Sermon — March 7, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Readings for the Third Sunday in Lent
Back when we had more free time in the evenings, Alice and I loved watching detective, crime, and spy shows: Bones and Grantchester and Foyle’s War; one of Alice’s family’s favorites is the great BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. We tend to do better with forensics or old-fashioned detectives than with modern action movies, for a simple reason. There comes a time, in every chase scene, when a poor street vendor’s fruit cart is overturned—either knocked over in an attempted diversion or smashed through by a racing car—and Alice, in this moment, is overcome with distress.
This trope is so common that that it even has an entry in Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms, filed under “Fruit Cart.” And every time we see it happen, I see Alice get distracted, thinking about the poor fruit-seller whose Tuesday morning just got ruined, who’s going to have to stand there now and pick up bushels of bruised fruit, with no help, by the way, from the detective.
And while we don’t often have very much sympathy for the moneychangers and animal-sellers, today’s gospel story—what we often call “the Cleansing of the Temple”—is Jesus’ fruit-cart moment. Jesus wants to make a point, and so he goes to the Temple, and drives out the animals, and he dumps out the moneyboxes, and he flips over the tables, and he walks out, leaving all these vendors to clean up the mess he’s made of a random morning during their busiest week of the year.
The moneychangers and animal-sellers, after all, aren’t really doing anything wrong. And if you want to understand what Jesus is doing in this story, I think it’s important to start by talking about what he’s not doing, because the ancient Temple in Jerusalem is quite foreign to our experience of religion.
First: Jesus is not driving out “the moneylenders,” but “the moneychangers.” (John 2:15) People often misquote this verse, but it’s an anti-Semitic Freudian slip. It’s just a way of taking a medieval association between Jews and banking and projecting it onto Jesus’ day with dangerous implications. Jesus isn’t somehow validating alt-right fantasies about Jewish financiers.
I’m sure nobody listening to this sermon thinks he is. You might imagine, though, that Jesus’ issue here is the commercialization of religion, this strange collection of animal-sellers and moneychangers who’ve “made my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:16) We see the same kind of commercialization in our religious world, and many of us rue the fact that Christmas has become all about shopping, or that Easter’s become all about candy. And certainly, Jesus says that his problem is that this commerce is going on inside the Temple; it’s made the house of God into a place of business.
But Jesus is actually saying something even more radical than this.
We shouldn’t imagine that this is like setting up a flea market in the back of our little church at 10am on a Sunday morning, with the clink of coins and the beep of cash registers drowning out our reflective music and pious prayers. The Temple itself was a small building, somewhere around this size, actually, but only the priests entered it. The Temple complex, on the other hand, was huge, a quarter of the area of ancient Jerusalem. You could literally walk from St. John’s to the Whole Foods to the Monument without ever leaving the Temple grounds, so it wasn’t the kind of clash of commerce and worship you sometimes see in paintings of this scene.
More importantly, though, buying and selling animals and changing coins from one currency to another weren’t a commercial replacement for worship; they were actually vital to the functioning of the Temple itself. Worship in the Temple was built around animal sacrifice. Depending on their wealth and how thankful they were feeling (or how sinful they’d been), worshipers would bring a cow, or a sheep, or a dove to the Temple, and give it to the priests, who would butcher the animal and cook it. (A somewhat different skill set from priests today.) In some kinds of sacrifice, the animal would be wholly offered to God, burned on the altar. In other cases, the priests would keep a small part for themselves as their payment and return the rest to the worshipers to share with their families in a festive meal. The priests offered sacrifices in the Temple every day, but ordinary people only came up to Jerusalem to worship on a few major festivals during the year, so worshiping in the Temple was more like a holiday feast than our ordinary week-to-week worship in the synagogue or the church.
So, selling animals at the Temple made worship more inclusive and more equitable. Not everyone, after all, is a farmer; even in an agrarian society like first-century Judea and Galilee, many people were artisans or laborer. Jesus the carpenter’s son and his fishing friends wouldn’t be any more likely to own their own cattle or sheep or doves to sacrifice than you are! So of course, people need to buy the animals to offer, just like you do at the butcher’s counter.
Animals that were going to be offered also had to be healthy and uninjured. If you bought an animal at home and brought it with you on a journey through the Judean hill country to the Temple, it might get hurt along the way, and you’d be unable to offer it and stuck with the bill. Selling animals in the Temple was almost an insurance policy, protecting people from having to carry that financial risk themselves.
