John 2:13-22[1]
Religion can be
wonderful, and it can also be oppressive. And in both cases, those who practice
their religion believe they are being “true” to God. Part of this is due to our
human nature. As Bill Moyers famously observed, “we all know that religion has
a healing side. But we also know it has a killing side.”[2] All
the major religions in the world—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and even
Christianity—have led their follows on “crusades” to kill in the name of “God.”
It is a sad commentary on our capacity to completely distort even that which is
intended to bring out the best in us.
If you’ve been reading
the Bible with us this year, you know that there are some unsettling contents
in some places. Whole books of the Bible are devoted to a concern for religious
purity that is rigid and exclusive. In some places there is almost an obsession
with what is “clean” and what is “unclean.” What drove that obsession was the
belief that they had to keep what is holy separate from what is common. The result
was a system of boundaries that feels very rigid and exclusive. It doesn’t
sound much like the image of God we find in Jesus, who not only welcomed
sinners, but also sought them out!
Right at the heart of the
Jewish religion in Jesus’ day stood the Temple. It was a massive edifice that
was built as a monument to the separation between the “holy” and the “common.”
It literally set in stone the idea that ordinary people like you and me could
only approach God’s presence through an officially designated priest. Our
Gospel lesson for today has all of this in the background. It tells the story
of how Jesus drove out of the temple courts those who were exchanging money and
selling sacrificial animals.
The reason this market
even existed at the Temple was that Jewish pilgrims came from all over the Mediterranean
world to worship at Jerusalem. They could not bring with them sacrificial
animals that had to be “without blemish” in order to offer them at the Temple. So
first they had to exchange their Roman denarii or their Greek drachmae for the
Temple Shekel. The problem with this was that it was taking place in what was
known as “the Court of the Gentiles.” Essentially, the Temple was a series of “courtyards”
that surrounded the “sanctuary” where God’s presence was believed to reside. The
outermost courtyard was “the Court of the Gentiles.” This was the only place non-Jewish
people could come to worship the one true and living God, and the Jewish
religious leaders had allowed it to become a “marketplace”!
But there was a deeper
problem than that. Like the prophets before him—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Amos—Jesus would not accept worship that consisted of “going through the
motions.” I think that’s what we’re meant to hear when John tells us that Jesus
did this out of his “zeal” for the true worship of God. The worship God seeks
from us has always been something that changes our lives. In fact, Jesus will
say later in this Gospel that “the hour is coming when you will worship the
Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. … the hour is coming, and is
now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth”
(Jn. 4:21, 23). That kind of “true worship of God” will leave its mark on the
way a person lives.
While the other
Gospels tell a different story about Jesus cleansing the Temple, they all seem
to wind up in the same place. The Temple, with its elaborate system of
sacrifices, and with its very structure reinforcing the notion that people had
to keep their distance from God, would no longer be the focal point for the
“true worship” of God. In one sense, Jesus’ very presence and his ministry had
already begun this process. Instead of the idea that one could only approach
God at a particular place, and at a particular time, and in a particular way,
Jesus made it clear that God’s presence is available to all people, priests and
commoners, men and women, Jewish and gentile, “righteous” and “sinners” alike.
Unfortunately, it’s
all too easy for those of us who seek to follow Jesus today to get caught up in
some of the same limiting notions about God as the people of that day. In our
concern for moral purity, we can become critical, rigid, and exclusive instead
of welcoming and embracing all people in the name of Jesus. Those of us who
have spent our whole lives in the church can easily develop an attitude that
“despises” those who are “outside” the church.
But we cannot embrace
the death, resurrection, ascension, and reign of the living Christ without
recognizing that it has created a fundamental shift in the way we understand
how to worship God.[3] The “true worship of God” should lead us to so deeply encounter God’s grace,
mercy, and love, that we cannot help but share what we have received with all
others, regardless of who they are or how they live. When we "truly" worship God, it will show up in the way we treat others.
[1] ©
2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 3/7/2021 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] “Bill
Moyers and Salman Rushdie,” interview for Bill
Moyers On Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006, accessed on 4 Mar 2021 at https://www.pbs.org/moyers/
faithandreason/print/faithandreason101_print.html
[3] Cf.
George R. Beasley-Murray, John, p.
39, where he says that Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple “provides a vital clue
for grasping the nature and the course of our Lord’s work, his words and
actions, his death and resurrection, and the outcome of it all in a new worship
of God, born out of a new relation to God in and through the crucified-risen
Christ.”
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