Scripture: John 2:13-25
Given on 2-10-2019
Growing up, at the time in which I did, I was, maybe, the last of an age of kids who could freely roam the streets of their neighborhood with nary a thought from their parents of their safety or even where they were most of the time and while, as a parent, the idea of Jameson being out somewhere and us not know where he is, is utterly horrifying, my parents lived in a totally different world than me and Lesley occupy. But in my growing up years, in my neighborhood, this took the form of a 3 or 4 house rotation with the kids of the neighborhood congregating a one house to play basketball, another house to play video games, yet another to shoot pool, and finally mine that had a huge trampoline in the back yard that attracted many a young man and many more wrestling matches upon said trampoline. But little of these meetups would have happened if we were left to our own two feet. For our neighborhood was bisected by Walnut Street, a road that while only busy by the standards of a two-lane thoroughfare cutting through a relatively small section of my hometown, it was a shortcut that could get someone from one of the major roads in my community to another without hitting any traffic lights and so folks often availed themselves of this bypass with few stop signs in between point A and point B. As such, growing up, our presence walking along that road was strictly forbidden. But then, somewhere around the time I was my oldest son’s age, I entered into a wondrous period of my life in which I was able to breathe the fresh air of freedom while at the same time throwing off the shackles of parental tyranny and gaining a large measure of autonomous existence. I learned to ride a two-wheel bicycle. Now, you may think that some three decades after the fact, this transition from the world of the bipeds and the restrictions that came with that and into the world of bicyclists and the independence that accompanied that might not still hold such a degree of whimsical wanderlust and magical movement. You might think that once you’ve owned a car, kissed a girl, gotten married, traveled around the world, lived in a foreign country, had children of your own that the mere practice undertaken by the young and young at heart in every city in the developed world would lose a degree of its luster and sure, to the untrained eye, it is easy to banish this transitory moment into the far reaches of your mind and your life story. In a world and at a time in which it was simply a rite of passage for kids of a certain age and socio-economic status to receive and learn how to ride a bike, it is easy to relegate such an event to the status of the passé and rote. But this is to miss the surge of freedom that one gets when he or she departs from their abode aboard their new adult bicycle and begin to pedal left then right then left then right then left then right and as the resistance seems to be hindering your speed you shift the gears on your 10-speed to the highest levels and just like that you are pedaling as hard as you can and the bike is speeding a long and the wind is rushing through your hair especially when you forget for a second that you now have a bicycle with handbrakes and not the kind where you reverse the direction of your pedaling to bring the bike to a quick halt. And it is that feeling of elysian peace that first wraps around the soul of the animated body in motion that rests at the base of all other forms of freedom and liberation that will accompany the passage of time and the various firsts that one experiences on the journey from young child to fully grown adult. The further destruction of limits of space and time that comes with driving a car or riding on a train or flying on a plane and the release that accompanies those is not forged in the front seat of the Driver’s Ed teachers car, nor in the passenger car on the line from London to Edinburgh, or even in the emergency exit row of a flight from say Charlotte to the Caribbean, but rather it finds its supreme form at that moment when you push off on a two-wheeler, kick the kickstand up to the non-parked position and determine for yourself where you are going to go all on your own. It is at that moment that you realize that the world has been forever altered and it and you will never, ever be the same. I’ve thought a lot about that singular instance in my own life as I have thought about this passage from the Gospel according to John that we have just read a few moments ago.
