John 2:13-22
March 3, 2024
Did you grow up looking at pictures
of Jesus? I know that there are no actual pictures of Jesus, but there are
plenty of artistic impressions of him. Did you grow up looking at any of them?
There are three specific pictures of Jesus that I remember from my childhood.
One was a painting that we had hanging in our living room for as long as I can
remember. It was a painting of Jesus talking with two other men, and they are
walking on a path, and in the distance, you can see the outline of an ancient
city. Without being told this specifically as a child, I knew the one guy was
Jesus. I just knew it was. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this
was a depiction of the road to Emmaus story from Luke’s gospel. When I was a
little kid, it didn’t matter to me what the story was. I just liked to look at
Jesus and the two men, and I would trace the path to the city with my finger
and imagine the conversation they were having.
The second picture that I remember
must have been one that I saw in Sunday school. It was a picture of Jesus standing
outside of a door inset into a stone wall. It looked like a door into a garden.
There were vines and flowers growing around it, and Jesus was standing before
it, knocking. I was told that the door represented my heart, and Jesus was
knocking, asking to be allowed in. See, Jesus is knocking at the door of your
heart. Let him in. Whenever I looked at that picture, I vowed that as soon as I
heard Jesus knocking on the door of my heart, I would let him in.
The third picture that I remember
may be one that you all remember too. It is a painting of Jesus that is far
more famous than I knew until I started doing some research for this sermon.
Painted by American artist, Warner Sallman, the painting’s official name is
“Head of Christ.” But it is also known as Sallman’s head. It is a picture of
Jesus with very pale eyes, light skin, wavy light brown hair, staring off into
the distance, looking beatific and perfect and divine. It’s a nice picture. It
is a comforting picture. I don’t remember if we had a version of that picture
in our home, but I know I saw it in other places. And I remember looking at it
and thinking that Jesus looked nice and kind and safe. This picture represented
what one commentator called, “a manageable deity.”
Those are the images of Jesus that I
grew up on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, other than he doesn’t
look like a Middle Eastern Jew in any of them. But they were nice pictures to
grow up, and clearly, they sparked my imagination as a child and stuck with me
into my adulthood. But those depictions of Jesus seem very far from the Jesus
that we read about this morning. This morning we read about a Jesus who gets
angry, who is zealous. We read about a Jesus who goes into the temple, makes a
whip of cords and begins to drive out all the animals that were gathered there
for sacrifice. This is a Jesus, so filled with zeal and righteous anger, that
he dumps out the coins of the moneychangers and overturns their tables. He
yells at the people selling doves, saying,
“Take these things out of here! Stop
making my Father’s house a marketplace!”
The Jesus who cleanses the temple –
cleansing being a euphemism, like ethnic cleansing – this Jesus does not clean
but scatters and crashes and flips and causes chaos. This Jesus seems very far
from being a manageable deity, and even further from the Jesus who stood at a
door and knocked. This Jesus may not be one we like to consider very often, but
here he is. So, this is the Jesus we deal with today.
Just as we may not quite know how to
deal with the Jesus before us today, I can imagine the disciples didn’t know
how to deal with him either. I can imagine that they were as shocked by Jesus’
behavior at first like everyone else who witnessed this. They must have looked
at each other in alarm, eyes wide, maybe silently mouthing to one another,
“What’s
happening?” “Where did this come from?” “Why don’t you try and calm him down? “Why don’t you try and
calm him down?” “I asked you to do it first.”
And
so on, and so on. John’s gospel does tell us that the disciples remember that
the scripture says, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Jesus was certainly
filled with zeal.
It
must be noted that this is a story found in all four gospels. When you come
across a story that each of the gospel writers included in their version of
Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, it is a good idea to pay particular
attention to the story they all share.
In
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this story comes near the end of the gospel. This is a
final act of Jesus, one that contributes mightily to the religious authorities
saying,
“That’s it! Enough with this guy!
He’s gotta go!”
But John puts this story right at
the beginning of his gospel. When you read this in the other gospels, Jesus’
anger makes a little more sense. After all, he’s been in public ministry for
three years at that point. He’s been preaching, teaching, healing, proclaiming,
showing, modeling, and exhorting. Some people got it, but a lot of people
didn’t. And part of his anger in the other gospels is that he was protesting a
religious system that had become more about exploitation of its weakest members
than it was about worship. But why is Jesus angry this early in John? He’s just
getting started. He has just left the wedding at Cana where he turned water
into wine. Why turn the temple upside down at this moment?
Well, firstly, the question must be
asked, is Jesus more zealous than angry, is his anger fueled by his zeal or is
his zeal fueled by his anger? As I said earlier, the scripture that the
disciples remembered was that he would be consumed with zeal for his father’s
house. Certainly, Jesus is consumed with zeal in this story. And that zeal
leads him to overturn the long-standing practices and systems that took place
in the temple.
The moneychangers were there, not to
exploit, but to change money. The Law prohibited coins with images on them in
the temple. The only coins the people would have been allowed to use outside of
the temple would have been Roman. Roman coins bore the image of Caesar on them,
so those Roman coins must be exchanged for coins that were lawful in the
temple. The great number of animals were in the temple because sacrifices of
animals were expected. It was part of their practice of worship. In order to buy an
animal for their required sacrifice, they had to purchase it with an approved
coin. What was happening in the temple was what was expected and approved of by
the religious authorities and the Law as they all understood it.
But Jesus comes in and sees this and
basically proclaims,
“You have all missed the point!”
But he proclaims this with his
actions, his unexpected and scandalous actions. So, of course, Jesus is
questioned by the religious leaders.
“What sign can you show us for doing
this?”
And Jesus answers them by not
answering them, not directly,
“Destroy this temple, and in three
days I will raise it up.”
But they don’t get it. The temple
has been under construction for forty-six years, but this guy says it can be
destroyed and rebuilt in three days?! Sure. Whatever you say, Jesus.
They missed the point. They could
not yet see what was right in front of them, who was right in front of
them. They thought the only temple was the one of wood and stone, the place
where God lived exclusively. But the temple was flesh and blood and standing in
their midst. Jesus was trying to make them understand that God dwelled in him.
God was not confined to a building. God had come into flesh and blood, into his
flesh and blood, and was loose in the world. God had left the building. And
if it took Jesus disrupting the status quo, physically as well as verbally, for
them to understand and see this, to believe it, then so be it.
Jesus was consumed with zeal, with
fervor and passion. One commentator called him the Great Disrupter. But his
zeal was not about destruction for destruction’s sake, but about tearing down
what kept people from full and abundant life in God and building up a new way
of living and being as God’s beloved children. His zeal, his anger, his passion
was for all to find life, to see and believe that God had left the building but
was loose and growing and creating in the world, in him and in them.
Maybe that is something we need to
focus on in this season of Lent. We need to claim the zeal of Jesus as our own.
We need to see Jesus in his fullness, not just the calm, safe Jesus of art, but
the Jesus who was not afraid of righteous indignation, the Jesus who loved and
lived passionately, the Jesus who had zeal and fervor for doing God’s work in
the world, the whole world. Maybe it’s okay that Jesus is not a manageable
deity. Maybe it’s okay that safety is not what following Jesus is all about.
Maybe it’s okay if our status quo is disrupted. Maybe it’s okay if Jesus tears
down our expectations and our ideals about how we think things should be. Maybe
it's okay because what Jesus is really doing, what God does through Jesus, is
creating new life, abundant, verdant, lush life, and inviting us to be a part
of it all. Jesus’ zeal is for life. May we be as zealous for life as well.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Amen.”
Amen.
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