3 Lent – March 3, 2024
John 2:13-22
All four gospels include an account of Jesus’ disruption at the temple.
Matthew, Mark and Luke all place this story at the end of Jesus’s ministry, sandwiching it between his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the parable of the tenants. John, however, puts the story at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, after the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, which makes it one of his first public acts.
Both of these first acts are acts of transformation. In turning the water into wine, John adds a particular detail that we may miss in our fascination with all that wine: the stone jars filled with water were used for the rites of purification. That is an important detail for John and for Jesus. Jesus transforms the waters of purification.
Jesus overturns a system with purification at its center. An elaborate system had been developed over the centuries which named some things “pure,” others “impure.” Women were impure for seven days after the birth of a son, fourteen days after the birth of a daughter. Dead bodies were impure. People with blemishes caused by leprosy and other diseases were impure. Certain foods were unclean. The list was very long.
Changing water into wine was not primarily a way to enhance a party – it was an act of transformation, a breaking down of boundaries, a different way of seeing the world and God’s presence in it.
It is not accidental that the next action takes place in the temple because the temple had become the center of the purity system. The animals being sold in the courtyard are for sacrificial purposes. The cattle, sheep and doves here are the proper animals for sacrifice, sold according to one’s ability to pay. There were economic implications for purity: poor people who could hardly afford to give a tenth of their crop away found they were then unable to sell their grain because it was judged “impure.” When it came to temple services, the poor were unable to buy the best animals.
Money-changers became a very important part of this system. Roman coins were considered impure and could not be used to buy sacrifices. The money-changers weren’t simply giving change for a twenty – they were giving “pure” tokens in exchange for “impure” money. …sometimes, for an extra fee.
The money-changers were making profit on the people’s worship. Jesus was not pleased. He threw them out of the Temple because they were hindering true worship. The temple was considered the meeting place between the God of Israel and God’s people. The temple was a holy place. It was a place where human life and divine blessing met.
In John’s Gospel, the body of Jesus is the new “holy place.” “The Word became flesh, and lived among us,” John writes. In the incarnation, with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s dwelling place is with human beings, as a human being. So Jesus baits the Jewish leaders: “I dare you: destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Jesus came into the temple not to be destructive or disruptive, but to draw us back to the heart of God. Jesus came to the temple to overturn every barrier that separates us from God.
It’s a subtle process, this turning the temple into a marketplace. Think about the houses we live in – a little dust and dirt build up on the baseboards and in the hard-to-reach nooks and crannies of each room, lint balls accumulate under the beds, mildew forms in the shower stall and around the tub, coffee stains appear on the carpet, cobwebs hang from the ceiling – it all happens so slowly that we hardly notice, until, one day, an alarm goes off, and we come to our senses, and we realize it’s time to do some spring cleaning and put our houses back in order.
Jesus did a cleansing of the Temple. And when Jesus speaks of his body as a temple in our story, he’s talking about the meeting place of God and God’s people. Jesus says I am this. Jesus carries the temple in his bones. Within the space of his own body that will die, that will rise, that he will offer to us, a living liturgy unfolds.
The wonder and the mystery of this gospel reading, and of Jesus’ life, lie not only in how he gives his body as a sacred space but also in how he calls us to be his body in this world. In the end, Jesus is saying that his body is the location of God. Yours is, too. It has to be. God is counting on it because God loves the world. Jesus is counting on it because his incarnation came to an end on that cross. Christ calls us to be a place of meeting between God and God’s people, a living sanctuary for the healing of the world.
And this is what I hope you’ll take home from today: Lent is a time of introspection, of looking within and taking note of the various ways we’ve strayed from the righteousness of God. It’s a time for cleansing the temple and making our lives – mind, body and soul – worthy places for the Spirit of God to dwell. We are complex people and we all, hopefully, evolve during our life’s journey; recognizing what we could do differently as we seek to heal, and to be healed, in this world.
So, how is it with your temple today?
Amen.
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