03-03-2024 Bad For Business

Thomas J Parlette
“Bad for Business”
John 2: 13-22
3/3/24
          There are certain things that get under my skin. Things that irritate me – pet peeves, if you will. We all have some I guess,
          In my case, I’m very fussy about remote controls, and yes, I sometimes call them “clickers.” I like to keep the remotes on our coffee table at home, that way everyone knows where they are. That way they won’t slide down between the couch cushions or find their way into the kitchen because somebody went to the microwave to pop popcorn. Keep the remote on the coffee table.
          I’m the same way about turning out lights. I am forever turning out lights in empty rooms in our house - I hope you can hear my family’s eyes rolling in unison because they are so tired of my dad lectures on those topics.
          And of course, we’ve all got some pet peeves while we’re driving. For instance, it really gets under my skin when you pull into a fast food restaurant to grab a coffee or something, and there are 14 cars ahead of you. How is that fast? Or – whenever I’m driving south on Broadway coming into church, it seems I always have a car ahead of me that slows down to crawl to make a turn into MOKA, without using a turn signal. I have nothing against MOKA – but please let me know you are turning!
          One last pet peeve – those TV shows where one of the characters gets married, and one of the other lead characters goes online to get ordained as a minister in the Church of Spiritual Whatever for twenty bucks so they can perform their friend’s wedding. At this point, my family just gets up and walks out of the room, because they know what’s coming.
          Well, this morning we get a little glimpse of something that really gets under Jesus’ skin. The situation at the Temple really pushed his buttons and he gets angry.
          The story of the cleansing of the Temple can make us a little uncomfortable, because it’s one of those times when we see Jesus being very “un-Jesus like.” The image of an angry Jesus flipping over tables and causing a stampede doesn’t really sit well with our images of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, meek and mild, or the baby Jesus lying in a manger. This angry Jesus can trouble us.
          This story of Jesus clearing out the Temple is one of the few stories that is told in all four gospels. The synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – all tell us this story happened towards the end of Jesus’ ministry, when he came to Jerusalem just before his crucifixion. John however, places this story right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, according to John, Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Passover at least three different times, while the other gospels have Jesus only making one trip to the Holy City.
          Biblical scholars have long wrestled with this inconsistency. Solutions or explanations for these discrepancy have fallen generally into three categories.
This story only happened once, during Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem during Holy Week, as the synoptics tell us.
2. The cleansing happened at the start of Jesus’ ministry, as John tells us.
3. Some have offered a third option to say, maybe there were two cleansing episodes, and Matthew Mark, Luke and John all have it right.
          For the most part, that third option, that this story happened twice, has been ruled out, and scholars go back and forth over the proper chronology of this story.
          But when you consider the purposes of each of the Gospels, it becomes a little clearer why John puts this story at the beginning. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are most concerned about telling us what Jesus did and said. But John was much more concerned with identifying who Jesus was. John assumes that his audience already knows the stories and the facts of Jesus’ life – he was more concerned in showing his listeners who Jesus was. For John, this cleansing of the Temple establishes Jesus as the new dwelling place of God. Now that Jesus has come, God will dwell with the people not through the Temple, but through an actual, flesh and blood person. All four Gospels record Jesus saying “Tear down this Temple and I will rebuild it in three days”, with the disciples realizing what Jesus meant after his death and resurrection. But John wants that early in his story so we can see who Jesus was right from the beginning.
          Whenever we deal with a passage from John, we should be careful to note how he refers to “the Jews.” Unfortunately, passages such as these have been used to support anti-semitism in the Christian community for years. It’s been improving in recent years, but historically, passages like this one have been used to scapegoat “the Jews” as a people, blaming them for killing Jesus. We must be careful to remind ourselves that all the characters in this story are Jewish, including Jesus and his disciples and everyone gathering in Jerusalem for the Passover festival. We need to take into account that when John refers to “the Jews”, he is not using that pejoratively for all Jewish people. He is referring to specific Jewish people, the religious officials within Judaism. He is referring to those people who are responsible for running things at the Temple. So, whenever we read John, whenever he says “the Jews”, we should probably substitute “the religious officials or establishment.”
          So, in addition to the placement of the story of Jesus’ visit to the Temple, there are a couple of other ways that John’s story is different from Matthew, Mark and Luke.
          First, although Matthew and Mark both mention that doves were for sale as sacrificial animals there in the Temple courts, only John tells us that there were oxen and sheep for sale as well. Luke doesn’t even mention the animals.
