sermon
– third sunday of lent – year b
“temple
tantrum”
john
2:13-22 / march 8, 2015
Let us pray: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to
you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.
Amen.
“Gentle Jesus – meek and mild...”
that image of Jesus has been a popular one. The picture I showed the children
earlier was quite like the one I
remember when I was a child – often it was framed and hanging on a wall in Sunday school classrooms. In it Jesus appears so
gentle and serene. As a
youngster I imagined Jesus would be the perfect parent -- never raising his voice or getting
upset. “Gentle Jesus, meek and
mild...
my favourite theologian, N.T. Wright, states that many popular
depictions of Jesus portray him as: “a
hippy peace-child, a delicate flower of a man... why would anyone want to hurt him? Maybe because he’s so annoyingly sweet and
precious; but that’s not the story of the gospels.” Instead Wright says, “we should be looking
for a ‘crucifiable’ Jesus, a Jesus who does something so provocative as to make
the...leaders of the day murderously hostile.”
And that’s exactly the Jesus we find in today’s gospel passage. Jesus has been traveling to Jerusalem, and
now he has arrived there -
arrived at the very centre of
religious and political life in Israel.
Jesus enters the temple, what Wright calls the “beating heart of Judaism.” The temple was the centre of
everything: of worship and music,
politics and society. It was the place
where Israel’s God had promised to live in the middle of the people. It was the focal point of the nation. And Jesus chooses one of the most important
times to enter it: Passover, the holiest
of all religious celebrations commemorating when god delivered the Israelites
from captivity in Egypt. --- And then mayhem ensues.
Jesus takes deliberate, calculated action. He goes and makes a whip of rope. He comes back and drives the merchants out of
the temple. People are running. Animals scatter all over the place. Money is flying. Tables are being knocked
over. So, what is going on here? I had better state first what’s not going
on. Notwithstanding the sermon title,
Jesus is not just losing his temper or having a hissy fit. Jesus does not need an anger management
course.
There is anger here, to be sure, but it is a righteous anger, not an
impulsive one. Jesus’ action in the
temple is a planned, well thought out, orchestrated act of protest.
This act of Jesus is an act of disruption – not so much a disruption of
the events of that day in the temple, but an act of disruption that cut to the
core of the historic Jewish faith and all it stood for. It was a moment of crisis for the people of God. Jesus was saying that the old way of doing
faith was no longer appropriate, that the heart of faith had become lost in the
ritualism, that it was passion for god that had sold out, not pigeons for
sacrifice. Jesus is confronting the
people of god with a deeply uncomfortable truth – this was a moment for them to
re-assess. Was it enough for them to be
tied to their rituals and customs or did they need to find the heart of their
faith once more?
Now, I have to say, it’s important to say, that Jesus was not opposed to
Jewish tradition and not opposed to the rituals of Judaism per se. Jesus was a Jew, born and brought up steeped
in the law and ways of the synagogue.
And it was because he was a devoted Jew that he overturned the tables in
the temple.
He was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Micah who,
hundreds of years before had written:
“Will God be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of
oil....God has told you what is good:
and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?”
Jesus was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Amos who
challenged Israel with these words:
“’Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I
will not accept them,’ says God, ‘but let justice roll down like waters, and
righteousness like an everflowing stream.’”
Jesus was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Jeremiah
who proclaimed: “do not trust in the
deceptive words,
‘This is the temple of God’. But
act justly. Do not oppress the alien,
the orphan and the widow. Do not go
after other Gods. Then I will be with
you in this place.”
Micah, Amos, Jeremiah -- they knew, and Jesus knew - that true faith
cannot ever be expressed through empty rituals but that the rituals we
undertake must be an expression of the real worship of our lives: justice, kindness, humility, non-oppression,
care for the marginalized, faithfulness and righteousness. If our worship does not engage these
attitudes and actions,
it is not true worship. God is
not primarily interested in beautiful worship, God is interested in true
worship – and the two are very different indeed, though not mutually
exclusive.
But, by the time Jesus visited the temple on that day,
The leaders of the people had lost sight of the difference. The purity rituals had become rituals of discrimination:
Jews in the inner court, gentiles in the outer court; men in one
section, women in another; sacrifices the poor could afford, sacrifices the
rich could afford. In the beauty of the
ritual, the heart of purity had been lost and that is what made Jesus angry,
and, as a prophet, he had to take a stand.
