Third Sunday in Lent, John 2:13-22

Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Jonathan Linman

Stop and think for a moment about what we just heard. Imagine yourself as a first-hand witness of Jesus cleansing the temple. Jesus makes a whip of cords, and with it chases out the people selling animals intended for the ritual temple sacrifices. And with the animals, Jesus also drives away the people handling currency exchange so that people could use Temple currency to pay for their sacrifices.

If you let yourself picture the scene, it’s extreme. Jesus is running about chasing out people and animals. And then Jesus dumped out all of the money onto the floor and tipped over the tables of the money changers.

Whose gonna call 911? If that happened here, that’s exactly what we would do. Jesus is engaging in some pretty extreme behavior in this story, violent even. And this from the Prince of Peace?

Yes, Jesus sometimes spoke hard and harsh words, especially addressed to religious leaders and the powers that were in his day. But this episode is rare in that it actually became physical for Jesus.

What provoked Jesus to go off the deep end, as it were, off the rails, and behave in a manner completely uncharacteristic of our views of Jesus? Something must have violated Jesus’ most deeply held principles.

This is righteous indignation. Are we seeing Jesus’ human side or his divine side? I suspect the answer is yes – we’re witnessing both. Jesus’ very human behavior was informed by his divine anger at what they were doing to the holy place, the temple.

Jesus’ actions in this story came with words, and the words hold the key to unlocking our understanding of what motivated Jesus to cleanse the temple. Jesus exclaimed: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” The versions of this story told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke report that Jesus’ objection was that they were making a house of prayer into a den of robbers.

Whatever the case may be, Jesus found the buying and selling and the money-changing to be perversions of the real purpose of the temple and its worship.

But this is what we human beings do in our mortal finitude and sin. Since the Fall, we’ve forever had the tendency to try to domesticate divine transcendence for our own self-centered, greedy purposes. This was true in Jesus’ day at the temple in Jerusalem. And it’s been true throughout history.

One of the things that provoked Martin Luther’s righteous indignation was the sale of indulgences. Selling indulgences was a scheme to buy off years of purgatory by giving money to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which made the place a den of robbers according to Luther.

And this tendency to commodify Christianity is apparent today when churches and Christian organizations – for profit businesses, really – offer up Christian products and services and entertainers and celebrity preachers, and more and more. Think prosperity gospel preachers and how all of this aligns with consumer capitalism.

In our sin, we humans tend to try to create Jesus in our own image. We want Jesus to be our chaplain, to cater to our own whims and pre-conceived notions of what we think holiness is. We want God to be our co-pilot – really, that’s a phrase I’ve heard repeatedly. God as our co-pilot. Wait a minute, I thought God is in charge. I thought God is in charge as pilot, as author of creation, our sacred sculptor, that God is the creator and we are merely the creatures, the fruit of God’s creation.

The tendency to want God and Jesus on our terms is idolatry, and this is exposed and railed against in today’s first reading from Exodus where the Lord proclaims to the people of Israel: “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. You shall not make for yourself an idol…. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…” (cf. Exodus 20:4-5a)

In the story of the cleansing of the temple, we see the jealousy of God in Jesus, the Word of God made flesh who was at the beginning at creation, who was and is God.

Who will save us from our idolatrous ways? Jesus, of course. For he offers us the ticket out of all of this mess of our making true religion into corrupt, idolatrous marketplaces. Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life, makes the way to freedom from our idolatry, and it happens on the cross and in the empty tomb.

The whole thrust of today’s gospel in John, focusing on the Passover observances in the holy temple in Jerusalem, is that Jesus is our Passover. Jesus is our freedom from the bondage of slavery to sin and death. Jesus is our holy City Zion. Jesus is our temple. All of this comes into clear view in Jesus’ final earthly days in Jerusalem.

Hear again what John reports that Jesus said: “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ [The others said] ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But John reports that Jesus was “speaking of the temple of his body.” (cf. John 2:19-21)

The saving power of the cross and the resurrection exposes our idolatry, and overcomes its claims on us to reveal that God in Christ is sovereign and in charge, and we are merely the created recipients of God’s mercy and grace and all the blessings of life. The good news is that we are the creatures, not the creator.

And this divine power revealed from Good Friday to Easter Sunday shatters in life-giving ways the illusions of our trying to create God in our own image who will cater to us as a chaplain to our marketplace whims.

Here’s how the Apostle Paul says it in his first letter to the Corinthians which we heard today: “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:19-20)

The confounding, paradoxical wisdom of the cross and the empty tomb destroys our faulty human wisdom and thwarts our clever attempts at discerning the mysteries of God’s ways.

The cross and the empty tomb drive out the robbers and charlatans among us and within us. The cross and the empty tomb turn over our own versions of the money changers tables. Indeed, in Christ, him dead, him raised, the tables have turned.

And God’s holy word of Jesus’ death and resurrection is a whip of cords that drives out the old sinful Adam in us, and cleanses the temples of our bodies to become temples of the Holy Spirit.

And in the waters of baptism, our tables are turned over such that we emerge from the flood as new born children of God, cleansed from our idolatrous ways.

And at the table of the Eucharist, our tables are likewise turned upside down in cleansing ways to make room for our adoration of the sovereign Christ who makes his divine self known to us in the breaking of bread.

Sunday after Sunday Jesus appears among us in sacred righteous indignation to cleanse this temple of a church communally, and our bodily temples individually. And the provocations of Jesus’ presence with us in word and sacraments wake us up again week after week, renewing our faith, and setting the record straight in healing ways: God in Christ is in charge, and we are blessed recipients of grace and mercy, claimed as God’s children, God’s creatures.

Week after week, by God’s grace working in the Holy Spirit, we grow in our capacity to trust this order of things that ultimately will make for the healing of the world.

Thus, we are sent back into this world to do as Christ did, to turn over some tables, seeking God’s justice to drive out of the marketplaces of the world the robbers and thieves who exploit the most vulnerable among us.

And we do this without any expectation of profit in return.

In word and deed, serving the poor without exploiting them, we sing our prayer to God, longing for the day of God’s justice: “My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.”

By the power of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Amen.