          The other thing unique to John version is that Jesus fashions a whip of cords to use as he drives the animals out of the Temple. At times, this story is portrayed as an impromptu act, as if Jesus gets caught up in the heat of the moment and loses his cool, so we can downplay the anger that comes out here. But as John tells it, this was deliberate act, something planned out, it was not spontaneous. Jesus had to take at least some time to gather enough cords and then find a way to fasten them together somehow to make this whip cords. This was a deliberate show of righteous anger. So why was Jesus so angry about this?
          The religious officials who were responsible for worship in the Temple probably had good intentions when all this buying and selling started. After all, people came from miles away to be here for Passover and they needed to buy animals for sacrifice and get their money changed to the proper currency. It was just good business when it all started. It served a much needed purpose.
          But over the centuries, the sacrificial system had evolved into an efficient machine for fleecing the rich and poor alike, earning a great deal of money for the insiders who ran the system.
          If you went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, your goal was to sacrifice an animal according to the law of Moses. You could bring your own sacrificial animal, of course, but many who made the journey didn’t want to transport an animal, they fund it easier to purchase one on site – at a steep mark up of course.
          The law said that you had to present a perfect animal, without mark or blemish. So unless you had purchased a pre-approved animal within the Temple precincts, you had to take your offering to an inspector, who would tell you if the animal met the standard or not. Of course, many of the inspectors were in the pockets of the animal-sellers, so they rarely approved any sacrificial animal brought in from the outside.
          And there was something else. If you had journeyed from one of the surrounding lands where Jewish people had settled – like Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor or even Rome – well, you probably had imperial Roman coins on you, engraved with the likeness of the Emperor. Such graven images violated the 2nd Commandment, so they were forbidden in the Temple. You couldn’t use that to pay the Temple tax. So to make an offering or buy an animal for sacrifice, you had to go to the moneychangers to exchange your Roman coins for image-free Judean coins – all for a price, of course. Since there was no other option, you had to pay whatever commission they asked. Quite a racket they had going.
          When Jesus arrived at the Temple and saw this flea-market atmosphere and people being taken advantage of when they had come to worship God, he was incensed over the injustice of it all. This was not what the Temple was for. This was not what God wanted. That was what angered Jesus about the scene at the Temple.
          So after he created a stampede and flipped over the money changers tables, the religious officials could see – this was bad for business! This was their peak season. They needed to make their money now, during Passover, so they could pay for the upkeep of the Temple. So they question Jesus – “What sign can you show us for doing these this.”
          Notice here, that they don’t try to arrest Jesus for causing this disturbance, at least not now. They don’t order him to leave, they don’t send soldiers in after him. No, they ask for a sign. At some level, these Jewish religious officials knew that Jesus had a point. Maybe they knew that things had gotten out of hand. Maybe some of them secretly wished they could throw those moneychangers out themselves. Maybe they had just gotten so used to the system functioning as it did, bringing in the money they needed to keep the Temple going, that they were content to look the other way and let the religious stuff slide a bit. Maybe.
          Jesus’ answer however comes back to haunt him later. He tells the authorities – “Destroy this Temple, and in three days, I will raise it up again.” That’s the only charge that stuck later in Holy Week at Jesus’ trial, although the officials changed the wording to “He said he would tear down the Temple and re-build it in three days.” Not exactly what Jesus said, and certainly not what he meant, as his disciples remembered what he said and figured out he was talking about the temple of his body.
          This passage shows us that anger is not a sin in and of itself. It’s ok to get angry. Jesus did. What’s more important is what makes us angry and what do we want to happen as a result of our anger. Jesus was angry at how worship had been mangled to cheat people out of experiencing God. He was mad at the injustice of it all. What Jesus wanted to see happen was people coming back to the right worship of God. Back in Genesis 18, verse 18, Israel’s earliest calling was to reach out to all the nations of the world. In that verse we read, “Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.” The prophet Isaiah built on that calling in Isaiah 42, verse 6 and 7: “I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness. I have taken you by the hand and kept you. I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”
          What was happening at the Temple, with the sacrificial system and the moneychangers was not being a light to the nations – it was taking advantage of people. And for Jesus that had to stop.
          The controversial comedian Lenny Bruce once famously said, “Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.”
          Maybe that’s exactly what Jesus was doing here. Calling the people back to God. For in Jesus we will not need to offer sacrifices or visit the Temple to experience God. Jesus will take the place of the Temple. God in present to us now, not in a Temple, but in the person of Jesus Christ.
          As we come to the table this morning, let us give thanks for “Immanuel” – God with us, in this meal shared in the Spirit with Jesus Christ.
          May God be praised. Amen.