"Stop Making My Father’s House a Market-place!"

John 2:13-25

March 4, 2018

I.

Passover is the annual celebration of the Israelites’ liberation by God from slavery in Egypt.  One thing we can never forget is that both Jewish and Christian faith begins with a bunch of liberated slaves.  Passover remembers this and so does Easter, which is the Christian re-imagining and re-presenting of Passover.  Authentic spiritual life in general is a passage from bondage to freedom, from darkness to light, and from death to life.  It is a movement from one kind of existence to a new kind of life.  

God codifies this liberation movement in the Torah, which includes the laws about how to live in freedom, and the rituals designed to maintain that freedom.  All of which opens us to this new life in God, and forecloses on that old existence in slavery under Pharaoh.  

The central act of the Passover is a holy meal.  In Jesus’ time, this involves the slaughter of a lamb which is then eaten with unleavened bread, wine, and herbs, in family groups, with appropriate prayers and readings.  The point is to actively remember God’s liberating action in the exodus in such a way that the people would maintain that freedom in their present lives, generation after generation.  It was so they would not decline back into slavery.   

But over time people tend to lose sight of the real goal and purpose of stories and rituals; we forget why we’re keeping these laws and doing these ceremonies.  We still read them, but their meaning and purpose is not actualized in our real lives.  And if we’re not diligent and careful we slide back into bondage, darkness, ignorance, and death.  We gravitate back to the routine of making bricks for Pharaoh, only now we think we’re liberated.

In this story we hear about Jesus’ first trip during his ministry to Jerusalem for Passover.  He goes to the Temple, and he discovers there “people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables.” 

Everything they were doing in the Temple made perfect, logical, practical, religious, and economic sense.  It was all about helping this huge mass of people, many of whom had traveled great distances, keep the law and the rituals to the letter and have a positive Passover experience.  In order to get to the holy meal, people had to pass through several gauntlets of exchange.  First they had to change their foreign money into Temple currency, then they had to use that to pay their tax and buy an animal for their sacrifice.  And of course, sellers had to make a profit on this, that was only fair.

But what Jesus sees is that the holy meal of freedom at the core of the Passover, had been turned into a market.  Instead of liberation, what happened is what always happens when ownership and inequality, and supply and demand, are introduced: exploitation. 

Jesus’ response is to make a whip and start releasing the animals, perhaps so at least this Passover would be about liberating someone from bondage.  He also dumps over the cash boxes and overturns the tables of the money-changers.  And he says, “Get these things out of here!  Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” fulfilling a prophecy of Zechariah about traders being cast out of the Temple.  

II.

When interrogated by the authorities, Jesus offers a sign to them.  “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” he says.  But he is not talking about the magnificent, gleaming, white stone edifice that, they remind him, took two generations of workers to build.  He means his body.  For he is himself the new and true Temple, though nobody got that at the time.  He is himself the place where God and humanity, Creator and creation, come together.  

The following year Jesus does not go to Jerusalem for Passover.  Instead he gathers a crowd of people around him on a hillside in Galilee.  When they get hungry he does not send them to buy food from sellers; how could he when the year before in the Temple he rejects the market-based approach?  No.  He feeds them himself.  And then talks at length about how he, his body and his blood, are the real bread of life; anyone who eats of this “bread” will live forever.  By “bread” he means his words, his teachings which “are spirit and life.”

The year after that he does go back to Jerusalem for Passover.  And this time he himself becomes, as John predicts, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” by giving up his life, shedding his own blood, and dying on the cross.  He becomes the sacrifice, which is what happens in temples, as his life is given for the life of the world.  And when he is resurrected in three days he breathes his Spirit upon his disciples, which in effect makes them temples as well.    

All of which tells us that Jesus is not just a Temple reformer, as if everything would be fine if they could just institute stricter regulations.  Jesus is a Temple replacer.  In chapter 4 he will proclaim that the worship of God does not happen on particular mountains, like the one in Jerusalem on which the Temple was built.  But worship will happen, he says, “in Spirit and in truth." 

What Jesus is getting at here is that we do not need to transport our bodies to particular earth coordinates to experience God’s liberating life.  That just turns it into an artificially scarce commodity that people will be tempted to regulate and sell access to.  If we want to know the freedom we have in God we will find it in Jesus Christ by keeping his commandments together.  His body is the new and real Temple.  And “we are the body of Christ,” Paul says, “and individually members of him.”  This new community that gathers in the Spirit that Jesus gives, this is the real Temple, this is the real place where God dwells, this is the real place of reconciliation.  This is the place of real liberation, forgiveness, healing, compassion, justice, and love.

III.

The gathering of disciples in the Spirit of Jesus will not have the dynamics and structure of a marketplace, which too often is about artificial scarcity, false inequality, and exploitation of the haves over the have-nots.  It will have the dynamics and structure of a holy meal, the epitome of which perhaps is the Passover.  This is why Jesus often uses the image of a heavenly banquet when he talks about the Kingdom of God.  At this banquet God provides and the people share together and receive what they need.

What is the difference between a market and a meal?  In a market the food is on tables; on one side of the table is the buyer and on the other side is the seller, and one gives money to the other to receive the food.  In a meal the food is still on the table but there are no buyers or sellers.  Everyone sits around the table, taking food from the table and passing it around.  Everyone gets fed; no one stores up more than they need.  It is a sharing model.

This is why Christian worship has always been a meal: the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  We gather around a Table and share together in “the gifts of God for the people of God.”  This is why Christians have always had at the center of their congregational life something as ordinary and practical as the “potluck supper” in which everyone who can brings something and everyone who is hungry eats something… and there is always food left over!  This is why Christians, who pray “give us this day our daily bread” have from the beginning understood that “us” to include everyone, and so have always been involved in food distribution, and even extended it into wealth redistribution, in obedience of Jesus’ teachings and example.

The early church, and many subsequent monastic communities, took this to its moral consequence.  When you join the gathering of disciples you donate all your wealth to the group, which is then distributed to all, and even beyond the group, as needed.  Thus they extend the eucharistic/potluck principle beyond food to everything.  Everything is a gift from God to be shared.  The issue in stewardship is never one of “How much of my stuff should I give back to God?” but “How much of God’s stuff can I justify keeping to myself?”

Now, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ breathed upon the disciples, because he is the Temple of God, each one of us, and each congregation, and the whole body of disciples around the world in in every age, is the Temple of God.  We are the place where God and humanity, Creator and creation, come together.  We become by grace what Jesus is by nature: fully human, made in the Image of God.  Nothing less than that is what Jesus calls us to live into.

IV.

Now, I know what kind of a world we exist in.  I know that it is market-based to the extreme.  This has spawned breathtaking inequalities, sickening violence, and deep anxiety and depression.  I know that there is no avoiding participating in this.  

But our participation has to be… subversive.  It has to be mitigating.  It has to refuse to live by the greed and gluttony the system demands.

As the gathered disciples of Jesus Christ, we have to become the Temple; we have to be a living witness to God’s generosity and abundance, forgiveness, liberation, and deliverance.  We are his body in the world, witnessing to the freedom we are given from all ego-centric, selfish, exclusive, extractive, and consuming bondage.  May our life together be a manifestation of the open and “joyful feast of the people of God.”

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