From the Daily Lectionary for Tuesday in the First Week of Lent
John 2:13-22
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
There are several things going on here. First, Jesus is making a public stand against the institution of the Temple, in particular, his disgust with the Temple authorities who have found a way to profit from the piety of the average Jewish pilgrim. The animals for sale were for Temple sacrifice. People would travel for miles just to make an appeasing sacrifice to a God who holds their fate in God’s hands. Jesus sees this as idolatry, that God “doesn’t delight in our ritual sacrifices,” but instead by our doing God’s will.
A learned Jew would remember, according to scripture, the controversy in building the Jerusalem Temple in the first place. When Solomon built the original Temple, legend had it that God asked the question: “Would you keep me captive in a house made of stone?” God is present in the resurrected lives of God’s people. God is present in the sacrifice of our life and labor, body and blood the metaphor, of God’s people. Why is it that the status quo, institutional inertia, belies the roots of our faith?
This is yet again an exemplification of the Gospel being counter-cultural. While the Israelites sojourned in the Sinai desert, God inhabited them as a people, in the form of the Law; that to love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly, was to walk in the very life of God. This passage is an evocation of the roots of the faith, which has no room for mere idolatry, but requires our very lives to bear God’s love to and for the world.
We are God’s Temple. God inhabits our lives and leads us in the ways of love, such love that a house of stone could never contain it. God’s altar is the human heart, brimful with love for a broken world. Such a Temple will outlast the ravages of time, and meet the lonely and disheartened pilgrim where they are. Institutions are necessary, but we must always remember our roots, our radical history, where we come from, who we are, and to whom we belong.
A Prayer for the Mission of the Church (BCP p. 291)
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working out of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