Theologian Marcus Borg has said, “in the message and activity of Jesus,
we see an alternative social vision: a
community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and
politics of compassion.”
Those making this holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Passover – for many a
once in a lifetime opportunity – had to purchase animals for sacrifice; they
could hardly be expected to bring their own.
And the animals for sale in the temple courts were guaranteed to be
sacrifice-approved animals of the proper kind – without blemish. The moneychangers were needed because it was prohibited at the temple to
offer money that bore the image of a person or a God. The official roman coins were imprinted with
the image of Caesar, so anyone with this impure money needed to trade it in for
pure money.
Pure animals, pure money, pure bodies – these were required to enter
further into the temple courts;
This purity was required of those wishing to offer their sacrifices to
Yahweh.
Now you don’t come across many churches these days that have purity
requirements for those who wish to come in to worship. Or at least they wouldn’t admit to having
purity requirements.
Alice Walker wrote a story entitled, the “welcome table” about a woman
who wanted to go to church and worship God.
She walked right on up the steps and into the cold sanctuary. The minister shook her hand and said, “You
know – this is not your church.”
Eventually, the ushers threw her out the door. Seems the woman wasn’t neat enough or clean
enough or white enough to worship in that church. You might have heard stories of these
churches with unwritten purity codes.
Places where the welcome sign is out, but you’re not really welcome if
you wear the wrong clothes or use the wrong terms or drive the wrong car or
have skin the wrong colour or have a partner of the wrong gender. I know that some of you are here in this
church because you feel like you can come as you are. This is a place where lots of different
kinds of people are welcome to come and seek God.
Our mission statement says in part that Augustine is an inclusive,
affirming Christian community, that it is a welcoming sanctuary for seekers and
skeptics, that invites others to be part of our community,
That seeks, among other things, to be inclusive, welcoming, caring and
respectful. And I believe that is
an ethos, a way of being, that we strive to maintain and even improve along the
way. Perhaps we can do a better job in
some areas; for instance - ensuring those hard of hearing are made to feel more welcome; or perhaps those with particular disabilities could be made
more welcome; maybe those who would look
to different styles of worship or ways of gathering might be made to feel more
welcome.
Even those of us with the best intentions can set up purity requirements
without even knowing it. Even in
welcoming, loving, accepting congregations such as ours, I think it doesn’t
hurt to hold onto this image of Jesus, whip in hand. Any entrance requirements we might be
tempted to make, Jesus stands ready to strike them down. This is part of the message of this story
for sure – this key story from Jesus’ life that has made its way into all four
gospels: God does not appreciate efforts to regulate who can enter the
temple.
Now the temple in those days was not simply ‘a’ house of God; it was
‘the’ house of God -- the place where God
lived. Jesus, in his actions, is seen
to desecrate the outer court of the temple in a way that prevents people from
meeting the purity requirements for entering.
The religious authorities confront him; they ask him by what authority
he is doing such things. He starts
talking about destroying the temple and in three days raising it up again, a
veiled reference to himself. Consider,
if God is inside a building, the people who control access to the building
control access to God. I think that is
what Jesus was upset about. it wasn’t
that people were trying to make a living.
It wasn’t about commercial transactions somehow defiling the
temple. Jesus was angry because the
authorities were trying to control access to God – who could approach God, some
getting fuller access than others by virtue of criteria set by human authority
and not Gods. In naming himself as the
temple, Jesus locates the divine presence within himself, instead of in a
building that can be controlled. Maybe
this is why, while the other three gospels put this story at the end, John has
it near the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
so we can see this temple walking around talking to, and touching all of
the people who would never, could never, have walked into the temple –
the blind, the lame, the lepers, women, gentiles. All of us, every one of us, has unfettered
access to God – God -whose ways are made
known, whose love is revealed, whose very presence shines forth in the
one we call Emmanuel – God-with-us - our
saviour, Jesus Christ. Thanks and praise be to God. Amen.
Major
Resources:
“The
Ritual And Reality” by Darryl Dash in Dash/House, November 23, 2013.
“Jesus
in the Temple” by Joanna Harder in Spacious Faith, March 11, 2012.
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