John 2:13-22
“Temple”
March 7, 2021 – Third Sunday of Lent
I hope you enjoyed the photos of our church building and grounds that began this on-line service. For many of us it is bittersweet to view those pictures because it has been so long since we have been able to actually gather in that space to worship. This coming Monday, tomorrow if you are watching on Sunday, it will have been a whole year since we were in-person together in our sanctuary.
God has been good to us and we’ve gotten fairly proficient at offering worship on-line. We’ve even been able to have a couple of outdoor gatherings on the church property as we hope to do again soon in Holy Week. And we’ve had new people join us from long distances away. But we still deeply miss being in that place on Sunday mornings. It’s a feeling of loss so great that at least one of my pastor colleagues is planning a service of lament to recognize their church’s own year apart from their sanctuary.
Our own sense of longing for a sacred space can help us read the Gospel text for this week with more understanding. We need to sympathize with the respect and love Jesus (and Jewish people in general) felt for that particular building and its environs in order really get what is going on here. Jesus loved the Temple. It was no wonder He wanted it cleansed of objects and activities which profaned it.
It’s not that the buying, selling and money changing were bad in themselves. They had their own sacred purposes. People coming from long distances could not bring a sheep or an ox for a sacrifice and needed to purchase one close to the Temple. The usual everyday coins, Greek drachmas or Roman denarii, were not accepted for paying the Temple tax, so they had to be exchanged for shekels or half-shekels. The money changers made a small profit on the exchange. And the poorest people, who could not afford to sacrifice livestock, needed to be able to purchase doves to offer to God.
It was all perfectly reasonable business to support the actual spiritual business of the Temple: prayer and sacrifice. It was like making and selling Bibles or hymnals or banners or candles for use in Christian worship. The problem was that the Temple itself was not the place for those support services to happen. It was good business in the wrong place, because the place was special, sacred, holy. The place is what matters here.
You may know there is a little problem of harmony between the Gospels in this event. Matthew, Mark, and Luke put the cleansing of the Temple in Holy Week, perhaps the Monday following Palm Sunday. Yet John puts it here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, at least a couple of years before the events of Holy Week and the death and resurrection of Jesus.
That discrepancy in when it happened has only a few answers. A tiny handful of scholars suggest it happened twice. Most of them maintain that John tells the story earlier in his narrative for theological reasons, while another small minority argue that John got the timing right while the other three Gospel writers shifted it to later.
I’ll go with the majority of interpreters and say that John put this account of an angry Jesus in the Temple at a point in his story where it would make a theological statement about who Jesus is. Mark, whose Gospel we started reading at the beginning of the year wanted to make the fact that Jesus is divine, is the Son of God, a big reveal at the end of his book, spoken by a Gentile, a Roman centurion at the Cross. John instead begins with the fact Jesus is God on page 1 and keeps on showing us how that is true in what Jesus said and did and how He interacted with the people He met on earth.
John, then, is much more concerned with where this event took place than with when it took place. He still wants us to know in verse 13 that it happened just before Passover, but the exact chronology, the exact year, doesn’t matter so much. John here is bit like Native American and other indigenous story tellers. An event may have given a place its name. Seeing that place, recalling its name, and telling the story of how it got that name can be not just entertainment or history but a moral lesson.
The Apache people tell a story about a place I’ll call “Shades of Dung,” but the literal name is more vulgar:
The people who lived at this place had a great harvest and had much corn, while their relatives who lived nearby had a poor harvest and had little corn. They asked their relatives with much corn to share, but they would not. In anger, they forced their corn-abundant relatives to stay home, not letting them leave even to defecate. Unable to get to the spot of land that functioned as a toilet, they were forced to defecate at their home in their shaded areas. Their camp filled with the smell of bodily waste, and they got very sick. The relatives said, “You have brought this on yourselves. Now you live in shades of [dung]!” The story concludes, “Finally they agreed to share their corn. This happened at Shades of [Dung].”[1]
Knowing just when that Native American story happened adds nothing to it. But try to take away where it happened, the connection with a place, those shady places filled with dung, and it loses much of its power. Try to turn it into some general rule, “Share your corn,” or even more broadly, “Share what you have,” and it gets even more watered down.
Many interpretations of the story of Jesus in the Temple tend to water it down in the same way, to lift it out of its literal setting in the Temple in Jerusalem. The last time I preached on this text I did just that. I talked about how all sorts of activities can fill up our hearts and our lives and leave little room for God, for Jesus. So we get the idea that the emotion and action of Jesus were aimed at a spiritual error of which the livestock sellers and money changers were guilty. They let business get in the way of faith and devotion to God. That’s not a bad lesson to get from the text, but it misses something.
Look at Jesus’ “zeal,” as it’s called in verse 17. He had a passion for that sacred building. He called it His “Father’s house” in verse 16. To try and make a metaphor out of that passion, to make it a concern only for the spiritual practices which should have been happening in the Temple, is to miss the sacredness of the “house” itself. It’s the same as if we simply tossed off grief over being out of our church building for the past twelve months by suggesting it is only what we do there that really matters.
Americans have never been very good at understanding sacred space and place. In the beginnings of the nation we displaced both this land’s indigenous people and African people from their own lands, their own places. In current times, a Native American sacred place, Monument Hill in Arizona, was devastated last year for building a piece of border wall. In all our moving around, focusing on jobs or culture or good housing, we’ve not even understood our own need for, attachment to, and identification with place.
So we have to work to not misunderstand the last part of the text in verses 18-22. Jewish leaders challenged Jesus’ authority for cleansing the temple. In verse 19, He responds with an image that, again, the other Gospels place toward the end of the story, in His last days on earth, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” When His hearers can’t believe it, when they mutter that Herod’s rebuilding of the Temple has been going on for 46 years, John helpfully explains in verse 21, “But he was speaking to them of the temple of his body.”
