March 3, 2024
My friends, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Last week I preached on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. This week we’re going to take up a related Lenten question: what does it mean to be the church of Jesus? What does it mean to be the church of Jesus?
In this morning’s Gospel reading, we see the beginning of the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment in John’s Gospel. The backdrop for this story is the Passover festival. During Jesus’ time, Passover was one of three “pilgrimage festivals”, when Jews who could were expected to travel to Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands of people would have made the trip from all over the ancient Near East, and so the Temple would have been buzzing with energy and excitement.
And as you walk through the gate of the Temple, you come into a courtyard that looks like an open-air market. Because it is. Here are merchants selling cattle and sheep and doves. These are special animals. For these pilgrims, part of traveling all the way to Jerusalem was to offer a sacrifice at the Temple to atone for your sins. And if you’ve ever read Numbers or Leviticus, you know that laws around sacrifice were intricate. Burnt offerings, sin offerings, peace offerings – the list goes on. And the animals that were to be sacrificed had to meet some pretty strict requirements. It would have been difficult, if not impossible for pilgrims to bring their own animals. So these merchants sold animals that could be sacrificed. In our 21st century language, they were performing an “essential service.”
The moneychangers, too, were providing an essential service. In part, they were like those kiosks you find at the airport. Pilgrims were coming from all over the ancient Near East, with all kinds of coins. The moneychangers not only converted it all into the currency used in the Temple, but they made sure that people didn’t use Roman or Greek coins that bore the image of the emperor. Because such coins violated the Second Commandment – it would have been blasphemous to use them for these sacred purposes.
Amidst all this, Jesus has disrupted everything. He’s driven the moneychangers and the merchants selling doves and sheep and cattle out of the Temple courtyard. By depriving pilgrims the ability to buy these animals, Jesus has brought worship in the Temple to a screeching halt.
So why? Why did Jesus do this?
All this buying and selling and moneychanging was being done in a place called the “Courtyard of the Gentiles’. It was the one place where non-Jews could come and worship at the Temple – everything else was off limits under pain of death. While Jerusalem had been the capital of Israel and was still an important Jewish city, the reality is that is was located in an increasingly diverse region. There were many people living there who weren’t Jewish. And of these hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, some would have been Gentiles who had come along to see what all the fuss was about.
And then they arrive in Jerusalem, and go the Temple, and find that the only place they can go to worship – to learn about the One, True, Living God – has been turned into a market? A place that smells of animals? How difficult would it have been to worship in a place like that? How disappointing would it have been to realize that the only place for outsiders has been appropriated for the comfort and ease of the insiders?
No wonder Jesus felt such outrage. He knows that this activity could have taken place outside the Temple. But that would have been inconvenient. And a lost opportunity for the Temple authorities to cash in on their cut of the action. Instead, it’s a lost opportunity for those who are seeking God to find God.
And so we have to ask ourselves the question: is it possible that the contemporary church is today more consumed with providing life for those inside its walls than it is with helping others get in? Are we more willing to invest in bricks and mortar than we are in investing ourselves in the lives of the people outside the church? People who are desparate to meet the One, True, Living God?
Maybe the big problem is that we’re so caught up in our own organizational or theological agendas that we’ve claimed every space in the church for ourselves. Not just the physical spaces, but the spiritual and emotional ones, too. When we invite people in, do we have a welcoming space for them? It’s easy to put signs up that say things like “all are welcome”. But the spaces we create for others show our true priorities.
And so I want to come back to the question I started with – what does it mean to be the church of Jesus? This morning’s Gospel reading makes that clear. It’s a church that prioritizes the other. A church that offers a radical welcome to those who are hoping to have experiences of the divine that help them make sense of their experiences of life. A church that helps people give their lives identity, meaning, and purpose.
Jesus calls this this morning to clear spaces in our lives of faith. To sweep away the conveniences we’ve created for ourselves. To look outward as we dedicate spaces to the Other. To ensure that we’ve constructed a Temple – in every sense of the word -- that is aligned with God’s purposes for the world. To reconcile all things to God.
Amen.