Third Lent
John 2:13-22; I Corinthians 1:18-25; Exodus 20:1-17
I know they are little things, really. I know they shouldn't bother me that much and yet... I'm watching a sporting event and it becomes increasingly clear to me that the referee is loosing control of the game or going blind. It's a little easier now that my sons are too old to be playing in the game but there are still moments when I want to go down on the field and show the ref how to blow his whistle. It really shouldn't bother me all that much but, well, you know how it is. You're in a hurry at the grocery store and you head for the 10 items or less check out aisle. You glance into the grocery cart ahead of you and realize that the person pushing that cart is clearly an alien from another planet equipped with extra fingers and toes since they clearly have more than ten items in their cart. And then there is the computer. How can a collection of wires and circuits that depends totally on me for the very energy that turns it on and off create so much emotion in me by simply flashing the word "error" on its screen. Or worse yet, by deciding to do nothing at all. To simply freeze and sit there with the curser flashing but unresponsive to my mouse pushing, key banging, verbal entreaties.
There is anger and then there is anger. There is blind rage and there is righteous indignation. There is malicious destruction and there is controlled use of force. As Lutherans we get a bit uncomfortable with a text that speaks of Jesus getting emotional. Ours is a religion of measured feelings guided by the rational appraisal of God's will. If there is emotion in our religion it is usually over issues that are termed adiaphora, that is items that are not essential to the faith but important to the order of the community. If you want to see emotion in most churches you need to talk about the things that touch people's lives like what color to paint the sanctuary or changing the hymnal. Yet there are moments in the community of faith when emotions might rightly run a bit higher.
The Gospels do not agree on where during Jesus' life one of the most emotional moments in his ministry occurred. Some of the gospels place it at the end of his ministry while the gospel of John, our lesson for today, describes the cleansing of the temple as an early event in Christ's mission. Yet all the versions of this story link it to the celebration of the Passover in Jerusalem.
Now we need to understand that the days immediately around the celebration of the Passover were kind of like rolling the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas all into one celebration. The streets in Jerusalem would have been jammed with people all heading for the temple. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem to find the Passover preparation rush filling the city. As Jesus enters the court around the temple there are livestock salesmen every where. At this point in Israel's history the Hebrew worship had once again become centered on the sacrifice of animals. With the rebuilding of the great temple begun in 20 BC, the ancient rituals had also been reclaimed to preserve the Hebrew understanding of God's law. Here was the old-time religion being recast in new forms. The temple in Jerusalem, while still under construction, had become an international cultural and religious center for a revitalized religion. Of course travelers coming several days' journey didn't want to carry animals every step of the way. Further more the animals had to meet certain sacrificial standards. Providing animals for sacrifices at the temple was a convenience not unlike our offering of direct deposit transfers for your Sunday offering. And in the international setting of the global center of the faith there were, of course, moneychangers. It was only logical. Jews came to Jerusalem from all over the world. They brought money from home, from Rome and Greece and Egypt. Imagine the offering report in the bulletin being not just in American dollars but also pounds, yen, Deutsche marks, francs and euros. Many if not most of the coins bore the portraits of pagan gods and emperors. Those who came to the temple were people of faith. No one wanted to give a gift to God with Caesar's image on it. Dropping his picture in the offering plate would have been in poor taste at best and considered blasphemous by many. To be sure, there were arguments now and then but the money changers were there because the worshippers needed their services. The temple was a busy market place of the faithful striving to fulfill their religious obligations to the accompaniment not of holy chants but the mooing, cooing and clink of temple transactions. There is a lot going on this story. A lot to catch our attention or to distract us. Writer Grady Nutt retells our Gospel story in The Gospel According to Norton. In his version he imagined that Jesus' attention was caught by a young couple kneeling near the wall that separated the Gentiles from the courts of the Jews. This humble Gentile couple was trying to make contact with the Hebrew God. At just that moment a disagreeable man from Northern Galilee and a salesman get into an argument over the alleged imperfection of a pair of doves. One thing leads to another as their voices rise and one pushes the other who shoves back. The man from Galilee is knocked to the ground falling across the ankles of the young woman kneeling in prayer at the wall. In the commotion a donkey whirls about knocking over a water jar. The tumult and noise make Jesus come to life. He runs to the arguing men and pushes them away from the kneeling couple. They are startled by his strength and anger. Then Jesus suddenly, unexpectedly, kicks over a rickety table covered with coins. He grabs a whip from one of the sellers and snaps it with a loud crack over the crowd's heads. Then he starts unpinning the animals. He drives the sheep and calves down the main temple steps while pigeons released from their cages flutter about. Owners dash about frantically trying to re-corral their lost flocks and squawking birds. Money changers shove coins into leather pouches, then duck past Jesus and dart down the street. Jesus, smoldering like a cooling volcano shouts: "Stop making God's house a market place." The crowd scatters, amazed at the outburst in the temple. Jesus turns to the wide-eyed couple. He is breathing hard. Then he smiles and says, "Why don't we pray together?"