At least one commentator calls those last verses the “replacement” of the Temple by Jesus. Instead of a particular geographic location for God’s presence, God now becomes present in the world in Christ. Again, that’s not a bad lesson from this passage, but it should still not diminish the importance of the place. If that Temple had not been genuine, true sacred space for God’s people, then there would have been no point in Jesus identifying Himself with it. And there would have been no reason for Him to get all worked up about “cleansing” it of marketing and banking. But the place was important. Which means that it is right and good to see our own sanctuary at 3636 W. 18th Ave. as important in its own small way.
John’s comment in verse 21 does not identify Jesus as the “replacement” Temple. He does not denigrate or discard the old Temple. He simply points us to God’s provision of a greater Temple which is soon going to be available to all people, not just for those able to get to a particular place in the Mediterranean world. But that new Temple was not some cosmic, woo-woo, airy spiritual thing that we come to just in our hearts. It was still physical. It still had a location. It was “his body.” The new Temple stood there in Jerusalem right alongside the old Temple. He had material form. He had a place in the world.
That’s in part what we remember today at our Lord’s Table. We partake of bread and of the fruit of the vine while we name them as the Body and Blood of Jesus. If the Body of Jesus is a new Temple, then it is fitting to give His Body an actual location in this sacrament, to recognize the importance of its actual place in space. So until we can gather in the same place again, I pray that you can participate today, and each time we observe Communion on-line, with actual bread in your hands, and a cup against your lips. The Temple of our Lord’s Body is not something we just experience with heart and mind. We name His body and give it a place, like so many other places to which people connect.
One of the sad things about other earthly places is that they can be destroyed and lost, just like that ancient Temple. They’d spent forty-six years building it, but it was only going to stand another forty years before the Romans tore it down. But it’s not just buildings. The land itself can be ruined beyond repair.
We might want to think more about how white people have ruined places sacred to others. A white man carved four white faces on a mountain sacred to the Lakota tribe and forever marred it for them. And many of you who have loved and lived in a pretty place for very long have seen how it can be wrecked by highways and houses. My wife Beth remembers playing in the lovely little creek that ran through her backyard as a child. It now runs in a big drain pipe beneath a freeway. The land itself can be defaced, even lost.
That’s why Jesus as a new and greater Temple is so important. He didn’t just call His body a Temple. He promised in verse 19, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Here in one frail human form stood a place on earth which could stand back up after it was knocked down, could be beautiful again after being beaten and cut up. This is the promise of Easter toward which this whole season of Lent is aimed. What has been wrecked can be raised. Out of death can come new life.
The Temple who is the Lord who lives forever is the hope we have when we rightly mourn the lost places of the world, whether it’s the temporary loss of our church sanctuary or the greater losses of place felt by men, women and children across the world. And if we want to follow that One who is a risen Temple upon this earth, and share that glorious hope, then we will want to pay more attention to His identification with a place He loved, to His passionate zeal for that sacred site.
Terry Glaspey talked to some of us about developing a Christian imagination. Part of that may be the capacity to appreciate sacred space wherever it is cherished, whether it’s our own love for a garden or a creek, or another people’s love for their land, their places. Can we let Jesus be good news for Black people taken from Africa or Native Americans driven from their own land across the “Trail of Tears?” Can the raising of the Temple who is Jesus be hope for Palestinians displaced and cheated out of ancestral homes? Can the Body of Christ have a place for Syrian or Rohingya or Sudanese refugees forced to abandon and flee their own countries?
We sold an old car this past week, our 23-year-old Toyota Camry. It had done well for us. Beth even shed a tear or two, I think, as the young couple who bought it drove away. We might think that caring about places on earth is like that, a kind of almost silly sentimental attachment to something we know is only temporary. But our Christian faith and our Lord Himself teach us that place is more than that. It is part of who we are, of how we find our identity in this world. That is why holy places, places where we actually meet and discover that living Temple who is in our midst are so key for us. Yes, Jesus is our Temple, but the temples built with hands are important too. That’s why we have to be sure that the business we do in them is truly God’s business.
Thirty-four years ago next month, on April 7 of 1987, a little caravan of cars formed at the Grange Hall up Bailey Hill Rd. from our church property. Honking horns and waving at the people along the way, they drove down the hill and into the church parking lot. The pastor then, Jim Gaderlund, met them inside to celebrate the first worship service in that space we are missing today. My prayer is that it won’t be too much longer now until we can re-enter that space with as much joy and celebration as they felt back then.
As we plan for that re-entry, though, let’s be sure that we let that space be what it is meant to be, a place where people pray and worship, where they hear the Word of God, where they receive and become part of the greatest place on earth, which is the Body of Christ. We don’t want to just be sentimental about a place where many of us have felt comfortable. We want that building on the corner of 18th and Bailey Hill to be the kind of house for which Jesus felt so much passion, for which He gave Himself up in Passion.
When we get back to our place, then, let’s not just relax into our old comfort zones. Let’s remember other people who need a place or who love places that need to be protected or restored to them. Let’s remember that “our” place really belongs to God, that it is our Father’s house, not ours alone. And let’s remember how God has extended that place while we’ve been out of it, so that people in Nebraska and Indiana, in England and Saudi Arabia, have been part of our worship on-line. We still want them to be with us.
We are blessed to have a place to which we can go back. We have the hope of a resurrected life together in that place. Let that be a sign, even a sacrament like the bread and cup we are about to receive, of the great and holy Place who is Christ our Lord. It is in Him that we and anyone can belong and be at home.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] From Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 24, retold in Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 56.