John 2:13-25

10/26/08
John 2:13-25
Hudson UMC


Though we have been focusing on the Gospel of John, there are indeed four Gospels in our New Testament. Regardless of what fringe scholars might say, and regardless of the so-called suppressed Gospels that modern archaeology has unearthed, the church has always recognized these four and these only. In fact, some of the earliest Christian writings explain that, even in the second century, the so-called Gospel of Judas was considered by the entire church to be false. So, we have always had these four Gospels; if you have ever read them, you know that they are not exactly the same, which is good because it wouldn’t make sense to have four identical books in our Bible. Each author has handed down the events of the life of Jesus in their own unique way, emphasizing certain aspects, but always remaining fundamentally true to the message of God. Indeed, we could have had four entirely different Gospels because John, at the end of his account of the life of Jesus, states that “There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

In light of this, the surprising thing is not that the four Gospels are different, but rather that there are any similarities between them at all. With that much material, how could one choose what to include and what to leave out? And yet, there is a remarkable coherence between the accounts we have. In fact, the first three are so similar, you can look at them side by side and feel like you are reading variations on a single text. John is the odd one out. He tells stories and presents a point of view that is somewhat different than the others. What this means is that there are very few stories that are shared among every one of the four Gospels. It seems that, if each of these four authors felt the need to include the very same story, we should pay particular attention to it. It really is amazing the kind of stories that each evangelist includes, like the feeding of the five thousand, and the crucifixion; it is almost more interesting which stories are not included in each of the Gospels, like the birth narrative. It might surprise you that something as important as the birth narrative is next to ignored in both Mark and John, but a passage like ours for this morning, Jesus violently clearing the Temple, is found in absolutely every single Gospel account. The evangelists clearly thought that this episode, though it might seem out of character, is critical to understanding the life and ministry of Christ. It is in light of this observation that we proceed.

None of the Gospels claim to be a strictly chronological account of the life of Jesus, so we sometimes get stories in different places in different accounts and where the authors place a particular story might tell us a great deal about how they saw it. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple comes at the very end of the story, right before He goes to the cross. Here in John, we read about Him having this rather dramatic display of anger at the very beginning of His ministry. He has just gathered His core group of disciples, done a single miracle and then does this, making a whip, turning over tables, pouring out the coins of the money changes, and yelling at the merchants. The fact that John places this event so close to the beginning of his Gospel tells us that he viewed this scene as nothing less than the foundation of Christ’s ministry, that we should consider everything else in the story in light of how Jesus reacted to the people in the temple.

So, what does this event tell us about Jesus? It tells us that He does not just sit around with a blissed-out look on His face, holding His hand out to bless people, like He is often portrayed in stained glass windows. It tells us that, though Jesus has incredible patience and is not agitated by things that would completely stress us out, that there are some things that absolutely drive Him up the wall, things that He simply cannot tolerate. Jesus loves all people, but He does not love everything. Some things are wrong and there are no two ways around it. Jesus was hopping mad, and it was not a show. However, we do not always like to think about Jesus as getting really mad, do we? It just doesn’t fit in with our preconceived notion of Jesus being meek and mild, patient and loving; and yet, here it is, right before our eyes. It is precisely passages like this that challenge the way we think about God. It is absolutely true that God is loving, forgiving, patient, kind, and empowering, and a servant of the poor, but we can not, we must not forget that our God is absolutely capable of exercising wrath. God really feels emotions; there are things that really make Him mad. If we forget this and paint a picture of God that simply accepts all things without exception, we depart from the God revealed in Scripture.

When Jesus shouted at the dove sellers, He said, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” In other accounts, He says that the people were making the temple into a “den of robbers”. These are not simply words that sounded good at the time, they refer back to some extremely tough words in the book of Jeremiah. The prophet writes, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’” He continues on, “Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’ – only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” Basically, to put it into modern terms, what Jesus has done is walked into church, knocked over the tables in the fellowship hall, broken the pulpit, yanked the wires of the sound system out of the walls, and gotten rid of the stained glass and has said to the pastor and the church council, “You just don’t get it, do you? You are supposed to be worshipping the Father, but you are just wasting time and giving those outside a reason to hate God.” Harsh words to be sure.

What did the people do in response to this? Just as we might imagine, they were pretty upset. This guy, who most of them had never seen before, just came of out Galilee and came to the big city to tell them that what they have been doing for years is worse than useless. They start to complain, asking Him to give them a sign to prove that He has the authority to do this. He talks about the sign of the resurrection, but He does not do a miracle in front of them. We might wonder why He didn’t. After all, if He really wanted the people to stop their corruption, why wouldn’t he work a miracle and prove Himself to them? I think the point is that He shouldn’t have to. The people were corrupting the worship of God by their own self-serving behavior. It shouldn’t have mattered if it was Jesus doing this or if it was someone else. If something is wrong, we shouldn’t need a miracle to make us want to change. This desire for a miracle shows us what the people were probably really thinking.

These people had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. These people made their living in the temple. If Jesus was right, it meant that they not only had to change, but that they would be out of a job. We don’t find ourselves in a situation in America today where people will likely be fired simply for being a Christian, but we should always let this be a challenge to us. What if you were to realize that your job required you to do things that are not good for Christians to do? Would you find a new job? What if your lifestyle involves things that you like to do but are ultimately destructive to your devotion and worship to God? What Jesus is telling us by cleansing the temple is that, for those who name the name of God, nothing evil can stay. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians that “you cannot eat at the table of the Lord and also at the table of demons”. If Jesus were to walk into our church service today, would He find anything that would displease Him? Is there anything evil in our worship?

