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Text: John 2:15,16 So Jesus made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my father’s house into a market!" |
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No doubt we’re surprised at how mad Jesus gets in this story from the Gospel. This is one of the few stories about Jesus repeated in each of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the same story. But they place the Cleansing of the Temple toward the end of their gospels. And there, at the end, during the last week of his life, you can understand the rage of Jesus, what with his critics picking and poking at him for months, trying to entrap him. His rage is excusable; the final, tortured lashing out of one whose patience has finally been overcome by their cruelty.
But here, less than two chapters into John's Gospel, the rage of Jesus is harder to explain. Up to this point, no one has said a word against Jesus. In fact, everyone has been quite impressed with Jesus, marvelling when he turned water into wine, and rescued a marriage celebration that was going all wrong. So you can' t explain his anger by saying that Jesus has been pushed to the limit, or he is at his wit's end with their opposition.
This outburst in the temple, in John's Gospel, is right at the beginning, in chapter 2 of his gospel. John, in his typical way, isn’t so concerned with the historical placing of this event, but he is concerned about the meaning of this event.
You can just visualise the scene. Jesus is standing there, white hot fury, whip in hand, driving out the animals from the courtyard, overturning over the tables, sending the coins of the money changers spilling on to the ground. "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my father’s house into a market!" By the way, we aren’t talking about Jesus driving out a couple of animals from the courtyard. During the Passover thousands of lambs, as well as oxen and pigeons were slaughtered in the temple. So you see, the temple courtyard would have resembled a huge animal market. And as he cleared all of these out, it was the maddest and angriest anyone had ever seen Jesus, before and since.
But you see, the problem is not only that Jesus is mad, but he is in the temple when he gets angry. And it’s the time of the Passover when he gets mad. The Passover was the great celebration of the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery. This is the highest, happiest feast of Israel's year.
The temple was the place where the nation gathered to be close to God. The temple is that place where they remembered God; they came there to be with God. And with everyone else quite happy to be here at Passover, quite happy to be in the temple close to God, it's quite a contrast to the anger of Jesus, whip in hand, overturning tables and shouting. "Get out of here!"
A while ago we heard the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament reading. On this occasion Jesus doesn’t get red hot about adultery, he doesn’t get mad because the people in the temple were stealing, he doesn’t get furious because of covetousness. He attacked their worship. He assaulted their religion. He isn’t attacking the Pharisees for their legalism, or the scribes for their snobbishness. He isn’t assaulting unbelievers, he is attacking believers. Here he barges in and attacks the religious for their religion, for the way they have perverted the worship of God.
You can see what relevance this whole story has for us in this Lenten season. Lent is a time of self-examination, today the church is led to look at itself and its worship. We are led to look at our attitude toward worship. This is a text that leads the religious to examine their religion.
We are supposed to come here to meet the God who has saved us. We are supposed to come here to recall with thanksgiving how God has rescued us from slavery, slavery to sin and given us a new land, a home in heaven with him forever. We are supposed to come here to celebrate that we are passing from death to life, from the enslavement to sin to a new life. We are supposed to be here to let the God who loves us touch our lives in his Word and the Sacrament, assure us of his love and send us out into the world to make a difference.
But what usually happens. We get out of bed, get dressed, sit in a pew, open the hymnal, sing the hymns, fight to keep our eyes open during the sermon, struggle to concentrate when our legs are aching so much in the long prayers, stand for the benediction ... go back home.
When Jesus saw what people had done with the worship life in the Temple he was horrified. It made Jesus mad, just so mad when he saw what had happened to worship in the temple and what terrible attitudes those worshippers had. When Jesus looks into the temple of our hearts when we worship, is he also horrified about the way we approach worship.
When we come here to this church, do we really worship and celebrate God’s goodness in our lives, or do we just go through the motions sitting, standing, singing, saying the words, and perhaps sleeping, if not physically then spiritually? When we here to worship are we aware of what we are doing - that we have come here in the presence of the all powerful and ever-loving God whose name we call on at the beginning of the service. At the temple the worshippers lost sight of just this fact and become more engrossed in other things. Recently I read this about worship:
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews for God will one day take offence..."
There is an element of humour in this, but it is also the truth. Too often we consider worship as just a yawn. Just as Jesus took great offence about the way the people were worshipping at the temple, likewise he is also offended by the attitude we have to worship. The New Testament warns: Let us be grateful and worship God in a way that will please him, with reverence and awe, because our God is indeed a destroying fire (Hebrews 12:28,29). We have to admit that "reverence and awe" have been replaced by a yawn of familiarity.
Or do we have such strong feelings about how worship ought to be conducted, or what kind of service we have, or what kind of music is played that we forget what we come here for, that is, to worship, to celebrate, to come into the presence of God. I’m sure you have heard people say: "I’m not coming to that service because I don’t like the stuffy old hymns, or on the other hand, the shallowness of the modern songs." And those folk are quite welcome to feel like that, we all have different tastes, but remember all of us are part of the body of Christ. In love we should join with our fellow brothers and sisters and help them to worship and celebrate in the best way we know how. Remember Paul’s picture of the church as a body. Every part of the body works together, even in worship. And besides, God comes to us in his word and Sacraments regardless what kind of music we have, or what style of liturgy.
Or am I here in the pew reluctantly, driven there by conscience, barely participating in the service and glad it is all over when that last "Amen" is said? Am I so busy that out of the 168 hours in a week I can’t spare just one hour to come into the presence of God with my fellow believers and celebrate God’s love. And we could go describing the market place of hang-ups and wrong attitudes that each of us has when we come into the temple of the Lord.
Jesus was dragged from the temple, he was stripped, beaten, hung on a cross to die; three days later when he barged forth form his tomb, kicked down the doors of death, we remember what he said at the temple. He was asked for a sign to show what real religion is all about. The only sign he gave was that of his death and resurrection; he gave his body and blood for all the insincerity in our worship, the times we have been driven by conscience to worship but our hearts were not in it, for all the times we have spoken the words and not meant them. He has given for body and blood for all the times we have sat resentfully in this church, for all the times we have given something else a higher priority than coming into the presence of God.
We thank God that he is still cleansing his temple today, the temple of our hearts. And so we come and worship the Lord and join with the people of God of all ages and all around the world and give praise and honour to the great God who gave his life on the cross of Calvary.
His body and blood shed for us provide us with an even greater reason to "enter the temple with thanksgiving" and we stand in his presence with reverence and awe.
© Pastor Vince
Gerhardy
St Luke's
Lutheran Church, Nambour - 2nd
March 1997
E-mail:
gerhardy65@hotmail.com
