Temple Overhaul

John 2: 13-22
Jesus is complex: he’s human and can be love and angry—even angry because he’s loving. This is a story for his “angry side.” Jesus: brandishing a whip, overturning tables, spilling money everywhere! Our Prince of Peace and nonviolence making a public scene.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the same story, but they put it in a different place. In those gospels, the temple cleansing happens towards the end of Jesus’ ministry and serves as the catalyst for his arrest: proof that he is a dangerous threat to the religious and political establishment.

In John, however, this event happens early on. It’s not a catalyst, but a moment of self-identifying clarity for Jesus. It is also an opportunity for allude to his eventual death and resurrection, which is why we’re reading this text now, during Lent. It’s a revelation of other ideas as well: Jesus points to his death and resurrection as proof of who he is: the sign of his authority is that he will rise again. The temple equals Jesus’ body, as the locus for worshipping and experiencing God on earth—God’s dwelling place within a particular human body.

But because Jesus will rise from the dead and leave earth, the temple will then remain: in the Body of Christ, which is commonly known as the Church. The faith community now becomes the locus for God on earth, whether or not they have a temple, tent, or building with which to shelter God.

The gospel of John was written after 70 CE, after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. And so Jews and Christians alike were struggling with what to do, now that there is no temple. Rabbis were reconfiguring a faith that no longer required a particular physical building and Christians were arguing for a different understanding. God dwells in Christ’s body, we are the body of Christ, therefore God dwells within our community.

Some interpret Jesus’ action as criticism for a corrupt temple system, that the practice of selling animals, of exchanging money, was unclean, but this is a part of the ritual, a part of the necessary sacrifice that the faithful perform during Passover. Jesus’ act is not just criticizing temple practicing, but is a direct assault on the entire temple system. What we begin to see is a battle: a battle between Jews and Christians: a battle for God.

It’s not unusual for a “new” way to try to claim to be superior to the “old” way: For a Jesus community to want to distinguish itself from Jewish ones.

A quick obersvation of Judaism holds that this religion has a lot of rules and requirements: certain ways to eat, certain ways to dress, certain ways to put your shoes on. It can be argued, that Jesus takes away the need for such rules, that having Jesus means it doesn’t matter what you eat. But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t still present in stricter ways of living or that Christianity doesn’t have rituals.

It’s not that ritual isn’t meaningful. Rituals give meaning and order to a person’s life. AJ Jacobs wrote a wonderful book that I recommend to all of you: it’s called The Year of Living Biblically and it documents his year of attempting to follow every single rule in the Bible. In following the rules and rituals, he finds that they are quite meaningful, he remembers to be thankful for little things, he remembers that all of life is sacred, and he finds that there can be a certain freedom from choice. That certain rules can save you “from a lot of thinking” and free you up to think of other things.

Rules can give clear ways of obeying God—clear paths to righteousness—but if we forget about God, if we forget that its God behind the rules, then the rituals become empty and meaningless—if God shows up, as God does in Jesus—and breaks the rules (because God can) and we forget that God is beyond the law . . . God doesn’t fit in our boxes, we can’t put God in a cage and pretend we’ve got it all figured out.

God is bigger than our churches, broader than our faith, and seems to enjoy a good surprise.

God can live and breath in ritual and God can live and breath in the communal life—God can do both at the same time, but it doesn’t work when the ritual is meaningless and empty, when its done only as the means in itself, when the performer doesn’t really know why or doesn’t care.

Our traditions, our practices, our customs, our rituals and rules of community life all need to be examined, challenged, to be sure they are not empty vessels of preference, but actually help us to connect to God—to remember who we are as the body of Christ.

There was an article in the Washington Post recently on a new monastic community in the District. It’s a group of young adults, recent college graduates, who instead of taking on high profile careers have decided to live together, to live like Jesus in the 21st century. They live in neighborhoods and conditions that make their parents nervous, and they help the poor. They deliver food, help kids get into good schools, visit in the prisons, they offer Christ in whatever ways they can to a hurting community. They love people who have never been loved, who are suspicious, but accept that Jesus is pretty cool, that these Christians mean them no harm. For this community, they wanted more than what they had learned in church, wanted more than to just live a noble life, but wanted to really embody the life of Jesus.

It’s a life that is not in keeping with the status quo. They are breaking society’s rules and expectations. They live in high tension with their surrounding culture, with how they were raised and taught, but they have imagined a new way of living life in God. A way to be faithful that changes everything

Jesus came to show a new way of living.
He asked that we have the capacity to change,
To understand new, fresh ways of experiencing God.

Not everyone finds God in the rituals, in the practice of doing, in the ancient traditions—
We need both: the ties that bind us to the past, that bind us the historic church and bind us to Jesus.

Its why, 2000 years later, we gather on Sunday mornings to share the bread and wine of communion.
Its why we light candles, and sing, and pray, and read the word, even those things have been done before Christ walked on the earth, and we find God in these corporate practices.
But we do not only find God here, not only on Sunday mornings, not only within the walls of a church.
We find God out in the world,
We find God in ourselves
We find God in each other
We find God in complete strangers

Because Jesus walked among us
Because Jesus wore flesh
Because Jesus was God incarnate: God in a human body, with a human life
God gave us life and shares it with us in all our glory and terribleness
And we are a human community, with the divine presence of Christ

Because Jesus lived like us
Because he showed us a life that was worth living
A life that put flesh on the Word of God: since he is the Word of God made flesh
We can also live a different life
One that is not empty of meaning.

In another season of Passover:
Before the Zeal for God’s house consumes him and takes his life,
Before Jesus’ body is whipped with a chord, just as he brandished his whip in the temple,
Before Jesus’ blood soaks into the earth and he utters his final cry,

He shared a Passover meal with his companions.