We have heard this morning the two tables of the divine law of love, spelled out concretely in the 10 Commandments of Moses, telling us how to love God above all and all God’s creatures in and under God. We need to hear this instruction and study it! Indeed, nothing would be more fitting in the season of Lent than to recite the 10 Commandments publically for self-examination along with the Catechism’s explanations of the meaning. Or are we otherwise like the temple that Jesus cleansed? Where the last thing occupying the people was such study of the Torah of God?
In the temple Jesus found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. He found what, alas!, we so often we find in the history of humanity: the idolatrous, the blasphemous religion business, buying and selling the relationship to God. Those traveling into town from afar to worship could hardly bring along animals for sacrifice, you see, so a lucrative tourism industry developed. It was rigged. They had to change their foreign currency for special coins valid only on the precincts of the Temple. Thus the money-changers. What a racket!
Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. The whip is meant for the animals, to drive them out. Nonetheless we have no picture here of a mamby-pamby, teddy bear Jesus. He is angry. He takes righteous action. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here!” The opposite of love, friends, is not anger, you see, but apathy which does not care. Anger can be righteous. Anger can be love opposing what is against love. “Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" Here is clue to his righteous anger.
It is love for his Father, the very God of Israel, love for this One who is truly God creator of all, thus love for his Father’s house as a house of prayer for all people, love for all people who need to know the free grace of God and thus to be set free from the worst of all illusions, the very illusion cultivated by the religion business: that God can be manipulated like magic with religious works, animal sacrifices, silver and gold. That is why his disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The zeal of liberating love drives Jesus into action.
Naturally enough, the people of Jerusalem whose livelihood was affected by the dramatic protest action of the virtually unknown prophet from backwoods Galilee were not impressed. The buying and selling had been business as usual for centuries. It was time honored tradition. It was a system that met the needs of locals for labor and out of towners for services. It was, in short, good business. So they asked the angry prophet: "What sign can you show us for doing this?" They are asking for a divine confirmation of the claim hidden in Jesus’ action, a claim that in all the hub-bub of cattle stampeding and doves flying and sheep baying and coins flying we might have overlooked. Jesus referred to the temple as his Father’s house. It is as a true Son coming into what is rightfully his inheritance, zealous for his own Father’s name and reputation, that Jesus has cleansed the temple. That is what they want to know about. By what right, with what authority, man, what are your credentials?
The answer of Jesus gives contains one of those double meanings we find so often in the Gospel of John. Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Later, at his trial on the night the Jewish court called the Sanhedrin met to condemn Jesus to death as a blasphemer, this statement was thrown up in Jesus’ face. Not knowing who Jesus really is, this Son of the Father, not understanding his holy passion, the righteous zeal, the Torah-instructed love which drives him, how else can they take his words? They take them as a threat that he, who had attacked the business in religion going on in the Temple, would now go on to tear down the Temple building to rebuild it according to his own desires. So they object literalistically. "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?"
Such are the double-meanings which abound in the gospel of John. Jesus says something spiritually and he is misunderstood literally. They have asked for his right, his authority, his credentials to act in his Father’s name as a true Son. He answered "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." But he was not speaking of their building made with hands under construction since the time of King Herod the Great 46 years ago. He was speaking of the temple of his body which they would destroy on the cross and bury in the grave, hoping thusly to obliterate. He was speaking of the temple of his body, that is even more profoundly, the church, the community of his disciples, of all who believed in him after his resurrection. And so he is talking about you and me who in his name worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.
Dear friends, we are not to be in the religion business, buying and selling the most precious thing of all: the relationship with God. We are not to market it like a commodity, advertise it like a good deal, fleece the gullible, bargain with the skeptical, hawk and cajole and in general propagandize, proselytize, in order to profiteer. Martin Luther, after whom our tradition of Christianity takes its name, was filled with Jesus’ own holy zeal for his Father’s name and reputation in the world when he saw the poor throwing away their money on worthless scraps of paper superstitiously promising relief for loved ones burning in purgatory. If the church really has such power, he demanded in a single question which overturned all these new moneychangers, why in the name of love don’t we just give the indulgences away? Our Father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all people!
Dear friends, we are in the gospel business of just giving it away because Jesus gave it all away once and for all in his sacrifice at the cross. We are in the gospel business of proclaiming the free grace of God which cannot be bought or sold but only feared, loved and trusted above all things. We are in the gospel business of building up a caring community of disciples, a temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ gathered not around our would-be sacrifices to God as if to buy his favor or somehow bribe him, but around this holy meal of the Eucharist, commemorating his sacrifice once and for all to win us back to his Father’s grace and favor. We are in the gospel business that others might see truly good works, works of holy zeal and true love, and so give glory to our Father in heaven.
For the glory of our God is to give. God so loved the world, as we will hear from this gospel of John next Sunday in our Lenten journey, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. His house therefore is to be a house of prayer for all people, where this gift is given and received, from whence the praise of God arises in hearts sincere and true. Let this be our Lenten resolve: that the holy zeal of Jesus take hold of us and put us to work, cleansing the Temple which is you and me and our life together in Christ, making it a house fit to sing the praises of God’s free grace. The Lord grant it to us here. Amen.