Sermon for Sunday 15th March 2009

A few years ago my whole family went on holiday to a big house in Italy. There were twelve of us, including my brother Rod and his then 19 year old son, Nick. As often happens on holiday we would all drift down for breakfast at different times. One morning all of us had come down except Rod. He then appeared dressed from head to toe in Nick’s clothes – huge baggy shorts, a favourite tee shirt emblazoned with pictures and extremely trendy and expensive trainers. Nick immediately lost it – ‘Dad, what on earth are you doing?’ To which Rod replied – ‘irritating isn’t it!’ Of course, as with lots of children, it is taken almost for granted that they help themselves to their parents’ things – and usually leave them scattered around the house. Or left in some friend’s house never to be seen again.

Sometimes words just aren’t enough. How many parents here, having despaired of telling their children to ‘stop playing with that and get on with your homework’ resort to hiding their things. More effective than words.

Jesus’ barnstorming of the Temple in Jerusalem is a truly shocking event. It is so hard to reconcile with his caring, loving and forgiving nature. Not only does he come crashing in, turning over moneychangers tables and driving out animals. John has him armed with a whip of cords, just to make sure everyone, animals and traders alike, are herded out.

But Jesus’ actions were no doubt deliberate and necessary. He could never have achieved such a dramatic realisation of his message by turning up and just talking to the people in the temple. And even though Jesus caused such mayhem, they would fully understood why he did it after his death and resurrection. This is why John places it right at the beginning of his gospel. Immediately after he has given the first sign of who Jesus was with the miracle of water into wine at the wedding in Cana.

If you look up this story in the other three gospels you will find it in a logical place chronologically. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem at the end of his ministry and goes to the temple soon after his arrival. But John takes the account from these gospels (the synoptic gospels) and reorders it in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. John’s entire gospel makes constant reference to Jesus ultimate destiny, shedding much greater light on the meaning of the events as a result. Jesus’ words ‘destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up’, were almost nonsense to the Jews in the Temple at the time. But we immediately understand it refers to Jesus’ resurrection. And John’s account shows the disciples understood – ‘after he was raised from the dead the disciples remembered he had said this’. John wants us to hear, right at the beginning of his gospel, the message that this event carries.

On the surface this story is about Jesus getting cross because the Temple, the place where God was met and worshipped, had been taken over. By people changing money and selling animals for sacrifice. It seems to have become dominated by market place, even though the stalls were all related to the rituals of the Temple.

But Jesus was talking about much more than getting the Temple back to a more orderly and faithful manner of behaviour. Because in Jesus’ radical new world the Temple would be an anomaly. The Temple was exclusively for the Jewish people, and Jewish males at that. But Jesus came with the message that everyone, Jew or gentile; man, woman or child was equal in God’s eyes. And along with the breaking down of the exclusivity of the Temple came an end to the subjection of the Jewish people to elaborate rituals and laws.

Jesus drove the animals out of the Temple because there would be no need for animal sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. There was just one final sacrifice to come – that of Jesus dying on the cross at the hand of those who could not understand or bear his message of universal love. After Jesus death and resurrection the one sacrifice that they would be invited to make was the giving of their lives to Jesus. To believe in him. To die to their old ways and to rise again with him. No longer would their lives be dictated by adherence to the minutiae of the Jewish law, devised over centuries as a means to gain control and power. The only law they would follow in the future was that offered by Jesus Christ.

So what in this new order was going to replace the Temple? The whole focus of the religious observance of the Jews? The answer was not a building and a new set of rules. It was simply the risen Christ himself. The place God met was not in the Temple but in the body of Jesus Christ himself.

And at this point we become involved, we become a participant in the drama. And Jesus comes crashing into our lives, overturning all our obsessions and self-interested concerns.

While mulling over this sermon I wondered what Jesus could do today to cause the same outrage in a church as he did in the Temple. I thought it would probably be to come barging into a church and demand all the pews are taken out! If there is one thing that infuriates churches and local communities it is vicars who want change church buildings.

We can make the same mistake as the Jews did with their meticulous laws and Temple practices. If we are honest we are not that different. Our rituals, our buildings, our traditions, the things we like, are terribly important to us. But this story of Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables was not about getting rid of the tables. When he says ‘destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days’ he is talking about himself – his death and his resurrection. So the resurrected Jesus is the Temple. It was overturning the whole idea of the Temple. And today we sometimes lose that fact as we have for centuries concentrated on and built up our church rituals. The Church can become like the Temple Jesus challenged.

It is St Paul who reminds us constantly what the Church or Temple is. It is not buildings or organisations or committees. It is Jesus, and us – his body in the world today. We are the body of Christ. Paul tells the Corinthians – Do you not know that you are God’s temple? And declares with them ‘for we are the temple of the living God’.

If we are the temple of the living God, then we must like Jesus throw out anything that separates us from one another, as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. Or that gets in the way of our attempts to live our lives in his image. And that needs self-examination, humility and prayer. And above all unconditional love for Jesus Christ and for humanity. Quite a sobering thought. The purpose of Lent even.

© Robert Jenkins 2009