John 2:13-20
The
problem with religion is that sometimes people mistake it for God. Religion is a means of helping us relate to
God, and in the end, all of our religious practices and even all of our good deeds
turn out to be insufficient. God himself
has to come to us in the person of Jesus and put away all of the false images and
all of the false ideas and all of the false practices that can get in the way
and separate us from God. Then it can be
good.
That's
really what Jesus’ cleansing of the temple was all about. At the start of worship in the Temple, way
back at its beginnings, the whole practice of sacrifice was understood as a
sign of devotion. When that became lost
or buried, he wanted to restore the inner core of the rituals to its proper
place, in worship and in daily life, where love and sacrifice go together.
We
sacrifice one way or another for the people that we love and they sacrifice for
us, in a great give-and-take of mutual love. Parents sacrifice for their
children all the time from the moment that the baby is born and the parents no
longer get to sleep for a while, until the day when the child is sitting up by
the parents’ bedside at night to check on them, it goes back-and-forth.
People
sacrifice for their country in many ways. One of the most basic is by honestly
paying their taxes. Then there are
people who serve in civil capacities or sit for no pay behind the tables on
election day, or who serve as jurors for (what is it now?) something like seven dollars a day. Then
there are the people who enter the military, who really lay things on the line
sometimes.
Sacrifice
was the central expression of loyalty to God in the worship at the temple in
Jerusalem. In the early days of the
temple people brought what was important to them – the best of their sheep, the
best their goats – so that those could be given to the Lord in token of their
love and their obedience their loyalty in all areas of life and in apology for
the ways in which their love had failed. In response, the priests would
splatter the people with the blood from the sacrifice so that there on their
bodies and on their clothing would be a symbol that what lay at the center of
it all was a mutual giving-and-taking between God and humanity that was a
covenant between them, established first by the Lord’s gracious giving and binding
people together with him and one another in a single community where there was
forgiveness as well as law.
I'm
sure there was a lot more to it than we would ever understand. It is very hard
to gauge what anybody else is feeling and experiencing in any religious
ceremony, even the ones that are familiar to us in a way that animal sacrifice
is not. I regret being part of one of those online conversations this past week
in which people were taking sides about worship styles. One person wrote,
“Some people’s worship is entertainment in the
eyes of some people but on the inside they’re praising God with all their
might. I might dance around when playing
guitar or singing but I’m not ‘rocking out’.
I’m filling my soul with God’s love. …”
Another wrote,
“Many…find the praise music, electronic
instruments, TV screens and the jumping and dancing around not only
uninspiring, but downright disrespectful. …The pastor should also be robed.”
Then someone with a more practical viewpoint and
less of an axe to grind than either of those two (whose remarks I’ve edited to
leave out some of the less helpful commentary) added,
“I cannot do electronic amplified instruments
and drums for a very simple reason. I am
deaf in one ear and the music overwhelms my good ear and it is too painful.”
Who knows what was felt by people in that temple
in Jerusalem where the sheep and doves and goats and lambs were being
sacrificed while trumpets blared and cymbals clanged and singers chanted the
Psalms? Who knows what they felt when
they smelled the smoke from the altar and the burning carcasses and clouds of
incense? Did it put them physically in
awe of God? Did it make them
nauseous? No doubt there were those who
found a renewed sense of the Lord’s presence with them. There may also have
been those who found less than that.
At
some point, and it was probably a good idea at the time, the people who were in
charge of the temple began to find ways to make things a little bit easier and
to facilitate worship for people who had begun to come farther and farther
distances. They began to make animals available for sale right there so that if
you came from, say, Greece or Syria, you would not have to carry a coat the
entire way. That’s why when Jesus went
to Jerusalem
“In
the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the
moneychangers sitting at their tables.” [John 2:14]
There were so many people from so many places
throughout the Roman Empire finding their way back to the temple in Jerusalem
that they had with them the Roman coinage. The problem there was that the
emperor’s face was stamped on the front like George Washington on the
quarter. That was a graven image,
forbidden by the Ten Commandments. Even
worse, on the back was usually the image of a pagan god, an outright idol. So what do you do about that? Well, if you are part of the occupied Jewish
state, you establish a special coinage
for the temple so that people can buy the animals for sacrifice using coins
that were not objectionable in any way.
