Scripture: John 2:13-25
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he
found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their
tables. 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. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here!
Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was
written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign
can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under
construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was
speaking of the temple of his body. 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.
When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name
because they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust
himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about
anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.
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This week, I’ve found myself thinking about the past a bit. Taking a little time to revel in those great, sunlit memories of long past, allowing myself to revisit some of my most happy times; not unlike returning to an old, dog-eared book that you enjoyed in your youth, but which has sat untouched on the shelf for many a long year.
Like a great many people, especially white people from the Midwestern United States, a not insignificant portion of my good memories are rooted in the community experience of my time spent at church.
I mean, sure I have memories of great personal triumph, the assertion of my own victory over the great challenges of life; graduation, ordination, that one time I managed a long-distance sticky-grenade shot in the original Halo during a dorm party back in college. But while those memories are brief, sharp moments of joy; EQ spikes of greatness amidst an otherwise flat and level sound, the memories in which I find the most consistent joy, those periods of slow-burning comfort, love, and acceptance; those I always found in church.
I can still remember with astounding clarity the feeling, as a young boy not more than 11 or 12, sitting down amidst the towering men of our community for my first day as a member of the church sanctuary choir.
I can picture in my head, with an image quality that would make the greatest photographers of the age weep with frustration, those church pancake breakfasts spent running around the building in a sugar-fueled frenzy along with all the other kids, just waiting for someone to careen headfirst into a wall like a perfectly-tuned Ferrari inexplicably being driven by a drunken toddler.
Those moments, church meetings and Sunday services, Bible studies and bake sales, youth group meetings and quiet nights huddled over the baby grand like a child sleeping at the feet of Jesus; these memories feel like warm sunlight on a cool spring afternoon to my heart.
They are, at my very core, what church means to me.
And I know that many of us who have positive history in the church tend to feel the same way; whether those memories are of a small Midwestern church in Michigan, a great stone metropolitan sanctuary in New York, a temporarily-vacated theater borrowed from another organization somewhere in Arizona, a steel-and-glass work of art in California, or the oft-rebuilt home of an ancient missionary base in Japan. No matter where those memories started, those of us who grew up safe and secure in the loving arms of great mother church all tend to have memories along similar lines that feel just as strong.
Which is what makes it easy for a lot of us to miss what is so damn jarring about today’s passage.
When we read today’s passage, whether we read it as we did today from the gospel of John, or take it instead from it’s briefer presentations in any of the other three gospels we tend to receive it as something nowhere near as shattering, as deeply disturbing, as it truly is.
When we read today’s story, we often hear it like this:
Jesus comes to the temple, and there he finds people doing something so obviously, cartoonishly, villainously evil, that he can’t help but get utterly and completely infuriated. Jesus’ rage is justified to us, because the very idea of people buying and selling; a marketplace inside the temple? We can’t imagine such blasphemy.
Of COURSE Jesus was pissed!
And, fair cop, there are a lot of good reasons for Jesus to be pissed. After all, the buying and selling that was going on there wasn’t just for fun. They were changing money, and buying and selling animals for sacrifice, usually at an exorbitant markup. In those days, as you might know, animal sacrifices were seen as a necessary component of ones reconciliation to God; something you needed to do in order for your sins to be forgiven, and for you to get right with the Almighty. So, what these people were doing was, basically, selling access to God at such a price that the rich could get all the forgiveness they could manage, while those dirty poors wouldn’t even make it through the sanctuary doors.
Knowing that, it makes sense that Jesus would be upset. It makes the scene here in John’s gospel all the more believable too. After all, Jesus’ attack on the temple moneychangers wasn’t some knee-jerk response. Jesus made a whip of cords.
Have you ever tried to make a whip? From scratch?
That takes time, determination, and focus.
It is at this point where I love to imagine Jesus grabbing a bunch of leather cords from a nearby shop, sitting down on a bench across from the temple, and just braiding furiously, muttering angrily under his breath while the disciples looked on with a growing sense of dread and concern.
