Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2015. Preached in Dubuque, Iowa, at my internship congregation, St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church. This week’s lectionary texts are Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, and John 2:13-22.
This week, I’ve also posted video of the sermon, which I’ve done only once before, for this sermon from January 18. I tried to be a little more creative this week and a portion of the sermon “in character,” reacting as I imagine someone present in the Jerusalem temple might have reacted to Jesus cleansing the temple. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this worked. Enjoy!
I’ve been thinking all week about what to preach for today’s sermon. I’m over halfway through my internship, and I want to try something creative. Now, one way to make a text come alive is to act it out. So I’ve thought about doing that with today’s Gospel reading.
However, I have a feeling flipping over the altar and chasing all of you out of the sanctuary with a whip wouldn’t go over well. I’d also hate to scare everyone away from church on a week when my supervisor Pastor DeWayne’s not here, and I’d also like to not fail internship, so I’m going to try a different approach.
But I do want us to get a sense of how shocking what Jesus did must have been. Think about how someone in the temple that day might have reacted.
[move into aisle]
Did you hear what Jesus did? He came here, into the temple, and he just lost it. I mean, this is the Jerusalem temple. This is where God lives! And it’s almost Passover. If this itinerant street preacher wants to make some kind of point complaining about the temple, he wouldn’t be the only one, but to come in and make a scene right before Passover?!
Ok, maybe the money lending and the selling have been getting a little out of hand recently, but what religion doesn’t have some commercialism in it? I’ve even heard some of Jesus’ own followers might be going to start selling some cute bracelets with the abbreviation WWJD, asking “What would Jesus do?”
Yesterday, I would have thought that was a good question, but today? What would Jesus do? Apparently, he’d lose his temper, flip over tables, and disrupt worship!
And over what? A few merchants setting up shop in the courtyard? It’s Passover. There are three hundred thousand people from all over Israel, here in town this week. Shouldn’t Jerusalem get some, you know, economic benefit from all the tourists? And the sellers are serving an important purpose.
The law of Moses requires that people bring a sacrifice to offer at the temple, and the animal to be sacrificed has to be perfect. You don’t expect people to travel a hundred miles lugging a sheep or some cattle with them and keep it healthy on the way, do you? And there are people who can’t afford even a sheep. They’ve probably saved up pennies all year just to make the trip here, and all they could afford to buy is a dove, except, wait, Jesus drove out the dove sellers!
And the money changers. Ok, I admit seems a little odd to have a bank in the temple, but it serves a good purpose. Since the Romans took over, all the money is Roman currency, and it has the emperor’s image on it.
Obviously, you can’t use that money to pay the temple tax; it’d be like idolatry! The very first of the ten commandment is to not make idols. So the money changers are there to convert Roman denarii into Jewish shekels so people can fulfill their obligations under the law.
Maybe if you understood some of the history. After rescuing us from slavery and bringing us out of Egypt, you know, the historical event we’re celebrating during this passover time, God gave us the gift of the law. I know what you’re thinking, since when is a law a gift? But think of the 10 commandments.
Do you know how they start? The first commandment is to have no other gods before the Lord, but even before that, it starts with God saying, and I quote, “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.” And why would we want to? After what God has done for our people, God has every right to set rules for us. And these rules, these 10 commandments, and all the other commandments in the Torah and from the rabbis, they allow us to live in peace with each other. The law starts with God’s action, not with ours. God gives us instructions out of grace.
And when we disobey, when we sin – hey, it happens. The Torah has 613 commandments in it. There’s a lot to keep track of! – Anyway, when we sin, God graciously provides us with a way to return to the Lord our God through the law. When we bring sacrifices to the temple, God forgives our sins. And that brings us back to the temple, to what Jesus did.
Right before Passover, no less. During the very time when we remember God rescuing us, Jesus goes into the temple and disrupts everything. I figure he probably shut down the whole system for almost half an hour! But why?
Maybe Jesus was just upset about some people who got a little blinded by the profits they could make by preying on travelers. Maybe he was just having a bad day!
But the more I think about it, the more I think he was challenging the entire system, the entire way we understand God to be working. I mean, did you hear what he said when some of the leaders challenged him? They asked why he was doing this, what sign he could show them.
Basically, they asked what right he had to interfere with the way people come to God. But he didn’t really answer. Instead, he said that if they destroyed this temple, he would raise it up in three days. Have you ever heard something so ludicrous? It took years to build the temple! Just the remodeling project Herod started has been going on for 46 years! How could it possibly be repaired in three days!? I don’t get it! This Jesus is turning the world upside down. I just don’t get it.
[back to pulpit]
Even though the people in the temple and the religious leaders didn’t understand what was going on, didn’t get what Jesus was saying, we do. We have some help from the gospel’s narrator, who explains Jesus “was speaking of the temple of his body.” And that after Jesus was raised from the dead, the disciples remember this and they understood.
What’s really interesting about this story is that John’s Gospel was almost certainly written after the temple was actually destroyed in the year 70 by a Roman invasion. The destruction of the temple was devastating to the Jewish people. It shook their whole way of life, their whole understanding of the world. Sacrifices in the temple were the way God chose to forgive people. The temple was thought of as where God lived, the place of God’s presence in the world. Their whole world was changed.
For John, especially writing after the temple’s destruction, this story of Jesus in the temple is really critical to understanding who Jesus is. It’s so important that he uses it as a way to frame everything he says about Jesus.
I wasn’t aware of it until this week, but in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s gospels, this story of Jesus cleansing the temple comes towards the end of the story. It’s right before the crucifixion. Part of why Jesus is arrested and killed is for making a disturbance in the temple. But John tells this story right at the beginning of his gospel, in chapter 2, right after Jesus’ first miracle of turning water into wine.
The reason today’s story is so important to John is because he understands that Jesus is God in the flesh. The temple is no longer where God lives on earth, because God has come in the person of Jesus. We can encounter God’s presence directly; we don’t need to go to a specific building.
Because of the resurrection, where the temple of Jesus’ body, God’s presence, was indeed raised up in three days, we know God’s presence is not located in a specific place. God has come into all of creation. We can encounter God in all aspects of our lives.
We can look for God at work all over the world, not just in Jerusalem, or in Israel. God is at work, turning the world upside down. Not always working in the ways we expect, but at work, and sometimes, the way God works makes us uncomfortable, because sometimes, God’s work doesn’t fit into our box.
Last week, we heard about Peter not wanting to hear about Jesus the Messiah coming to suffer and to die. This week, we hear about a Jesus we might not want to hear about, about a Jesus who gets angry, even violent.
And in a few weeks, we’ll hear about the biggest scandal of all, about, as Paul said in our second reading, “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks – to you and I when we look with the eyes of faith – Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
God is working through us here in the church, and all over the world. We might not always see what God is doing, and it might even make us uncomfortable. Jesus has done what the temple pointed to, becoming the ultimate way that God forgives us. In Jesus, God has come to be with us.
Amen.