Again,
it all made sense at first, until over time those practices meant to be helpful
became an end in themselves. People began making money from the enterprise. It
was a problem. But what do you do?
Maybe
you are one of the people who comes from a distance even though you live
in Palestine. Maybe you are someone who's lived
with the poor who could not fully afford the exchange fees. How do you help
them? Maybe in the midst of this you
would find yourself, like people you care about, being cut off from God by the very
practices that were supposed to draw you closer together. Perhaps you would get
angry. You would if you were Jesus. He lost it.
“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 moneychangers and overturned their tables.
He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Stop making my Father’s house
a marketplace!’” [John 2:15-16]
At that it became clear that he was a threat to
the system. Systems don't like being threatened. When that happens systems
threaten back. He knew that. He accepted what it would mean, and he began
once more to speak both of his death and of his faith that God would validate
him, even in the grave.
“’Destroy
this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ …But he was speaking of the
temple of his body.” [John 2:19, 21]
Who
was Jesus? He was many things. One of those was a religious reformer. He
loved the traditions of the faith deeply, and recognized what they should have
been but were not. In fact that love is part of what led to his death. It was
part of his love for us, for his very being was God reaching out to us.
Sadly,
the need for reform never goes away. We
never will get everything right from our side.
Listen to what it sounds like when somebody puts that belief in clear
terms. This was written by Curtis
Freeman, who is a Baptist clergyman, a member of the Commission on Doctrine and
Christian Unity of the Baptist World Alliance.
He speaks from his own tradition, but you could hear others saying
something similar from their own background.
“Baptists and other free-church folk often tell
the history of the church like this:
Jesus came and called the apostles, and then he died and the apostles
started this movement that was the early church, and it spread throughout the
world and it flourished. Then at some
point, about the third century or so, we went through this dark period.
We don’t really say what all that was, but
somehow the church went off, and then Martin Luther came along, and he got
everything sort of back on track, but he kept baptizing babies. Then there were the Anabaptists that came
along, and they got things worked out, but they had some other problems, so
then came us, and we straightened it out.”[1]
Every branch of the Jesus Movement has needed
its reformers over and over and over again.
We’ve needed Teresa of Avila and we’ve needed Martin Luther and we’ve
needed John Wesley and (I’m going out on a limb here) we’ve needed Pope
Francis. Salvation is never found in the
forms of the institution, no matter how many times it splits apart over matters
of doctrine or practice.
Happily,
salvation is found in Jesus himself, in faith in him who never lets us settle
for human forms alone. Jesus pushes us constantly to see the love of God that
can and does come to us in the worship of our hearts before God. He drives out all that prevents us from feeling
the love of God for ourselves and lets us know God's grace for ourselves
experienced in prayer and praise and acts of loving sacrifice.
The
Church at its best remembers him and proclaims that we ourselves, no less than
anybody else, are sinners whom he calls back over and over and over again into
relationship with God. There are times
when reform comes with terrible convulsions, and that is not good, but it is
what happens when the problems lie deep within.
There are times when renewal comes with the Holy Spirit’s gentle but
persistent touch, and that is good.
But
know this, either way:
“The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ,
her Lord;
She is his new creation by water and the Word.
From heaven he came and sought her to be his
holy bride.
With his own blood he bought her, and for her
life he died.”
[1]
Curtis Freeman, “’Other Baptists’ and Confronting Catholicity” in Faith and Leadership (Durham, NC: Duke
University Divinity School), February 24, 2015.
http://www.faithandleadership.com/curtis-freeman-other-baptists-and-contesting-catholicity
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