Friends,
The Gospel for this Sunday, the 3rd Sunday in Lent, is one of my favorite texts from the Gospel of John, Jesus’ “Cleansing the Temple,” John 2:13-22. All four Gospels relate this episode in the life of our Lord, but only John puts it up front, in the 2nd chapter of his Gospel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “synoptic Gospels,” because they see the story of Jesus in a similar outline, thus “syn”-together and “optic”-to see. They are just getting started with the Galilean ministry of Jesus. John, on the other hand, has been called “The Maverick Gospel” because he brings Jesus to Jerusalem right after the miracle of the wedding at Cana, and a short stay in Capernaum with his family.
At Passover time, the observance of the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, Jesus goes to Jerusalem like many other observant Jews. God had commanded that the Passover be observed every year. Making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem would have been momentous. But Jesus hasn’t come to the temple as another observant Jewish man. He has come as a disrupter.
Everything is just as it should be when he gets there. Things are “normal.” The business of changing money into “temple money” is going gangbusters. That’s because the image of the Roman Caesar on Romans coins made their use prohibited in the temple, and they could not be used to buy the animals needed for sacrifice. Then in comes Jesus and he disrupts the whole place. Tables overturned, coins flying through the air and clanking on the stone floor, Jesus with his whip chasing off the money changers.
What was Jesus’ problem with “business as usual” in the temple? Why is he so hostile to the sacrificial system of 1st century Judaism? I’m not authority on this, but here’s what I think. I think Jesus wasn’t just overturning the temple-market place. In John’s Gospel Jesus is the disrupter par excellence! He is overturning assumptions all along the way:
· In John 2 Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding in Cana, and now people can’t go through the ritual washing because the water for that purpose has become wine.
· In John 3 Nicodemus learns “must be born again by water and the Spirit.” Though he is a religious scholar and teacher (Rabbi) has no idea what this means.
· In the next chapter, John 4, Jesus breaks all the rules by having a personal and intimate conversation with a Samaritan woman. It’s not clear what the disciples thought was more horrid, that she was a woman, or that she was a Samaritan.
· In the next chapter, John 5, Jesus breaks the rules again and heals a man on the Sabbath Day.
· John 11 Jesus “disrupts” the funeral of Lazarus by ordering the mourners to “unbind him and let him go” as he walks out of his grave alive.
I think you get my point. John is the Gospel of Jesus the disrupter. Maybe this means that we should ask what it means when our world is disrupted. Might it be that God is doing something new, something contrary to our assumptions about life, about death, and about God?
Reflecting back on the cleansing of the temple, and Jesus words, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will re-build it,” John says his disciples saw what happened as an event the pointed ultimately to the resurrection, the ultimate disruption. Normally speaking the dead do not rise. But in Christ they do because Jesus has disrupted the power of death. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)
Lord God, give us faith to trust you in the midst of the disruptions of our lives, believing that in you we have eternal life. Amen.
Pastor Joe Hughes
March 7, 2021