We are told that almost immediately following his miracle at the wedding in Cana at which his disciples saw and believed for the first time about the power and the glory of Jesus of Nazareth over the world, he takes these first followers to the Temple in Jerusalem during the Passover time. And because it is Passover, this, in and of itself should not seem like an unusual practice for Jesus or the disciples. This was one of the few times of the year that Jews made a pilgrimage and congregated all together in the Holy City. And they, as well as those who practice contemporary Judaism, come together to retell and remember that time in the story of their faith tradition in which God spared all the Jewish children even as God’s spirit killed the firstborn of the Egyptians. This sign of God’s promise and protection has, for as long as holy days have been marked within the Jewish tradition, brought practitioners of the faith together to worship and have a traditional seder in which memories are elicited by the practice of eating and drinking and so it is that Jesus and his followers being Jews themselves are continuing the customs and practice that is associated with this high holy time. But having just witnessed the turning of water into wine and the subsequent opening of eyes of the disciples, we know that something different is beginning to be brought forth in this person of Jesus of Nazareth. And maybe at first, it’s just something bubbling just beneath the surface of the water, maybe it’s a pot that has been simmering for sometime and just needs to the heat turned up a bit so that it can reach a boil. This is the state of the Jewish world as Jesus and his followers make their way up the Temple Mount and into the traditional home of God. So it is that when they arrive and the child of God see the money-changers and the folks selling cattle and sheep and doves to the faithful who have come to worship in God's house there is a momentary explosion, of sorts, when the new order in which God is doing this new thing in the world clashes with the old and entrenched specters of how things have always been. And here, I want to be clear that Jesus is not critiquing Judaism, at least not the Judaism that is a faithful attempt to see the movement of God in the world, but rather, the crooked and corrupt practices that have infected the whole of the Temple culture at that point in history. For the folks who are changing money and selling sacrificial animals so that the faithful can offer the proscribed burnt offering aren’t doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. They aren’t doing it so that God can be worshipped all the more by all who enter into the Temple gates. For at this time in history, the people charged with exchanging monies and with selling animals are known to be operating just below the level of an extortionist. Because for the folks who come to the Temple without any kind of animal to sacrifice, from the wealthiest to the poorest, once they are there, Mosaic law proscribes that they must offer up a burnt offering and the temple sellers were only too happy to sell their wares bun only at prices far above anything that can be considered market value. And so, at least part of what Jesus is so angrily reacting to, is the devious way in which those on the Temple grounds are turning a profit on the backs of those who have little other choice but to pay the exorbitant rates given by these grifters. But, lest we let ourselves off the hook too soon, lest we think we might point at those crooks and swindlers, lest we believe that this is a story about those folks over there and not about us, there is a second, deeper meaning to the actions of Jesus in the Temple yard on that day. For almost the entire history of the Jewish faith, worship of God has been undertaken with the practice of burnt offerings. We see this in the stories of Cain and Abel, of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac, of Elijah challenging the prophets of Baal to a competition between their respective gods, of Noah, and of Moses, and of Aaron. And much of the earliest Jewish faith was based on the practice of burnt offerings to God both because they were thought to be offerings that arose from the first fruits of the harvest, the unblemished calf, the giving not from one’s abundance but, from one's very livelihood. But, let’s be clear, the offering is substitutionary in nature. It is the use of another living creature to overcome that gulf that exists between our own human nature and God. It is the use of a sheep or a ram or a dove that they might be purified by fire in our place. This is the reason that for much of the gospels, Jesus is referred to as the lamb of God—the one who will bear the weight of the guilt of the world in hopes of appeasing the wrath of God even though he himself is without blemish. But, when one begins to make the shift from an angry deity seeking retribution for the sin of the world and towards a grace-filled God whose love is forever and always surrounding you—a truth we can see and experience if we will cast out of our own lives all that hardens our hearts, all that blinds us to the movement of the spirit, all that offers a temporary, though tangible, visage of our faith. If we allow that which is inside of us to be burned away in the consuming fire of God’s love and grace, we will emerge a new people, living a new way, and ushering in a new era in which God isn’t found solely in the Temple. God isn’t appeased by fleeting moments of devotion when we can devote the whole of ourselves to God. God doesn’t want those singular moments of worship that take place on Sunday mornings. God doesn’t want us to give from our abundance. God wants nothing more than our whole body, our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole soul. And when we meet Jesus on the road to the Temple Mount, when we meet Jesus out on the sea when the storms of life are causing the waves to crest the bow of the boat and they try and make us capsize, when we meet Jesus as the one who walks out of the tomb on Easter morning, he is offering us the chance to live the whole of our lives in the presence and love of God if we will but let go of the safety and security of the vestiges of our old lives and live into total devotion to the call of God. And we will bring sight to the blind and release to the captives, we will bring good news to the poor even as we let the oppressed go free. And we will declare the year of God’s favor for all people and in turn all people will become our brothers and our sisters and no one will hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain ever again.