Throughout the last few hundred years, Western Christians have tended to try to root Christianity in simple morality, claiming that the reason that we follow Jesus is because His system of morality is so good. However, when we really look at the morality that Jesus promotes, we find that He tends to go quite a bit farther than we want Him to. In Jesus’ ministry, He consistently claims that it is not enough to simply live a life without “evil”. Not only can nothing evil remain in the life of a Christian, nothing indifferent can stay, either. Most of the people whose business Jesus interrupted did not likely wake up every morning saying, “I wonder how I can desecrate the house of God today. How can I live a lifestyle of evil?” It is far more likely that the people did not give much thought to what they were doing. They probably saw it as a job, nothing more. In so many ways, Jesus was not so much overturning the evil in the temple, but the apathy.

So, in light of all these things, what this text says to me is that all of Jesus’ ministry is based, not on trying to bring good teaching to humanity, nor to make them feel warm and fuzzy, but to radically transform them. I think that John included this story at the beginning so we might have a very clear picture how God works in our lives. God does not just come in and make a few suggestions about how we should consider living. First, He comes and cleans house, coming into our lives and passing judgment, saying, “You know, all of this stuff needs to go”, but it isn’t a judgment that is meant to finally condemn us. If this were the case, it would not be truly good news. The reason why the story of Jesus is called a Gospel is because, in the end, it does not bring condemnation but brings good news and hope. Christ’s judgment on the merchants and money-changers in the temple was not meant to crush the people, but was meant to restore them. The reason it seems so harsh is because the people were so ingrained in their tradition, having forgotten to remind themselves why they do what they do, that He needed to be drastic to even get their attention. The judgment that we feel in our hearts when we consider the words of Christ is not meant to remain forever, it is meant to pave the way to receive the cleansing and the new life that God has promised us through His Holy Spirit. If we hear the difficult words of Christ and do not respond, if we insist on living the same way we always have, we will never move beyond the judgment into the joy and hope. The people who challenged Jesus heard the words of condemnation against them, but they never once said, “What must we do to be saved,” but rather were indignant. “How dare this man say these things to us?” When the God of the universe speaks tough words, it is meant to bring us to repentance and to trust in Him for our strength.

I have tried to bring this passage close to home this morning, comparing what Jesus did all those long years ago with our modern situation. On the one hand, this has probably made it more difficult to hear. After all, if we simply left the story in first century Palestine, we could allow ourselves to think about the merchants and money-changers as other people, people who belong to other churches, or do not belong to a church at all. We could nod our heads with Jesus, saying, “You get ‘em, Lord”. The problem with this is that, we also are not perfect. Every day I look at my life and at my heart and see where I am not yet like Christ, where I am not yet where God has called me to be. Not a day goes by when I am not reminded how little I have when I do not trust in God. Every time I read this story it exposes the hypocrisy that sadly still remains in my own life. You have no idea how tempting it is to simply think that, because you are a pastor, that you must necessarily be a strong Christian. At seminary, it is taken as a given that we have all surrendered our lives to God because we are following a call to pastoral ministry. I need to wrestle with this story every once in a while to help me uncover the areas that I have still not surrendered to God’s lordship.

I mentioned the fact that God often needs to come into our lives, pronounce judgment on our thoughts and actions, declaring them to be evil, before we can fully step into the joy and hope that the Gospel promises us. There are probably many people in this room who know exactly what I am talking about. There are probably a bunch of people who have struggled with their sin for a long time before they finally felt the peace of God wash over them. However, a famous Christian teacher in the twentieth century said, “Society’s last great hiding place from God is the church.” Any one of us might have spent decades in the church, but this does not prove anything. If we are still merchants and money-changers, it does not matter that we spend all of our time in the temple.

The words that I have had to share with you this morning have not been easy, but this should come as no surprise because the text itself is not easy. In order to explain the text and in order to bear witness to the truth of God, I must unapologetically declare the difficult realities that Jesus Himself declared. However, though I have certainly heard the voice of condemnation in my own heart, though I have all too often displeased my God, it is not because of these things that I am a preacher of the Gospel. I am here today as a believer in Christ and a preacher of His name because I believe that, though this word of condemnation comes, and indeed must come, there is a better life because of it. God’s difficult words come to us, not to make us feel bad nor to make us feel like we are children being scolded, not to cloud out the hope of God, but to reveal truth to us. Christ overturned the practices of the temple, not to be a trouble-maker, but to show the people that they had put their trust in a lie. When God clouds hope, it is not to make us feel hopeless but to make us realize that the hope of this world is empty and we must push on to receive the very hope of God.

Jesus did His first miracle at the celebration of a wedding and He will spend most of His time giving hope to the hopeless, redeeming those who seemed unredeemable. We must not forget, though, that this hope, this redemption, this salvation, comes with a price. Christ, in His good news, asks us to die to ourselves so that we might live for God. The two cannot be separated. Let us always remember that every time God challenges us, He gives us the strength to respond in faith and will take us by our hand to lead us into joy unspeakable. When the world crumbles around us, when “the way we’ve always done things” no longer satisfies, let us always remember to turn to God for sustenance. Let us pray.

AMEN