John 2:13-22
Lent 3 / Year B
In the
gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives out the merchants and money
changers from the Temple on the day after Palm Sunday because he is appalled by
their dishonest and corrupt practices.
Pilgrims comes from far and wide to make sacrifices at this holiest of
places. Once they arrive in Jerusalem
they must convert their money into local coinage in order to purchase an
appropriate offering. What they
encounter are financiers charging exorbitant exchange rates and peddlers
selling sickly and deformed birds and animals when the offering required is
supposed to be pure and unblemished.
(When it comes to giving to God, only the best will do.) These three gospel record Jesus acts because
his Father’s house has been turned it a “den of thieves.” He is not attacking the Temple and its
sacrificial rites, only those who are profiting by ripping off others. Jesus’ actions, in these gospels, becomes the
impetus for his arrest.
Now, as
we heard moments ago, John’s gospel describes the same event but if you pay
attention to the text there are subtle and not so subtle differences. Not so subtle: John has this event taking
place at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and not in Holy Week. John is not concerned at all with holding his
narrative to a chronologically accurate timeline. Rather, he weaves events in such a way so as
to reveal who Jesus is and what he is all about. So by placing this story near the beginning,
John is saying Jesus’ entire ministry has something to do with the Temple
itself. But what?
Well,
the key to answering this question is found in a subtle detail. In John’s gospel, when Jesus drives out the
sacrificial birds and animals and overturns the tables of the money changers,
he does not do so because they are a den of thieves. Did you notice what he said? Jesus said, “Stop making my Father’s house
into a marketplace.” He is not condemning
unethical sales practices. He is
leveling an indictment on their entire system.
When
asked by what authority he acts, Jesus responds, “Destroy this Temple and in
three days I will raise it up.” Those
who hear him take Jesus to mean the stone and mortar structure which has taken
decades to erect and still is not finished.
But here, at the very beginning, John has Jesus shifting the entire
focus and function of the Temple to himself.
It is a
motif John will build on throughout his gospel.
Think about the conversation Jesus has with the Samaritan woman at the
well. At one point she asks him about
the appropriate place to worship, either the Samarian site of Mount Gerizim or
the Israeli location of Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Do you remember how he answers? “The hour is coming, and is now here, when
the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the
Father seeks to worship him.” It
continues the shift from an emphasis on an outer structure to one’s own inner
devotion.
The way
John tells Jesus’ story takes on even greater significance if we consider how
his original audience would have heard it.
John writes some two decades after the fall of Jerusalem and total
destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Some
of John’s readers grew up making pilgrimages to the Temple to offer a
sacrifice, something no longer possible (think solastalgia – for those of you
who attended last Sunday’s Lenten program).
Other readers had never been to Jerusalem, let alone the Temple. To both groups, John has Jesus saying,
“Forget about the Temple and the things of old.
I am the new Temple. You no
longer need to offer sacrifices of cattle, lambs, or doves. Now you are to worship the Father in spirit
and truth.”
If Jesus
calls us to worship God in spirit and truth, what might he find in us which
might lead him to make a whip of cords in order to drive it out of us?
Perhaps
the first thing Jesus may find is what Erma Bombeck called “the gift that keeps
on giving” – guilt. David Grohl,
founding member of the rock band The Foo Fighters, said “Guilt is a cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy
you… It’s a thief.” And yet, at least for
some of us, our religious heritage has instilled in us a deep sense of
unworthiness, of guilt. We have absorbed
a spirituality which holds God is exacting; demanding from us a standard of
holiness beyond anything we can possibility achieve. If this is where you are, Jesus wants to
drive it out of the temple of your soul.
I
suppose the flipside of guilt is self-righteousness; the notion you are good in
God’s eyes because… you name the reasons… while others who do not meet the
standards of your religious heritage are not.
Jesus said, “Why do you criticize the splinter in your neighbor’s eye
while ignoring the log in your own?”
Jesus makes a whip of cords to drive out of us any and every sense of
judgementalism.
And,
while I could preach from now until next Sunday of this subject, allow me to
name just one more impediment to worshipping God in spirit and true: fear. While guilt infects how we remember the past,
fear eats at the future. Each shares the
same power to cripple our ability to live in the present moment, which is the
only place we can worship God in spirit and truth. Do you know how many times the phrase “fear
not” appears is found in the bible? 365 –
one for each day of the year. Jesus seeks
to drive out all fear so that we might be free to live, to love, and to worship.
These
are just a few of the building blocks and cornerstones which Jesus uses to
build his new temple in us. What other measures
and messages resonate with you as Jesus drives far from us all that holds us back
from coming to him in spirit and truth?