This picture of an angry Jesus stands in contrast to the familiar picture of the gentle Jesus meek and mild. We seldom think of Jesus as threatening. The image of Jesus brandishing a whip, overturning tables, driving oxen down the Holy Spirit center aisle is not a typical picture. The problem is not that Jesus is mad, but that he is mad at the church and he is mad at church people. We expect that if Hollywood were to film this scene the workers in the temple would all wear black turbans and have sinister looking mustaches. Unfortunately the facts in this story are that the ones selling animals and making change are more like ushers. They're not bad guys who don't go to church. They're good guys doing what the church has asked them to do. Jesus is not angry because they are cheating anyone. The Roman government wouldn't allow Temple workers to get rich off the common people, that was the Romans' job. What makes this story troubling is that Jesus isn't attacking Mafia hit men in a casino. Jesus is angry with normal, religious people at church. His anger is not against the commercial activities. He does not condemn fund raising in the church but he stands against the way everyone had lost the focus and purpose of faith. Worship had become trivialized and unimportant to other activities. God had been replaced in people's priorities and lives by other rituals.
That is also what lies behind the Old Testament lesson for today. We know them as the ten commandments but notice how they begin in the book of Exodus. God reminds the people the he is the God of power and the source of their freedom. This God is a jealous God, angered at those who turn away from him but abounding in grace and blessing for those who turn to him. A God of almost unlimited grace showing "steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love and keep my commandments". The thousandth generation, and the dictionary tells us that a generation is 30 years. That means God's grace and love for one generation endures for 30,000 years. 30,000 years is amazing grace considering that the oldest civilizations on our planet date back only 10-12,000 years.
Jesus knew this God well. Jesus wanted us to be drawn closer to our God but so many things, so many idols, rituals, obstacles separate us from God. His emotions got the better of him. The righteous anger burst forth. "Zeal for the house of the Lord" would be the words that the disciples and gospel writer would later call it. Zeal for setting right that which has gone wrong. But we view such zeal much as the religious authorities of Jesus' day. We have to be realistic about our expectations of God and faith. "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up" With these words Jesus called for a new way of viewing the world. Most could not even begin to imagine what he was talking about. Destroy the temple? 46 years under construction even as he spoke and not completed until 30 years after Christ's death. Destroy the temple? Later the disciples would see these words as a foreshadowing of Christ's death and resurrection. But there was more. There was the confrontation. The confrontation of the world's way of thinking, seeing, feeling, doing and the vision of God's kingdom.
Destroy the temple? If Jesus was speaking to us today I don't think the focus of his words would be about most church buildings. Going to church is not the major distraction keeping people from a right relationship with their God today. We have different temples. Temples of military might, material possessions, personal convenience and comfort, politics, medicine and economics. Last Sunday we heard Pastor Chris quoting the singer and activist Bono on the subject of the year of jubilee. The suggestion that the temple of debt needs to be removed from burdening the developing third world countries. This past Wednesday we heard about the temples of homelessness and hunger. We know the solution. All we need to do is destroy the temples of greed and political power and replace them with dwellings of fairness and justice. But we do not take threats to our temples lightly. Emotion? Lets talk Iraq, taxes--cuts and deficits--and watch the language construct untouchable idols of absolutes. Jesus fed the hungry. For us nothing is that simple. Jesus entered the temple in our lesson expecting to meet God. He was met instead by all that human structures, traditions and rituals could create to separate God from the people. We come to worship to be met by God's word and grace. Sometimes we miss that because we have become so caught up in the repetition and ritual. Sometimes we miss God because we are so caught up in ourselves. In preserving the temples we have built.
We miss the offering Christ makes of himself, an example to us to offer ourselves, to open ourselves to the Spirit, to God's grace. We come together this morning to set aside the idols we have made. That is at the heart of the ten commandments. To have no other gods. Worship is not about us. It's about God. We gather before holiness and not before a mirror.
We come before God because we need to give ourselves to the one who is infinitely great. This morning God intrudes, overturning tables, loosing the planned sacrifice, scattering coins on the floor. This morning Jesus comes to us when we might otherwise be sleeping, reading the paper, playing tennis, relaxing in the rituals of our favorite god. This morning the Spirit stirs within us once more maybe just for a moment a feeling, a feeling of God's presence, maybe a feeling of anger at that which would separate us from God and those we love. Maybe it is finally time to get truly angry at injustice, hunger, abuse, neglect, disease, death. Maybe it is time this morning to cry out, "Take these things out of here" for they have no place among God's people. And after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this: and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Amen