Cleansing the Temple: Sermon for March 19, 2006
A lot of people think the story we heard from St. John’s Gospel is a justification for not having gift shops or rummage sales or craft bazaars in the church, but that’s not what it’s about at all!
The folks who were selling animals and changing money in the Temple, where actually not in the Temple per se. They were in the courtyard area known as "The Court of the Gentiles," where those not of the Jewish faith were permitted to come, and they were not doing anything "wrong" under Mosaic Law. They weren't breaking any of the Ten Commandments we heard in the lesson from Hebrew Scriptures; they weren't breaking any of the rules in the Levitical purity code; they weren't doing anything contrary to the holiness code of Deuteronomy. They were not breaking the law!
Indeed, what the sellers of animals and the money changers were doing was, strictly speaking, in aid of the law: their business was to help others offer sacrifices acceptable under Temple tradition, custom and rule. The animals being sold in the courtyard were for sacrificial purposes – it was not like the sale barn at the farm shows and the county firs, where spring lambs and hogs are put on the auction block. The cattle, sheep and doves these folks were selling were the proper animals for sacrifice, sold according to the purchaser's ability to pay. There were economic implications for purity: poor people could hardly afford to give a tenth of their crop to the Priests, but if they didn't, they found they were then unable to sell their grain for it was judged "impure." When it came to temple services, the poor were unable to offer their best animals or their best produce. But the Law made allowances; poor farmers could purchase a dove or a small sheep to offer, instead of offering a bull or a valuable she-goat. The sellers of pure animals were an important part of the Judaic religious system.
Money changers were likewise a very important part of this system. Roman coins were considered impure and could note be used to buy sacrifices. The money changers weren't simply giving change for a twenty: they were giving "pure" tokens in exchange for "impure" money ... sometimes, for an extra fee, but that was acceptable under the Law. What they were doing wasn't illegal! They were not law breakers.
So that’s the scene – a venerable tradition of sacrificial animal sales, of money exchange, all in aid of the religious system being practiced in an open courtyard just outside the sacred precincts of the Temple. In this scene comes Jesus striding purposefully onto the Temple ground ... you can almost envision it. He enters the courtyard and sees this religious commerce going on ... to the residents of Jerusalem, this was normal and acceptable, but as a rustic Galilean, Jesus has a different expectation what should be happening in the Temple. It's not that he's a rube or a country bumpkin; rather, he is from a region in which there has been a tradition of great rabbinic teachers such as Honi the Circle-Drawer, who performed great healings, and Hanina ben-Dosa, who insisted upon personal holiness, and Hillel, considered still by many to have been the greatest of the rabbis, a region steeped in the idea of the Temple as an extremely sacred place of prayer. Can't you just see his hands trembling as he picks up some scraps of leather and plaits a sort of home-made lash to drive this activity out? Imagine the confusion that must have reigned as he began driving the beasts and their keepers out of the courtyard, as he began knocking over the tables of the money changers. This is not “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”!
What is going on may not be illegal ... but somehow, deep in one's gut, one knows that it is not quite right.... That's what this story of the cleansing of the Temple is all about. A recognition that something isn't quite right.... In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul suggests to us that this is the human condition. He writes in the first person, but he is truly speaking about all of us and every human being that ever lived when he says:
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. *** I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. (Rom. 7:19,21)
We've all been there, haven't we? We've all had that sense, at one time or another, about a situation or about our own behavior, that something isn't quite right.
It is this human tendency to do evil rather than good that the Law was supposed to address. The Ten Commandments, and all the Levitical and Deuteronomic law which descended from them, were supposed to help us turn to the good, rather than to what is bad. But that human tendency to do evil corrupted even the Law. The Psalmist who penned today's Gradual was, I think, something of an optimist: he (or she) wrote ...
"The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul; *
the testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent.
The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart; *
the commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes."
Evangelist Fred Brown recalls the Psalmist's words when he analogizes the Law to a flashlight. If suddenly at night the lights go out, he says, you use it to guide you down the darkened basement stairs to the electrical box. When you point it toward the fuses, it helps you see the one that is burned out. But after you've removed the bad fuse, you don't try to insert the flashlight in its place. You put in a new fuse to restore the electricity. The Law doesn't really solve the problem of human behavior, it simply illuminates it.
