Cleansing the Temple
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
March 23, 2003
Exodus 20:1-17, John 2:13-22
I. INTRODUCTION
I am so glad they knocked down the Cassell building across the street. What a hideous eyesore that thing was. It was built by the army either during the Second World War or just after. And it had that highly attained aesthetic nature that just screamed: “The military built this.” It was one ugly building.
But that building isn’t there anymore. They knocked it down over the summer and began to construct the new art center. In fact that’s not an unusual event–we often have to knock down old tired things to build new things in their place.
There are plenty of buildings downtown that are torn down to make way for new buildings. Sometimes they get knocked down with a crane. Sometimes they get blown up with explosives. But when they get torn down so that something else something better can be put in their places.
II. THE TEXT
Something like that is going on in the lesson we heard tonight.
Tonight’s lesson is often referred to as the cleansing of the temple. You all know the story: Jesus comes to the Temple, he declares that his father’s house has been made a marketplace, and he drives the moneychangers out, and knocks over the tables and scatters the coins. You’ve all seen the reenactments in all the Jesus movies.
It is one of the few stories outside of the crucifixion that is found in all four Gospels. It’s a familiar enough story, but what is Jesus up to?
There are a couple of interesting things about John’s version of this Gospel story. In John’s telling of the story, Jesus cleanses the Temple at the beginning of his ministry. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it happens just after he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, at the end of his ministry. Alone in John, is Jesus described as using a whip. Jesus even uses a whip. And alone in John’s version is Jesus quoted as making the statement: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
A. Not about money or sacrifices
It’s this line that makes me think this story is not really about money or sacrifices—though those are the traditional interpretations of the story.
Traditionally there have been a couple of predominant views about what Jesus was up to. The first is that Jesus is challenging corrupt business practices, and overcharging on behalf of the merchants. That’s possible and the language can be read that way, but it’s hard to imagine that he would get in as much trouble as he did for basically being a consumer watchdog.
The second is that Jesus was challenging the practice of selling and money changing in the Temple. But to look at this we need to know something about how the Temple worked.
It’s easy for us to project backward in time our understandings of religion. We pretty much imagine that religious life in Jesus’ time was not markedly dissimilar from what it is today. In fact, I am sure that there are hundreds of Sunday School teachers across this country who are telling their classes that when Jesus was a boy he went to church every Sunday. But religious practices were very different in the ancient world. At the heart of worship was sacrifice and the presentation of an offering. We have an offering, too. We pass the plate and raise a little money to support the ministry. It’s hardly the centerpiece of the service. In the Protestant traditions, the Scripture and Sermon are the centerpiece of the service.
In the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, they’re a little closer to the ancient understanding, for the Eucharist is the heart of the worship service. And in traditional Catholic and Orthodox theology, the Eucharist is a sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ for his people. In the traditional language of the mass, the priest will say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” But for those of us who do not view the Eucharist as sacrifice, we are removed from this reality.
In the ancient world, there was no doubt. Sacrifice was how one worshiped. And the only place one could rightfully worship was the Temple. Other sacrificial sites were forbidden. It wasn’t the only place you could pray—you could pray in the synagogues, and of course anywhere. But that wasn’t worship. That was more gathering, or study. The Temple was where it was at for worship.
Three times a year there were the pilgrimage festivals when people would come to Jerusalem, Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost), and Sukkoth (Tabernacles). And if you were going to schlep all the way from Galilee, you weren’t necessarily going to bring a sheep or a dove all the way with you. You’d buy one there.
Now the problem was, you were probably using Roman money—whose else were you going to use? And the problem with that was that there was an image on the coin: the image of the emperor. And that made it unfit for use in the Temple. It was idolatrous. It was a graven image. The only way to buy the sacrifice that you had to make in order to worship was to change money from pagan coins to Jewish ones. Then you had to buy your sheep (or if you were poor, a dove) and make sacrifice in the Temple.
All this stuff was necessary to how people were accustomed to worship. And long comes Jesus and overturns the tables and chases the money changers out. Let’s try to translate a little bit. It would be like Jesus coming in here and knocking over that little table with the bulletins, tearing up the bulletins, and then walking out with all the hymnals. Now how the heck are Methodists supposed to worship without those?
Some have said that Jesus was in fact making a statement against the worship practices of the Temple: declaring them finished and of no further use. Indeed, the Book of Hebrews argues that Christ is our perfect sacrifice. One could look at it that way, I suppose.
There’s just one problem with that, though. If Jesus really meant to challenge the system of sacrifice and worship, why did his disciples continue to worship in the temple and make the sacrifices after Jesus’ death and resurrection? The Book of Acts has them in the temple worshipping regularly. Were they not paying attention? Had they forgotten this fairly dramatic lesson?
Or perhaps, the cleansing of the Temple wasn’t really about the things we think it was about.
B. Street Theater
Maybe you’ve seen those commercials by The Truth. They’re those very clever and in your face anti-tobacco commercials. I’m sure you’ve seen them. There’s the one where they unload filled body bags in front of a tobacco corporation symbolizing the number of tobacco deaths in America. There’s the one where a guy dressed up as a giant rat plays dead in front of a subway with a sign that says that the same chemicals that are in rat poison are in cigarettes.
