Sermons at Saint Mary's

The Third Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2009
John 2:13-22

Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen

When I was a little girl, I used to wonder where God lived. And when I asked that question out loud, I would get a variety of answers: God lives in heaven, God lives in us, God lives in nature, God lives in church, God lives everywhere.

Of course, there is truth in each of those answers. Each of them speaks to a particular understanding of God, to the variety of ways we experience God’s presence, to how we understand God’s nature and being, and God’s relationship with us.

For the Jews of Jesus’ day, however, the answer to that question, “Where does God live?” would have been a bit more straightforward. For the Jewish people, Yahweh, the Lord God Almighty, resided in the Temple.

As literally the “house of God” the Temple was for Jews the center of their religious life. Jewish parents presented their children at the Temple after their births; people came to the Temple to be cleansed, to be made pure; the faithful thronged to the Temple to make sacrifices to God and to celebrate the holy days. For the Jews of Jesus’ day, worshipping God, indeed religious life, was inconceivable without the temple.

In today’s gospel we find Jesus in the Temple, having made the journey into Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of the Passover. Rather than making an offering or paying his temple tax, however, Jesus straightaway upsets the applecart—he over turns the tables of the moneychangers, he drives out the animal sellers and the animals, and he rebukes the people for making the temple into a place of business.

Jesus’ actions must have been both shocking and incomprehensible to those who witnessed them. For in fact, the moneychangers and the animal sellers were providing necessary services in the temple. People who traveled long distances to the Temple couldn’t always bring the required sacrificial animals with them, and every day coinage imprinted with images of Caesar could not be used in the Temple of God, who commanded that there be no graven images.

Many have argued that Jesus drove out the animal sellers and the moneychangers because their businesses were corrupt, taking advantage of the poor who came to worship there. And that would not have been out of character for Jesus. But as radical as Jesus’ attitude towards the poor and oppressed was, Jesus’ activity in the temple that day was even more radical, and went far beyond outrage over unfair or corrupt practices.

Jesus came into the Temple not full of anger but of zeal. And in his zeal Jesus came not to cleanse the Temple—for in fact, those he drove from the Temple were essential to it’s very operations—but to replace it.
Jesus came to replace the Temple. That must have been a shocking claim for a people for whom the temple was the epicenter of their religious life, the literal home of God, built at God’s behest, following God’s instructions.

But Jesus came to replace the Temple because the Temple and the sacrifices carried out there had become, for many, not a conduit to God but rather an end in itself, and even a barrier to truly knowing God and doing God’s will in the world. And that is a notion we hear in the voice of the prophets Jesus himself likes to quote.

The prophet Isaiah wrote:
Thus says the LORD:
Heaven is my throne
and the earth is my footstool;
wheat is the house that you would build for me,
and what is my resting place?
All these things my hand has made,
and so all these things are mine,
says the LORD.
But this is the one to whom I will look,
to the humble and contrite in spirit,
who trembles at my word.
(Isaiah 66:1-2)

Isaiah goes on to say about sacrifice:

Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being;
whoever sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog's neck;
whoever presents a grain offering, like one who offers swine's blood;
whoever makes a memorial offering of frankincense,
like one who blesses an idol.
These have chosen their own ways,
and in their abominations they take delight.
(Isaiah 66:3)

It’s not that the prophets question whether God asked for sacrifice—clearly God had—but rather whether the people fixated so much on sacrifice and other practices of piety that they forgot the rest of what God asked. The prophet Micah raises this as he writes:

‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:6-8)

Jesus’ actions in the Temple remind us that Jesus comes to reconnect the world with what God is really all about. Jesus makes the practice of sacrifice unnecessary by offering himself as the one perfect, full, and sufficient sacrifice, the sacrifice that ends all sacrifice so that we are freed to be the people God calls us to be and do the work God calls us to do. Jesus comes in a sense to release God from the Temple, to unleash God’s power out in the world with renewed vigor, with transformed authority, to establish God’s kingdom both in the here and now and in the world to come.

Two thousand years after Jesus upset the Temple, we run the risk of being in the same place religious Jews were in Jesus’ day. We run the risk of losing sight of why we are here; we run the risk of keeping God boxed up in the very houses that we construct to honor God’s glory. We forget that God’s power is bigger than any temple, greater than any church, grander than any categories we might conceptualize, more wonderful than we can imagine.

In this season of Lent, as we make the journey with Jesus to the cross where he will make that ultimate sacrifice, we place a great deal of emphasis on our practices of piety, on our prayers and our liturgies and classes and disciplines—activities that are meant to bring us closer to God and that are right and good. But even as we engage in these practices, we must remember that they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. We pray, we read scripture, we come to this table for the Eucharist, not just for solace, not just for pardon, but to be filled, nourished, and sent out into the world to be the body of Christ, to do the work of loving God and our neighbor, to care for friend and stranger, to love the unlovable and accept the unacceptable.

For what indeed does God require of us but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?

Amen

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