A Biblical analogy likens the Law to a plumb line. ([Amos 7:7.15] "He showed me: behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.") When a builder wants to check his work, he uses a weighted string to see if it's true to the vertical. But if he finds that he has made a mistake, he doesn't use the plumbline to correct it. He gets out his hammer and saw. The law points out the problem of sin; it doesn't provide a solution.
This is where those folks in the Temple went wrong; they thought that doing nothing illegal was sufficient. This is where a lot of us modern Christians it wrong. too; we think that doing nothing illegal and minding our own business is sufficient. In his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning writes that we have "twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper." That's what got Jesus's goat there in the Temple courtyard. Not illegal activity, but activity that "distorted the image of God into an eternal, small- minded bookkeeper."
Maybe what we need to do is to twist something else, not God, but the human recording of God's Commandments. Methodist writer J. Ellsworth Kalas' book, The Ten Commandments from the Back Side, (Abingdon 1998), "twists" the Big Ten so that they can move from that deadly familiar "Thou shalt not...." list, into a lively and new place in our lives. Here's Kalas's "back-side" version of the Commandments:
1. God shall have all of you.
2. You shall adore the mystery that is beyond comprehension.
3. You shall enter into God's name.
4. The Sabbath will keep you.
5. You shall accept the blessing of the past so that you can have a future.
6. You shall embrace life.
7. You shall cherish the sacredness in you and your mate.
8. You shall become a larger person.
9. You shall bless and be blessed by the truth.
10. You shall rejoice in your neighbor's having.
We need to begin reading Scripture, the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, the Epistles, the whole darn thing, in this way. "Thou shalt nots" are all well and good, but like the discipline of Lent, they are only good if the negative is illuminated by a positive. We give up one thing for Lent in order to make room for something else – we give up movies in order to make room for Bible study; we give up our bridge game in order to make room for prayer; we give up one meal each week in order to donate its cost to provide food for someone with none.
As Kalas's "twisting" makes clear, each “thou shalt not” commandment is, likewise, a “thou shalt” commandment: every injunction to not do something, is an injunction to do something else. "Thou shalt not do murder" is a commandment to exercise a sacred regard for human life; "Thou shalt not steal" is a commandment to respect the possessions others have received from a loving God; "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is a commandment to honor and revere human relationships.
When we focus on only the negative aspects of the Scriptures, we engage in legalism. Brennan Manning really puts us on the spot when he writes:
"The tendency in legalistic religion is to mistrust God, to mistrust others, and consequently to mistrust ourselves. Allow me to become personal for a moment. Do you really believe that the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is gracious, that he cares about you? Do you really believe that he is always, unfailingly, present to you as companion and support? Do you really believe that God is love?"
This is what the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple is all about. It wasn't that the animal sellers or the money changers or even the Priests were doing anything "wrong" or "illegal." It was that they had lost sight of the fact that God is love; for them, the Law had ceased to be a light giving wisdom and clarity.
During this Season of Lent we must examine our faith and ask ouselves, have we lost sight of the fact that God is love? Have we lost sight of the Gospel's light of wisdom, clarity and grace? Are we, like those folks in the Temple courtyard, worshiping a "distorted image of God [as] an eternal, small- minded bookkeeper?"
When we were living in the Kansas City area, there was a news report about a man who was injured in a serious automobile accident and ended up in a coma. He was taken to St. Joseph Carondolet, a local hospital run by an order of nuns. After more than 60 days in a coma, he woke up with surprisingly little side effects. After a few days of recuperation, his doctors decided he was well enough to be visited by the nun who ran the hospital's business office; she wanted to know how his bills, which were staggering, were going to be paid. Did he have any insurance? No, he said, he didn't. What about any relatives who might help him with the bills, a brother or a sister?
"I only have one sister, and she's an old maid, a nun like you."
"Sir," the business manager replied, "a nun is not an old maid. She is married to the Lord."
"In that case," he said, "send the bill to my brother-in-law."
God in Christ is not a small-minded bookkeeper! He is our brother who has already settled the fine, already made the sacrifice, already paid the bill with God's gracious, wonderful, unearned, unmerited and freely-given love. Amen.