For something to get the Prince of Peace so princely pissed off…that’s clearly capital-B “Big Deal.”
But what gets me every time, every time I read this passage…
…if it’s such a big deal, such a glaringly obvious, unmissable Big Bad…
…why is Jesus the only one upset here?
Why aren’t there protesters out front?
Why aren’t there temple leaders arguing about this?
Heck, why aren’t the disciples equally upset about this?
Why does it seem like it’s just Jesus who’s upset?
The answer of course, is as simple as it ought to be completely terrifying for us long-term church folks.
To everyone else in that time and place, from the disciples to the merchants and back ‘round again, that scene in the temple wasn’t just an accepted evil. It wasn’t some compromise they’d all made.
It was how church was supposed to work.
For the people of the time, the flourishing trade and changing of money was how they measured the success of the temple institution. Trade was a sign of wealth and success, the riches of Solomon raining again on his descendants; a sign of God’s blessing on the community. The strength of temple trade was an easy metric by which they could assess the degree to which God had blessed the people; the degree to which the temple was “doing well.” If trade was up and profits were good, then it stands to reason that God must be happy, and we’re doing all the right things. If trade was bad and profits dipped…well, maybe we need to do something different.
Trading was kaizen for the temple.
It was…just how things were done.
For the folks in that moment, the people there with Jesus then and there, this day was as near-to-perfect as it would be possible for a day to be. Like those sunlit memories of church I mentioned earlier, the community had come together under clear skies, with warm weather, in good spirits, ready for some of that very-very-old time religion.
The author of the Gospel of John tries to give some sort of retroactive context to Jesus’ actions, quoting that “zeal will consume him” bit out of Psalm 69 to try and make it seem like this was something anticipated, something destined to happen; a zealous response to an abnormal situation.
But the truth was that everything was normal.
Everything was as it always had been, right up until until Jesus came and found it.
Found it…and looked right through it.
He saw it the way see fancy Easter dresses, suits and ties, and packed pews come Christmas Eve.
He saw it the way we see a bell choir, or a brass band, and a pancake breakfast with half the town tucking in.
He saw it the way we see the local salesman handing out business cards in the back during the passing of the peace, or a local executive lamenting how the company just isn’t making enough money these days, even though they still pay their exhausted workforce below-poverty rates; the way we see the smiles of church leaders uttering honeyed words of welcome while quietly judging just who among the people they’re willing to actually engage with, to actually let into the life of the church.
It is those beatific smiles…which don’t quite seem to make it all the way into the eyes; the silken tablecloth of love and community resting gently over a cracked and broken table.
Of course, we no longer have marketplaces in our temples. As Christians, we’re all rightfully a little worried about mixing religion and trade like this, because that moment where Jesus got that furious is a fundamental part of our shared historical memory. It was such a striking moment for us that it winds up as one of only a handful of the memories we have of Jesus that wound up in all four gospels simultaneously!
But the lesson here was never about trade practices. Jesus wasn’t upset because moneychangers just happened to be in an otherwise perfectly healthy faith community.
Jesus was upset because what he saw there was normal to everyone but him, and when he looked upon that scene he didn’t see a warm and welcoming community.
No.
When he looked out, he looked through the eyes of the people gathered there and saw truth.
He saw through the eyes of that 12 year old white kid in the church choir, looking at all the smiling white faces around him, and wondered what had happened to all that great and wonderful diversity God had so lovingly created.
He looked upon that HD memory of children running high-speed through the pancake breakfast, and saw the young gay child hiding in the corner because his Sunday school teacher just spent the last hour telling him that God hates him.
He saw long church meetings about how to hold on to money, Sunday lip-services, Bible studies where the Bible is mined for helpful self-justifications, bake sales as a pretext to send our very rich and very white children on fun mission trips to gawk at all the starving brown people; a grand piano purchased for as a tax-write-off by businessman who ran his company on starvation wages, but still wanted the image of a good and pious man.
