Out-of-the-Box Jesus Zeal for your house will consume me. John 2: 13-22, by Marshall Zieman, preached at PCOC

Transcription

1 Out-of-the-Box Jesus Zeal for your house will consume me. John 2: 13-22, by Marshall Zieman, preached at PCOC Our scripture reading for this morning takes us away from the gospel of Mark, where we have been since January, and over to John s gospel. We re used to hearing today s story around Easter, during Holy Week. John, in contrast, tells this story in the beginning of Jesus ministry. From John 2, beginning in verse The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father s house a marketplace! 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for your house will consume me. 18 The Jews then said to him, What sign can you show us for doing this? 19 Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. 20 The Jews then said, This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days? 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 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. The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God! So after he rose from the dead they remembered these words, but you wonder how they felt in the moment when he was doing this. Maybe GREAT! Or maybe not so great. Creating a chaos in the Temple, and

2 then referring to the destruction of the Temple was not small potatoes. What does Jesus think he s doing? This story of Jesus cleansing the Temple is found in all four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all see this as a crucial, critical event in Jesus ministry. As I mentioned, though, they don t all put this story in the same timeline, and that s very interesting. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have this story occurring during the final week of Jesus ministry - in Holy Week, after Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It s seen as one of the last things he does, sort of a grand climax that pushes the Jewish authorities over the edge. 2 In John, however, today s story is placed in chapter two, at the very beginning of Jesus ministry. The gospel of John starts out with Jesus calling his disciples, then they attend that wedding in Cana where he turns the water into wine, then here they are in Jerusalem, where Jesus cleanses the Temple as one of his very first acts. It sets the tone as his whole ministry begins. In the other three gospels, this story is the only time Jesus goes to Jerusalem as an adult (right at the very end). In John s gospel, however, Jesus and the disciples will make frequent visits to Jerusalem over the course of these three years. They are there for the Passover three times, possibly four. They are there at the Feast of Tabernacles, and another time for the Feast of Dedication. Jesus is seen at the Temple for important feasts. John is showing that the worship of God was central to Jesus life. It s also interesting that in the other three gospels, Jesus main ministry is way up in Galilee. In John, Jesus is in Galilee for only brief periods, and his main ministry is in Jerusalem. There s no contradiction they are telling the story from different points of view. The four gospels complement each other - we read them together.

3 3 In trying to reconcile the varying accounts - either at the beginning or at the end of his ministry, some scholars wonder if, perhaps, Jesus maybe even cleansed the Temple twice, and there s nothing to suggest that he couldn t have. If it were twice, it makes both a dramatic beginning, and ending, to his ministry. That makes sense. Whenever this occurred, the point is, it s a huge deal. Here in the Temple we see that Jesus was angry at the way the Jews were treating worship. He drove them out of the temple; they had turned it into a marketplace. Take these things out of here he says, - the doves, the sheep, the cattle, he knocks over the tables of the moneychangers. He cleansed the Temple. Again, all four gospels agree on the main elements of the story, but also notice something that only John states, in verse 15, something Jesus did: he made a whip. There are all kinds of interpretations as to what Jesus meant by this - was he bearing arms? Was he advocating violence? Or did he just made a whip because that s how you drive out animals? I think the thing we can say for sure was this - it was not something spur of the moment. He had a plan to all this. The error in their worship was so important, it warrants a corrective measure. But what was it exactly in their worship that made Jesus so upset? In the other gospels his complaint is that the moneychangers have turned his Father s House into a den of thieves, emphasizing the corruption which is being done there. That was true - you had to pay for your temple sacrifices in local money, sometimes even with special Temple money. Wherever you came from, you had to exchange money, and the money exchangers charged huge fees. The system was corrupt. Here in John, again it s a little different - Jesus is upset, he says, because they ve turned the Temple into a marketplace. He is upset with the very idea of a sacrificial system and all it entails. Worship is many things, but

4 4 it s not to be a marketplace. Does that mean we can t have a bake sale in the Fellowship Hall? Or a carwash? Or a book sale? Or garage sale? No. But Jesus is hinting at far more important than fundraising. He s talking about worship. In the first place, we would say that Jesus acted as he did because they were making worship irreverent. God s house was being desecrated into a noisy, smelly bazaar. Sure, they needed the animals for their sacrifices, but the buying and selling wasn t to be done in the Temple. Some surmise that the only place where this could have been done in the Temple was in the court of the Gentiles, since the other areas were only for Jews, and so if you were a Gentile, your worship experience was more like a pet shop, or rodeo. I like pet shops, and I love rodeos, and I m even okay with Cowboy Church, but this had gone way beyond the pale. In the second place, we could also say that Jesus acted in this manner to show that animal sacrifice was irrelevant. For centuries the prophets had warned about the same thing: From Psalm 51, the famous Ash Wednesday psalm we always hear: 16 For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. 17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. God doesn t delight in sacrifices he is after our hearts. Nowadays, we don t offer God animal sacrifices, but we can still err in worship. We can wrongly worship the beauty of the room, these lovely windows. We can wrongly worship something maybe you donated a lot of money for. We can get distracted, even by good things. When they are aids to true devotion they are God-blessed things, but when they become a substitute for true devotion, they make God sick at heart. It begs the question: is there anything else that you are worshipping as a substitute for worshipping God?

5 Jesus came to render worship in that Temple unnecessary and obsolete. Indeed, later to the woman at the well, Jesus will tell her that a time is coming when you don t even have to worship in Jerusalem, but we are to worship in spirit and in truth. 5 Here, at the very beginning of his ministry, he declares that they won t need to come to a Temple to make animal sacrifices to get right with God again. He says, in effect, that he will replace the Temple, that his sacrifice on the cross would be the last one ever needed. That s quite a claim, which would turn out to be true. So, even here, at the beginning of the gospel of John, he is already talking about his death, and about how his death would replace the whole Jewish system of atonement - how to get right with God. Jesus himself is the new temple, the meeting place where God and humanity meet. Historians believe that Jewish King Herod began to build this massive Temple in 19 BC, and finished it in 64 AD. In our story, they ve been building it for 46 years. It will take another 37 years to complete it, and then only 6 years later, in 70 AD, it is completely destroyed by the Romans. Jesus was not predicting the Temple s destruction; he s really making a prophecy of his resurrection. Jesus has come to show us a way to God, without any Temple at all. The commentator Barclay writes that what Jesus is doing is shattering their reason for even having a Temple, telling them that all the magnificence and splendor and all the money and skill that have been lavished on it were becoming completely irrelevant; Those are hard words to hear, and even for the disciples, it took a while for all this to sink in.

6 6 One last thing, it s the presence of the living, risen, Christ that makes the whole world God s temple God s presence is not confined to one place. St. Paul will later on say that as Christ lives in us, our bodies become the place where God dwells, so you don t need to come here, or to any certain holy place to meet with God. No matter where you find yourself on the road, at home, at work, at school, outside, or in this sanctuary, we have our inner Temple, the presence of Christ living is us, forever with us, throughout the world, wherever we go. Amen.