The folks who were selling animals and changing money in the Temple, where actually not in the Temple per se. They were in the courtyard area known as "The Court of the Gentiles," where those not of the Jewish faith were permitted to come, and they were not doing anything "wrong" under Mosaic Law. They weren't breaking any of the Ten Commandments we heard in the lesson from Hebrew Scriptures; they weren't breaking any of the rules in the Levitical purity code; they weren't doing anything contrary to the holiness code of Deuteronomy. They were not breaking the law!
Indeed, what the sellers of animals and the money changers were doing was, strictly speaking, in aid of the law: their business was to help others offer sacrifices acceptable under Temple tradition, custom and rule. The animals being sold in the courtyard were for sacrificial purposes – it was not like the sale barn at the farm shows and the county firs, where spring lambs and hogs are put on the auction block. The cattle, sheep and doves these folks were selling were the proper animals for sacrifice, sold according to the purchaser's ability to pay. There were economic implications for purity: poor people could hardly afford to give a tenth of their crop to the Priests, but if they didn't, they found they were then unable to sell their grain for it was judged "impure." When it came to temple services, the poor were unable to offer their best animals or their best produce. But the Law made allowances; poor farmers could purchase a dove or a small sheep to offer, instead of offering a bull or a valuable she-goat. The sellers of pure animals were an important part of the Judaic religious system.
Money changers were likewise a very important part of this system. Roman coins were considered impure and could note be used to buy sacrifices. The money changers weren't simply giving change for a twenty: they were giving "pure" tokens in exchange for "impure" money ... sometimes, for an extra fee, but that was acceptable under the Law. What they were doing wasn't illegal! They were not law breakers.
So that’s the scene – a venerable tradition of sacrificial animal sales, of money exchange, all in aid of the religious system being practiced in an open courtyard just outside the sacred precincts of the Temple. In this scene comes Jesus striding purposefully onto the Temple ground ... you can almost envision it. He enters the courtyard and sees this religious commerce going on ... to the residents of Jerusalem, this was normal and acceptable, but as a rustic Galilean, Jesus has a different expectation what should be happening in the Temple. It's not that he's a rube or a country bumpkin; rather, he is from a region in which there has been a tradition of great rabbinic teachers such as Honi the Circle-Drawer, who performed great healings, and Hanina ben-Dosa, who insisted upon personal holiness, and Hillel, considered still by many to have been the greatest of the rabbis, a region steeped in the idea of the Temple as an extremely sacred place of prayer. Can't you just see his hands trembling as he picks up some scraps of leather and plaits a sort of home-made lash to drive this activity out? Imagine the confusion that must have reigned as he began driving the beasts and their keepers out of the courtyard, as he began knocking over the tables of the money changers. This is not “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”!
What is going on may not be illegal ... but somehow, deep in one's gut, one knows that it is not quite right.... That's what this story of the cleansing of the Temple is all about. A recognition that something isn't quite right.... In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul suggests to us that this is the human condition. He writes in the first person, but he is truly speaking about all of us and every human being that ever lived when he says:
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. *** I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. (Rom. 7:19,21)
We've all been there, haven't we? We've all had that sense, at one time or another, about a situation or about our own behavior, that something isn't quite right.
It is this human tendency to do evil rather than good that the Law was supposed to address. The Ten Commandments, and all the Levitical and Deuteronomic law which descended from them, were supposed to help us turn to the good, rather than to what is bad. But that human tendency to do evil corrupted even the Law. The Psalmist who penned today's Gradual was, I think, something of an optimist: he (or she) wrote ...
"The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul; *
the testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent.
The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart; *
the commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes."
Evangelist Fred Brown recalls the Psalmist's words when he analogizes the Law to a flashlight. If suddenly at night the lights go out, he says, you use it to guide you down the darkened basement stairs to the electrical box. When you point it toward the fuses, it helps you see the one that is burned out. But after you've removed the bad fuse, you don't try to insert the flashlight in its place. You put in a new fuse to restore the electricity. The Law doesn't really solve the problem of human behavior, it simply illuminates it.