Friends, the author of the Gospel of John does something of critical importance with the cleansing of the temple story that is not found in any of the other gospels. He moves it. Rather than serving as the culmination of the ministry of Jesus on earth and the final act of defiance before he is handed over to the Roman authorities and killed as a seditionary and a criminal which is where the other three gospels place the story. The author of John moves it to the beginning of Jesus earthly ministry. He makes it the first pubic appearance of Jesus in the Jewish and the Roman worlds. And in doing so, I think that the author of John is making a profound statement about the work of Jesus in this world. Because follow the passage a little further down. After driving the animals and the money-exchangers out of the Temple yard, a group of, I have to imagine, somewhat confused Jews surround Jesus and ask him to provide them some kind of sign for why he is doing the things that he is doing and he tells them that when the destruction of the Temple comes in three days he will raise it up again. And while I’m not sure that this could have possibly assuaged any degree of confusion amongst the faithful gathered around him, knowing the entirety of the story, we might garner a measure of peace for ourselves. For Jesus begins to speak about knocking the Temple down and building it back up in three days. And as curious as such a line sounds (and the author does a good job of pointing that out), in the light of history and the story of Easter, we can know and believe what Jesus is saying. Because, Jesus is both talking about an historical reality in the life of the Jewish faith. The Romas will come to Jerusalem and following an uprising in the city that temporarily removed the Romans from power, the army of the Caesar arrives in Jerusalem and completely obliterates it. And the city and more importantly the Temple are brought down in a show of earthly force against those who would opposed imperial control. This was a watershed moment for those for whom Jerusalem was their ancestral home and the Temple the home of God on Earth. Following this, they were flung far and wide looking for a new home and a new reason to believe. Into this reality the author of John talks about a second temple, but one not made of human hand. A second temple where the spirit of God might dwell but not a stone edifice or even a tomb hewn out of rock. A second temple where the resurrected Christ, the one whom John Holcomb will tell you was raised on the third day, arose inviting all to dwell in him, and he in they until all the world was awash in the redemption of Christ. It is an invitation that called all the Jews lost and wandering to come to a new home. It is an invitation that continues to scream out from the light years to now.
I began this sermon talking about an instance in my childhood in which my life was forever demarcated between what had happened before and what has happened since. And we all have those singular moments in time in which we look back and knew that from that point forward nothing was ever going to be the same. This is the same experience that the author of John has with Jesus and that he shares with each of us on this morning. The experience of Jesus coming into Jerusalem for the first time as the Messiah. The experience of Jesus entering the Temple Mount and being so shocked and angered by the corrupt financial dealings and the staid religious practices that he completely loses it and declares with deeds more than words that nothing that comes in contact with Jesus will remain intact. No stone will be left on stone. At the same time, no person who comes in contact with Jesus, who decides to let go of all the security blankets and safety rails with which we so often surround ourselves, will ever be the same. Faith, real faith, demands, not just a moment of dedication, not just a single day of the week, but a life-altering trust in the goodness and love of God and a commitment to share in that goodness and love with all the world, with each person that we meet on life’s journey, with the one who doesn’t believe that anyone really cares.
What are the security blankets in your life and what would it look like to completely let them go and live into the light of God each moment of everyday? What is the rail that you are holding onto that allows you to inch safely forth day-by-day and what would it look like for you to let it go and allow spirit of the living God to blow where she will and take you with her? How can we, in this place, better and more faithfully live into our mission in this world knowing that God forever and always only but holds us in the palm of a mighty hand and that nothing we can do or leave undone will ever cause God to drop us? What are we going to do when Jesus appears to us in this moment and blows away all that is not godly in our lives and how will we live into the next moment and the next and the next and the next. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.
Image: Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple, by Jacob Jordaens, Date: c.1650