Jesus looked and saw what was, while others looked and accepted what had been.
And when Jesus saw the truth of what God’s people were, what God’s people had become, Jesus’ first instinct was to mutter angrily and go make himself a weapon.
In that moment, Jesus couldn’t have cared less about the church.
Jesus couldn’t have cared less because what it had taken them forty-six years to build, he could do again in three days, half-naked, while hanging dead from a tree.
And, I gotta be honest, I don’t really think that this is the one and only moment when Jesus felt this way about the church.
When we humans are left to our own devices, we typically find ourselves trying to build divinity out of blasphemy, rather than just simply letting God be God. Hunting for “metrics of success” rather than listening for the cries of lost sheep.
We build boxes for God, structures and ways of being that we insist are the only way of doing things, then defend them as “the way they’ve always been done.” All the while unaware that God couldn’t care less about how we want to measure our “success” as churches.
God doesn’t care about animal sacrifices.
God doesn’t care about how many likes, shares, or views we have, or how many butts we have in the pews.
God doesn’t care if we even have pews in the first place.
God doesn’t care how successful our temple market is.
God doesn’t care how successful our church is.
God does NOT care how many programs we run, how much money we have, or how much money we give.
When God sees our banging cymbals and sounding drums, our insistence on doing things just so and our refusal to do things differently, even if it means that the the poor, the immigrant, the different, the lonely, or the otherwise other find no home here; when God sees that….God walks off for a minute muttering in disgust, and gets to braiding.
Said the Beaver to Lucy of that great and terrible Lion, “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
God, my friends, is the origin and source of all that is good, all that is true, and all that is pure.
And so many of us have come to this unshakable belief, one with which I wrestle constantly myself, that goodness somehow requires a lack of confrontation.
This belief that goodness requires us to unquestioningly follow the ways in which things have always been done.
That goodness requires us not to challenge authorities, not to question our leadership, not to seek new ways of doing, of being, or of understanding who and what God is.
I think the truth is though…that goodness, real godly goodness, sometimes requires us to get pissed off.
Goodness doesn’t require us to be quietly acquiescent to an unacceptable status quo. Goodness doesn’t require us to silence our voices when we see ungodly acts perpetrated by those who sit in the seats of power and authority. Goodness doesn’t require us to turn aside when those who sit in the house built for the Lord speak of profit before principle, of numbers rather than nurturing; asking for labors rather than giving love.
Goodness requires us to look on the world around us and see not what has always been, but what God insists is possible through the application of God’s love in practice, rather than in theory.
Goodness requires us to look at our communities, and seek the learn what is needed rather than
what we want to do.
Goodness requires us to listen to the cries that are unheard, rebuild bridges that were burned down, bring healing to the sick, guidance to the lost and, occasionally, a lovingly-braided whip directly to the tables of those who would turn the household of the Lord into a temple to our own worst natures.
Friends, I struggle with this one myself. I come from places of social privilege, cultural power, and the strength of status afforded me because of my gender and sexual identity. I cannot, by definition, speak a universal message to everyone on this issue because, as a lifelong Christian with a background like this, my own memories are warm and fuzzy remembrances of time spent in the temple marketplace.
There always will be a part of me that yearns for that.
But for me, for a lot of us, that is our cross to bear. The cross of awareness, the cross of realizing that our happiness came at a price. The cross of sacrificing these warm and wonderful memories of community, exchanging them for a realization that we share with our savior; that the house of our Creator cannot, should not be like this.
We privileged folk carry the cross of tearing it all down.
Our hope here lies in the secure knowledge that what we have spent our whole lives building up, God can and will build back better in just a few days.
Those of us who have dedicated our lives to building religious communities that have run roughshod over the most vulnerable voices among us can have hope because we worship a Lord who tells us to tear it all down, and the helps us to do it again.
If death is no barrier to our Lord, what’s systematic inequality and prejudice?
So long as we’re willing to braid a few cords, I can promise you this.
It’ll be no barrier at all.
Let’s get to it then.
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