And what about changing coins? Well, the answer’s in your pocket. Pull out a random coin or bill from your wallet, and you’ll probably see a human face. Ancient coins were no different, almost always stamped with the image of the current ruler. But if you were paying attention to the first reading this morning, you might remember that the Second Commandment specifically warns against creating images of people or animals. “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…” (Exodus 20:4) Because ancient kings were regularly treated as divine, it would have been blasphemous to bring a coin stamped with the image of the king into the Temple. The money-changers were there to help you exchange ordinary, idolatrous coins for those that could be used in the Temple, and keep you from violating the Second Commandment.[1]
To make a long sermon short: the vendors whose proverbial fruit carts Jesus overturns are not bad guys in this story. They’re not distracting people from worship, but making it possible for everyone to participate. They’re not exploiting the poor, but protecting them from financial risk. They’re not displacing religion with commerce, they’re helping people follow God’s commandments.
It’s too easy for us to say that when Jesus drives out the animal sellers and the money changers, he’s purifying or “cleansing” worship in the Temple. He’s doing something more to his people’s worship. He’s stopping it altogether.
You might be surprised to hear that the Christianity, Judaism, and even the Bible itself have mixed feelings about what we call “worship,” this ritualized offering of praise and prayer to God. On the one hand, God gives elaborate instructions in the Torah on precisely how to offer various kinds of sacrifices; on the other hand, no sacrifice has been offered since the Temple was destroyed two thousand years ago. Neither the Old nor the New Testament seem to imagine the weekly worship that we’re used to, nor do they give instructions on exactly how to do it. Time and again, the ancient prophets criticize the people for focusing too much on worship and not enough on ethics. Even the early Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists for their refusal to offer worship to the gods of their own time, and the absence of something their contemporaries recognized as worship.
We even see this in the story of the Ten Commandments. When God first calls Moses, he tells him, “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” (Exodus 3:12) And after each of the plagues, when Moses speaks with Pharaoh, he doesn’t simply say, “Let my people go!” It’s always, “Let my people go, so that they may worship [God].” (Exodus 8:1, 8:20, 9:1, 9:13 et al) So when Moses has finally freed the people, and he’s parted the Red Sea, and they’ve escaped from slavery, they arrive at the mountain and they prepare to worship God, but they don’t know what to do. “Then,” Exodus says, “God spoke all these words” (Exodus 20:1)—and the first thing God tells them on the mountain where they’ve been told to worship is not how to pray, or which animals to offer and when, but how to live as free people in relationship with God and one another. And all of a sudden you realize there was a pun all along, because the Hebrew word that means “worship” also means “serve,” and to “serve God” doesn’t only or even necessarily mean to “worship” God in the sense we usually mean.
“Destroy this temple,” Jesus says, “and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19) Bold claim. For forty-six years, the finest builders in the land have been renovating the Temple Mount. Destroy it, and you’ll rebuild it in three days? But he’s speaking, of course, about himself. When Jesus walks the earth, the Temple is not “the house of God,” the place where God dwells. It’s him. It’s not the regular offering of sacrifices in worship at a particular building that’s the point; it’s relationship with Jesus. To pick up the Ten Commandments again: God’s answer to how the people ought to worship is that what’s primarily important is not how we worship, but how we live in relationship with God and one another.
And thanks be to God for that.
Because the Temple has lain in ruin for near two thousand years. This building has been closed for most of fifty-something weeks. Our worship has been disrupted more completely than Jesus’ table-turning ever could have done. And we miss it dearly, and we long to return. (And I’ll have an announcement for you in a few minutes on that.) And maybe we feel like fruit-sellers whose carts have been overturned, depressed at the prospect of cleaning it all up and rebuilding the ordinary.
Because God, Jesus seemed to say, does not live in the Temple. He’s walking among you. God does not live in the church; he is among us. We say that the Church is the Body of Christ; but that does not mean that the church is the Body of Christ. What I mean to say is that the Church—you—are the Body of Christ; the church—this building—is not. Jesus has ascended, and now it is in you and through you and among you that God walks the earth. And just as the ancient Israelites wondered how to worship God and were given the Ten Commandments, it is with your very lives that you worship and serve God—in your relationships with Jesus and with one another. So may we all live our lives with “God’s foolishness [which] is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness [which] is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25) Amen.
[1] Raymond, E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Yale Bible. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 115.