Zeal for Your House
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
March 12, 2006
Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
Exodus 20:1-17 Then God spoke all these words:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.1 Corinthians 1:18-25 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.John 2:13-22 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. 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 money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
I. BEGINNING
So, they’re building another condominium building in my neighborhood. They’ve built a number of new hi-rises in that part of town over the past few years. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll walk down the block and not recognize the street I’m on, it’s changed so much. Every time I look there’s some new hi-rise. Every time I drive down Massachusetts Avenue toward Union Station there’s a new building there that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Of course, these buildings don’t come out of nowhere–there is always something that a new building is taking the place of. One of the more challenging things for me as I walk down the streets of my neighborhood, is to try and remember what it was that used to be where the new building now is–before they built this big glass box where people are paying way too much in rent. And so, I’ll try to remember: was it a bank, was it a hotel? The one that’s going up now is replacing a parking lot and an Exxon station.
It’s a fairly common thing, especially in cities, to knock things down before we can build something new up. I don’t think any of you here remembers–perhaps the seniors will remember–there used to be a really ugly building across the street called the Cassell Building–made out of that corrugated tin that the army likes to use, back when the army was here, storing mustard gas on campus. They knocked that thing down in order to build the Katzen Center. They knocked down the gas station in my neighborhood to build these new condos. In my home town of Albany, New York they knocked down a whole neighborhood of row houses to build a plaza where all the state offices are located.
You often have to knock down the old thing in order to build the new things that need to be built.
II. THE TEXT: ‘CLEANSING THE TEMPLE’ [1]
I think that something like that is what is going on in tonight’s New Testament lesson.
It is a familiar lesson. Jesus has gone into the Temple. There he encounters those who are buying and selling animals for sacrifice. These are the animals that will be used for worship of God. There he encounters the money changers–a concept that has little meaning to us because we’re able to use the same money we carry around in our wallet for the collection plate. In the Temple it was not allowed–the coins that most people used in their daily lives had images of the Emperor on them and they were considered to be idolatrous graven images, unfit for use in the Temple. When you came to Jerusalem, you changed your money into something that was more acceptable to Jewish piety.
So Jesus comes into the temple and apparently confronts those institutions that are in many ways absolutely necessary to the smooth running of the temple. It would be as if someone came in here and prohibited us from handing out the hymnals, knocked over our hymnal cart back there, knocked over the collection plate, and disrupted the way that we worship.
Now, interpreters over the years have looked at this passage and they have seen Jesus doing a number of things. They have seen him preserving the integrity of worship and so they will claim that he was protesting dishonest practices of skimming off the top and so he was accusing them of robbery. Some have seen that he was altering the sacrificial system altogether, saying that sacrifices were no longer needed.
Yet there are a couple of things that give us pause out this interpretation. What we know about the disciples is that after Easter they continued to worship regularly in the temple and participated in the life of the temple. (Acts). So if Jesus was making a statetment in opposition to the temple and practices conducted therein, he did not manage to make his own disciples understand it clearly. Scholars have looked at this text and figured that something else must be going on here. Perhaps the line about “a den of robbers” owes itself more to the gospel writers trying to figure out what Jesus was up to.
There are clues in the text: Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” John interprets this for us by saying that Jesus was talking about the temple of his body, but it is entirely possible that Jesus is talking about the actual Temple. When Jesus is crucified on the cross on Good Friday, the charge that people keep hurling at him is “You who said you would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself.” This is evidence that Jesus’ demonstration about the Temple has everything to do with why Jesus winds up on that cross. And it had everything to do with Jesus’ ministry.
In John’s gospel the cleansing of the temple takes place at the beginning of a three year ministry. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s telling, the cleansing of the temple takes place at the end of a one-year ministry. And so we have to struggle with the question: did Jesus cleanse the temple twice? Or are the gospel authors telling us something by placing the story in different places?
I think that what John is telling us is that Jesus’ demonstration at the temple defines Jesus’ ministry. Because what I think Jesus is up to–what he is doing by knocking over the tables, and chasing out the purveyors of the sacrificial system–is symbolically destroying the temple itself. Jesus is engaged in what we would call prophetic “street theater”. No doubt some of you will see something of that on this campus tomorrow. Others of you may have seen those Truth.org commercials where they bring body bags to the doors of tobacco companies and dress up like rats and pretend to choke on the poison that’s in cigarrettes. That is street theater–designed to affect people who see it.
There is every reason to believe that Jesus is following in the old prophetic tradition of street theater. The way Jeremiah would wear a yoke of iron to symbolize the yoke of Babylon. They way Ezekiel laid down on his side for days on end. Street theater is an old prophetic tradition.
So what is it that Jesus is saying through this demonstration?