This kind of activity is called ‘street theater.’ It’s pretty common today. A number of the anti-war demonstrators were doing that this weekend. Laying down in the middle of the street with fake blood on their faces, imitating the casualties this war will produce. It can be very effective.
And it’s a very ancient tradition. Prior to the Exile in Babylon, a number of the royal prophets were prophesying that everything was alright, that God would break the yoke of the Babylonians. Jeremiah showed up wearing a yoke to demonstrate that God was bringing the Babylonian Empire upon Israel as a punishment. The other prophets broke his yoke. So the next day he shows up with a yoke of iron. Prophetic street theater is an ancient tradition.
And it’s probably what Jesus was doing that day in the Temple. But what was he trying to show?
C. Symbolic Destruction
The answer comes in his words: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” Now, the gospel author interprets this verse for us saying he was talking about the temple of his body. And he was. But perhaps he was talking about something else too.
At his trial before the Sanhedrin, some testified that they heard him say “I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another not made by men.” At his crucifixion he is taunted by the onlookers: “You who said you were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself.” Jesus’ actions were clearly perceived not as a statement about worship practices, or about overcharging, or church bingo, but were seen as a statement about the Temple itself. Jesus was making a statement about the destruction of the Temple. Prophetic street theater.
III. CLEANSING
But why would Jesus make a statement about destroying the Temple?
As I said at the beginning sometimes we need to destroy the old before we can build something new. Jesus’ mission was to proclaim the coming Kingdom of God. Kingdom of God is a kingdom in which there is a new Creation. The old things will have passed away and a new thing will be done. In the Book of Revelation, we read of the vision of the new Jerusalem. The holy city of God coming down from heaven, in which God himself will dwell. And since the Temple was the earthly dwelling place of God, would need to be destroyed and make way for the new dwelling place of God.
Jesus is making a statement about the coming Kingdom of God by symbolically destroying the Temple, in preparation for that Kingdom.
We are in the middle of Lent. We are on the road to Easter. Easter, when we proclaim the beginning of the Kingdom of God as we experience it in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent is the period of preparation before Easter. We prepare for the coming Kingdom by making room for it, by knocking down our own temples.
IV. OUR TEMPLES
But what are those temples of ours that need knocking down? Perhaps our preconceptions. Perhaps our closed-mindedness. One might argue that part of Jesus’ demonstration was meant to challenge religion so wrapped up in its traditions that it fails to experience new revelations of God. How often are we like that? How often do we fail to see God because God comes to us in ways we do not expect? How often do we close our eyes and cover our ears When God speaks to us because we cannot imagine God speaking to us in new ways?
Maybe our temples are our bigotries, our prejudices against each other. Maybe there are habits we’ve gotten into. Habits that keeps us from reaching out to God and to one another.
Perhaps our temples are our comfort zones. Perhaps they are our attachments to the familiar. Perhaps they are our unwillingness to go beyond what is comfortable for us, and to explore new ways of Christian witness, new ways of Christian discipleship, and new new ways of living out of our Christian faith. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a challenging and difficult Gospel. It does not allow us to view the world in the same way as we had before. It causes us to think critically about who we are, about the world we live in, and about our relationship to that world.
This can be had an unsettling thing. We’re not comfortable when God knocks our things down. We’re not comfortable when God asks us to knock our own things down. When Jesus knocks those tables in the Temple it’s upsetting to us. We want to live in security, and we get nervous when the Gospel calls us away from our security, into the risky business of being a disciple.
But remember for Jesus up ending those tables, destroying the Temple, was not the end. “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.“ The Gospel message is challenging. But it is not hopeless. In fact the core of the Gospel message is a message of hope. God is asking us to destroy our temples, to knock down the tables of our own preconceptions ,of our own and comfort zones so that God may build something new in us.
There’s another point that needs making here. And especially now. Even out of the uttermost destruction, there is a chance for building something new. We are in the middle of a war, many but not all of us wished had never happened. But God is able to make out of even this destruction, something wholly new and wonderful. Out of crucifixion, God is able to make Resurrection. So too God can make new life even when our world seems dominated by death.
And God is giving us a chance to do something new. God is giving us an opportunity to build something of the Kingdom within us. It can be scary. And there are times when we feel very much that we have been taken apart. Times that we feel our temples, our sanctuaries, our places of safety have been knocked down. But is in precisely those times that God is able to build something new within us. Just like with the performing Arts Center, sometimes we need to clear away the old and before we can build the new.
V. CONCLUSION
We are in the middle of Lent. On the road to Easter. Easter changes everything—most of all us. During this time of Lent we’re challenged to cleanse our temple. To sweep away the clutter of our sinfulness, preconceptions, our comfort zones, and clear the way for God to work a new thing in us. And we take comfort in the knowledge that we are accompanied by the one who went before us, who declared: “Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.”