A Biblical analogy likens the Law to a plumb line. ([Amos 7:7.15] "He showed me: behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.") When a builder wants to check his work, he uses a weighted string to see if it's true to the vertical. But if he finds that he has made a mistake, he doesn't use the plumbline to correct it. He gets out his hammer and saw. The law points out the problem of sin; it doesn't provide a solution.
This is where those folks in the Temple went wrong; they thought that doing nothing illegal was sufficient. This is where a lot of us modern Christians it wrong. too; we think that doing nothing illegal and minding our own business is sufficient. In his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning writes that we have "twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper." That's what got Jesus's goat there in the Temple courtyard. Not illegal activity, but activity that "distorted the image of God into an eternal, small- minded bookkeeper."
Maybe what we need to do is to twist something else, not God, but the human recording of God's Commandments. Methodist writer J. Ellsworth Kalas' book, The Ten Commandments from the Back Side, (Abingdon 1998), "twists" the Big Ten so that they can move from that deadly familiar "Thou shalt not...." list, into a lively and new place in our lives. Here's Kalas's "back-side" version of the Commandments:
1. God shall have all of you.
2. You shall adore the mystery that is beyond comprehension.
3. You shall enter into God's name.
4. The Sabbath will keep you.
5. You shall accept the blessing of the past so that you can have a future.
6. You shall embrace life.
7. You shall cherish the sacredness in you and your mate.
8. You shall become a larger person.
9. You shall bless and be blessed by the truth.
10. You shall rejoice in your neighbor's having.
We need to begin reading Scripture, the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, the Epistles, the whole darn thing, in this way. "Thou shalt nots" are all well and good, but like the discipline of Lent, they are only good if the negative is illuminated by a positive. We give up one thing for Lent in order to make room for something else – we give up movies in order to make room for Bible study; we give up our bridge game in order to make room for prayer; we give up one meal each week in order to donate its cost to provide food for someone with none.
As Kalas's "twisting" makes clear, each “thou shalt not” commandment is, likewise, a “thou shalt” commandment: every injunction to not do something, is an injunction to do something else. "Thou shalt not do murder" is a commandment to exercise a sacred regard for human life; "Thou shalt not steal" is a commandment to respect the possessions others have received from a loving God; "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is a commandment to honor and revere human relationships.
When we focus on only the negative aspects of the Scriptures, we engage in legalism. Brennan Manning really puts us on the spot when he writes:
"The tendency in legalistic religion is to mistrust God, to mistrust others, and consequently to mistrust ourselves. Allow me to become personal for a moment. Do you really believe that the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is gracious, that he cares about you? Do you really believe that he is always, unfailingly, present to you as companion and support? Do you really believe that God is love?"
This is what the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple is all about. It wasn't that the animal sellers or the money changers or even the Priests were doing anything "wrong" or "illegal." It was that they had lost sight of the fact that God is love; for them, the Law had ceased to be a light giving wisdom and clarity.
During this Season of Lent we must examine our faith and ask ouselves, have we lost sight of the fact that God is love? Have we lost sight of the Gospel's light of wisdom, clarity and grace? Are we, like those folks in the Temple courtyard, worshiping a "distorted image of God [as] an eternal, small- minded bookkeeper?"
When we were living in the Kansas City area, there was a news report about a man who was injured in a serious automobile accident and ended up in a coma. He was taken to St. Joseph Carondolet, a local hospital run by an order of nuns. After more than 60 days in a coma, he woke up with surprisingly little side effects. After a few days of recuperation, his doctors decided he was well enough to be visited by the nun who ran the hospital's business office; she wanted to know how his bills, which were staggering, were going to be paid. Did he have any insurance? No, he said, he didn't. What about any relatives who might help him with the bills, a brother or a sister?
"I only have one sister, and she's an old maid, a nun like you."
"Sir," the business manager replied, "a nun is not an old maid. She is married to the Lord."
"In that case," he said, "send the bill to my brother-in-law."
God in Christ is not a small-minded bookkeeper! He is our brother who has already settled the fine, already made the sacrifice, already paid the bill with God's gracious, wonderful, unearned, unmerited and freely-given love. Amen.
posted by Father Eric | 7:25 AM
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