Lent 3, Year B
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
"As we approach the midpoint of Lent, we as a congregation find ourselves also at the start of a different, parallel journey. We are in a liturgical period of self-evaluation, taking stock of what our faith is to us now and how we might grow and develop it more fully. But we are also in a period of more visible, tangible change in our church, discerning answers about where God is leading us now.
Today’s Gospel lesson from John is a familiar story recounted in all four Gospels, and sticks in our memory as a vivid moment of Jesus expressing what appears at least in the Synoptic accounts to be anger. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus rebukes the moneychangers in the Temple with words from the prophet Jeremiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.” Jesus’ intent with this disruption then seems to be a symbolic act of cleansing corruption from the Temple. But John’s account differs from the other Gospels in two significant ways. First, instead of the harsh rebuke quoting Jeremiah, Jesus says, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Notice there is no implication of extortion or financial impropriety in that statement. It is rather a disapproval of the act of commerce in this space, which at the time would have been considered a perfectly valid activity. Jews coming from all over to visit the temple would need a place to purchase an appropriate sacrifice to offer. Some theologians suggest that Jesus’ reprimand may have stemmed from the fact that the Roman occupiers would have benefited from the Temple’s commerce by way of taxation. To put it into terms more personal to us, this story would be akin to Jesus toppling tables at our annual Christmas Bazaar because we have to pay state sales tax on certain goods.
The other major difference from the Synoptic gospels is where in the narrative this incident takes place. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this story also takes place just after Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, which we commemorate on Palm Sunday, and can be identified as the causative event for Jesus’ arrest and execution. In John, however, this incident occurs just after the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, the miracle that kickstarts his earthly ministry, while the resurrection of Lazarus is what later leads to his arrest.
These differences transform our vision of how this encounter plays out, but more importantly, they speak to the emphasis that the Gospel of John plays on the divinity of Christ, especially in his earthly ministry. John’s gospel wastes no opportunity to proclaim that Jesus is as much God as he is man. When the Jews ask Jesus, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” he gives them a rather oblique answer, which is also not present in the Synoptic accounts. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” It’s a befuddling enough response that John adds an explanation: “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”
Let’s step back and look at John’s account from the disciples' perspective. At this point, they were brand-new followers who had witnessed Jesus’ very first miracle, transforming water into wine. This miracle is performed without explanation or a clear purpose, but the disciples believed in Jesus’ power to do it. A nascent faith was growing in the shallows, but it was still undefined. Just who really was this Jesus, exactly? It was not the act of commercial disruption on its own that would give them any greater understanding of Jesus, but rather the seemingly out-of-place reply that Jesus gives them. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Perhaps the disciples anticipated another miracle in the same vein as the Cana wedding feast, envisioning toppled stones righting themselves at Jesus’ command. Scarcely could they have imagined then that Jesus was actually saying “This temple will be dust in your lifetimes, but I will be your temple forever. These doves and sheep and cattle no longer have a place here, for I am your perfect, complete, and perpetual sacrifice. The God that abides in this place will abide in all of your hearts because I will prepare the way for unbreakable reconciliation.” And had they understood all of this from Jesus’ answer then, or had Jesus spoken more directly, would they have been ready to believe? Perhaps this is why Jesus responded in such a cryptic way, knowing that, as John says, “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.”
Perhaps Jesus also answered this way because he knew how difficult it would be for his followers to envision the Temple, this core institution of Jewish identity, as a temporary thing. The communal memory still held the destruction of the first Temple and the Babylonian exile as deep, unhealed societal traumas. The notion that such a thing could and would happen again may have been too great a grief for them to bear until they fully understood what God had planned for them next. I wish I could say that my reaction to Jesus telling me St. Luke’s would burn to the ground would be one of placid understanding, but I doubt it. We have a communal identity that is shaped around a building and the relationships that grow within it, between one another and between us and God. The suggestion that this place is every bit as susceptible to the relentless wear of time and circumstance as the Temple was, or as we are, makes us feel fragile. And if that were all we had, we would be fragile indeed.
Yet we are blessed beyond measure to know Christ’s constant promise in our lives, that he will guide our next steps through the power of the Spirit, that he has destroyed the finality of death and decay. When we cry out to Christ, “Why has this happened?” or “What does this mean?” we might not always get a response that seems to make sense in the moment. The disciples needed three years of walking with Christ, of asking and listening, before they could understand. They needed to search through the trauma of grief and loss, of hopelessness and fear before they could discover that the reason for all of it had been answered for them at the very beginning. That’s a tough ask sometimes, and it may be what drives some to consider the message of the cross to be foolishness, in Paul’s words. Foolish when the answers we seek are ones we have to at times work for and have to at times wait patiently for in a world where answers can be delivered to our fingertips in seconds. Foolish for trusting when the answer we get sometimes turns our world upside down and disrupts the comfortable pattern of our lives. But that foolish message of the cross, of the temple rebuilt in three days, of the promised hope of meeting our maker face to face, that is the power of God that does not disappoint when we put our trust in him. Amen."