If Jesus is symbolically destroying the temple, he is making a statement about God’s kingdom. Jesus is saying to us that God’s kingdom is coming into the world and is entirely new. Everything that is old is passing away and a new thing is coming to pass. Even the temple itself–the throne room of God on earth, in ancient Israelite thought–with its sacrifices, worship and holiness, even that will give way to the new temple that God will build in our midst.
What Jesus is saying is that the Kingdom of God is a new thing–it destroys the old things. Those things we get attached to. Those things we find safe and familiar and comfortable. The kingdom changes those thigns.
III. DESTROYING THE TEMPLES
Spiritual growth–in fact, any growth–requires destroying those old temples and allowing space for new ones to be built.
A. A Case Study: Cherokee Alt. Break
A case in point was this past week. Many of you went on trips far and abroad. Some of you went home for rejuvenation and restoration. For those of us who had the occasion to go to Cherokee, we saw how our temples can be destroyed in order to build new ones.
We learned a lot of things about Native America. We learned that sometimes Native Americans call themselves “Indians”. That was new. We learned that they often speak with thick southern accents. That was newer. We learned little things like it is possible to get a good night’s sleep with 18 other people in the same room. We learned how to survive a sweat lodge–with its oppressive heat from stones that had been roasting in a fire for an hour, and which are placed in the center of an enclosed space perhaps 8 feet in diameter.
We learned that destroying the old to make way for the new is how we grow in understanding, not only of ourselves and others, but our understandings of God. Tearing down our old prejudices, our old misconception, our old ways of viewing the world is how we grow spiritually.
The temples of our understandings of history that some of us struggled with this week–the way that we have as a culture persecuted a minority with very little voice in our society. Those temples come crashing down so that new understandings can be built.
The way we understand our own faith, the way it was practiced by those who came before us, who believed with such condition that Native Americans needed to hear the gospel that they never actually listened to them and converted them at the point of a gun, cutting their hair, forbidding them to speak their native languages, and tried to make them good little protestants. They never actually did what we got the opportunity to do–get to know something about Native American spirituality. A spirituality that is ultimately monotheistic. That believes that God–the Great Spirit–is distant in the heavens (symbolized by the sun), but is also present on earth (symbolized by the fire), and is indwelling in us (symbolized by one’s body heat). That sounds familiar to anyone who knows anything about the trinity. That God was a God of grace and forgiveness and love–these things were already known to the Native Americans. No one bothered to ask them. And so much of our stereotyped understanding comes crumbling down when faced with new insight.
IV. THE WISDOM OF THE WORLD
Most of the temples we worship at need destroying. We need to let Christ come into our lives so that we can destroy these old temples so that new ones can be built.
For most of the things we revere—those temples we have erected glorifying our own accomplishments, or brilliance, or might—those are precisely the things that need to be undone. We make much of our own greatness and our own wisdom, and yet, St. Paul reminds us:
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
All the things we take pride in–our intellect and ability–all those things are still folly compared to God. Sometimes it’s a good thing to knock down what we know–or think we know–in order to grow in understanding of God.
V. END—ZEAL FOR GOD’S HOUSE
Because ultimately, God has knocked down the temples of our world in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everythat was old, normal, and understood to be the way the world works came crashing down on that Easter Sunday. Everything is undone. Death was destroyed. Fear is cast out. Hopelessness. All these things were destroyed.
Those of us who went into the sweat lodge learned that oftentimes our biggest stumbling block, the biggest temple we’ve erected for ourselves that needs to be destroyed, is our own sense of inadequacy. Our own sense that we are unworthy of being loved. That we are unworthy of the gift of God’s love and forgiveness. That we have committed such terrible wrongs, such great sins against God and one another, that we are so thoroughly broken that there is no hope for us. We build that kind of temple all the time. We add on to it and build extra wings.
Jesus is calling on us to knock that temple down. Jesus is calling us to accept love and forgiveness into our lives. To say that we are not defined in God’s eyes by our shortcomings. We are defined in God’s eyes by the love that God has for us, by the grace that God showers upon us with open arms, receiving us. That is what defines us. That is the new temple. The kingdom of God. That is not something that we built, but that God is building for us by knocking down those old temples.
God invites us into relationship so that we can go out into the world and share love with everyone that we meet. We can allow God to destroy those temples that are standing in our way. We can destroy those temples of greed and replace them with temples of charity. Destroy the temples of injustice for temples of righteousness. Destroy the temples of violence for temples of reconciliation. Destroy the temples of fear and let temples of hope be built in their place.
We are in the middle of lent–allowing our lives to be transformed is a good lenten activity. Jesus is inviting us into a process of transformation. Jesus is inviting us to have that kind of zeal for the house of God–not the temples on earth that we build–but the temple that God will build within our midst. So that we can accept God’s love and mercy in us, and so that we can live in such a way that it may be said of us that the zeal for God’s house and God’s love will consume us.
