Jesus Against the Market.

John 2:13-25.          (February 8, 2015)

I.

            Jesus and his disciples go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  When he gets to the Temple he finds that it has been turned into a noisy marketplace.  There are bankers who have installed themselves in the precinct for the purpose of exchanging idolatrous Roman coins for Jewish coins which were suitable for people to use at other booths to buy birds and animals for sacrifice. 

            This enrages Jesus so much that it inspires his one act of semi-violence in his whole life.  Making a whip, he drives the animals out, and then he overturns the tables of the bankers.  He makes quite a commotion.  And he says, “Get these things out of here!  Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business!”  He does not want his Father’s house made into a marketplace.

            What is his problem?  Sacrifices are mandated in the Bible, and they had to take place in Jerusalem, which means that people had to travel.  Since, it was inconvenient to haul birds and animals on long trips; it made more sense to buy an animal when they got to Jerusalem.  But the Roman coins that everybody had couldn’t be used in the Temple because Caesar’s face was on them and the Bible rejected such graven images.  So people had to change it for Jewish money.  And it was only reasonable that this happen in the Temple complex, rather than in the city where it was harder to control things.  And people cannot be expected to provide these services for free, they have to make a living.  Therefore, profits should be made on these enterprises.  Right? 

            I mean, what does Jesus want to do?  Get rid of animal sacrifices altogether?  Is anything more solidly biblical than animal sacrifices?  Then, frankly, there is the practical matter of the whole economy of Jerusalem and Judea to consider, which was built on the spending of pilgrims who came to worship at the magnificent Temple.

            Jesus’ problem is that the point of the Temple and its ceremonial complex was to take away sin.  It was to restore humanity to its original, blessed, good, whole condition, united to God, to creation, and to each other.  It is a free gift of grace to which humans respond in gratitude and joyful obedience.  But can sin be taken away this way?  Faith in God had been twisted into a racket designed to fill the pockets and maintain the power of the elite. 

            The Temple was not doing what it was supposed to do.  In fact, it was doing the opposite.  Instead of taking away sin, it was compounding sin.  Instead of reconciling people to God and each other, it was driving them further apart.  It had been turned from a place of prayer to a place of business.

            Worse still, it was compounding sin while making people think it was taking sin away.  It’s like taking medicine that you think will make you better, but is really making you worse.

II.

            So the Temple authorities ask Jesus, “What is your authority for doing this?  What miraculous sign will you show us” to prove that you have the right to make this disturbance?  The only thing that might possibly overrule the entrenched Temple system would be some incontrovertible miracle from God.  And the Temple leaders knew this was not going to happen.

            But that is in the end what happens.  For now, though, Jesus says, Here’s my miraculous sign for you: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

            Of course, the Temple executives take him literally.  They think he’s talking about the actual, physical Temple, which has taken forty-six years to build.  They hear him saying they should somehow allow the gleaming, stone edifice to be dismantled and demolished, and that he will then personally and miraculously reassemble every block, brick, and rafter, neatly in place.  Using the Force, like Yoda, I guess.

             Last week Jesus transformed the exhausted faith of the people  into powerful new wine.  Now he goes to the heart of the religious institution of his people.  And he sees that it is corrupt, ineffectual, and dead.  All that’s left are the commercial vultures picking at its carcass.  Unless they are open, light, and flexible enough to keep receiving the refreshing breath of the Spirit, religious institutions tend to become just dead weight.  They spawn leaders and hierarchies and rules and budgets and bureaucracies and procedures.  And then they seek mainly to preserve themselves at all costs. 

            Institutions seem inevitably to morph into markets, places of commerce, areas in which money comes into power.  Because all those leaders and hierarchies and rules and budgets and bureaucracies and procedures don’t come cheap.  They have to be paid for.  And the money has to come from the people who are actually producing something, generally.  So the leaders of institutions have to develop some tactics for convincing or compelling people to give their money to support them.  Hence the whole rigamaroll of buying and exchanging that people had to pass through before they could worship in the Temple.

            And a market, a place of business, is the polar opposite of the zone of grace, forgiveness, redemption, equality, freedom, and liberation that the Temple was originally supposed to be.  The Temple that Jesus found was upside-down.  It had become a gauntlet of haggling, interest, accounting, scarcity, lies, and swindling.  It had taken what God gives freely to all, and put price tags on it.   

III.

            When Jesus tells the officials that he will raise up “this temple” after its destruction, in effect he is saying, “I am the true Temple.  My body is the real Temple.  And after you destroy this temple, that is, after you kill me, I will rise up after three days.” 

            Now the new Temple, the real Temple, is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  In place of these living sheep that Jesus stampeded out the door, the shedding of whose blood was not working anymore, he puts himself.  The people’s relationship with God, creation, and others, was not being healed.  Their alienation and sin was not being repaired.  That is something a market, as a battlefield of competing self-interest, cannot ever do.

            But this reconciliation will happen in the ultimate sign that Jesus predicts, which is his own death and resurrection.  He takes away the sin of the world, not by buying and selling, but by dying and rising up again.  He carries our sin, our brokenness, our hatreds and fears and selfishness, our shame and anger, in his body, which is the same body we have, made of the same stuff.  And he immolates all that on the cross, vaporizing it, and revealing it to be the nothing that it is.  And he gives us God’s own new, eternal life of love, and pours that into our hearts in his resurrection. 

            It is his death and resurrection that reveal that he is the new, true, final Temple.  Unlike the Temple that failed to do its job, Jesus will himself lead his people through death to new life.  That is the only way to new life.

            Not through propping up an institution that was actually dead but didn’t know it, and was now nothing more than a cynical cash-cow for the elites.  But through the transformation which requires that we die to our old fearful selves caught in addiction to violence, selfishness, and suspicion, so we can be reborn on the other side, a place of light and life, joy and grace, healing and liberation.

            The true test of anything is whether it actually accomplishes its purpose.  In terms of the Temple: does it heal people?  Does what goes on there take away sin?  Do people find reconnection and wholeness?  Do they emerge from the place reconciled to God, creation, and their neighbors?  Are their broken souls restored to integrity and unity?  Or do they come away from the place with little more than souvenirs?  Trinkets and a t-shirt?  Some pictures?

            That is a tough standard but it has to be applied to churches as well.  Are we better people, are we more grounded and together, are we more healthy and strong, are we more peaceful, forgiving, compassionate, open, joyful, and loving because we came to church this morning?  How can we continue to improve our gathering so that it is more apparent and more likely that we will be made better by coming here?

IV.

            Jesus’ ministry is not a Temple-reform movement.  He is not trying to apply principles of adaptive change to the religious institutions of his day.  He comes not to reform but to replace the Temple with himself… and by so doing reveal that the true Temple, the true place where we meet, worship, hear from, and respond to God is… everywhere.  He is the Word through whom everything was made.  In him the whole creation is his Father’s house.

            His body is not just his historical, mortal flesh but now given to us sacramentally, so that we literally become him.  The gathering of his disciples, the church, is now his body.  Paul says that therefore now each of our bodies is a temple, a holy space where we encounter God.  The Lamb is the Temple who gives himself to us making us the Temple.  And the blood of the Lamb of God, his divine life, becomes the life of the whole world.

            Now the words, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace,” mean that in God’s eyes nothing is for sale; nothing is reduced to a dead commodity; nothing is considered only for its exchange value.  The whole place has already been bought with a price.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, reveals the truth of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein.”  And it is all free.  Unencumbered.  Priceless.  +++++++