Lent 3 New Temple – 3 March 2024
13 When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15 So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ 17 His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’
18 The Jews then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’
19 Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’
20 They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ 21 But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
What Jesus did this day in the Temple area must have made quite an impression. All four gospel writers recall it.
John tells us that at the time, they did not really know what Jesus was doing. It is only after the resurrection that they recalled that the Scriptures say that zeal for the Lord’s house would consume the Messiah and that the temple Jesus was speaking of on this day was not the temple they were standing in but the new temple of his own body.
John tells it differently to the others too. He does not share it as being a trigger for the final lead up to the crucifixion at the end of Jesus ministry like the others. John remembers it being at the very beginning – right after the wine at the wedding in Cana. John is saying something different to the others about this.
When Jesus enters the temple area, nothing is unusual. The whole sacrificial system of animals, birds, grain and exchange of currencies have to be done somewhere. The Jerusalem temple is a huge open market space in the centre of the city.
Why is Jesus zealous enough to personally make a whip-chord, turn over tables of foreign exchange merchants and rattle the cages of those doves!? He does not call the place a ‘den of robbers’ as Matthew, Mark and Luke tell it. This does not seem to be a protest about malpractice or corruption. It seems to be bigger… deeper.
For John, Jesus seems to signalling the dismantling of the whole thing – building, system, practices….. This temple, this building with all of its associated roles, stories, symbols of religious identity and even national pride is no longer necessary. It is being demolished to be replaced by something bigger and better. That is BIG!
Everyone knows that this is God’s building. What could possibly be better?
This building was originally established at the Lord’s direct command – first via Tent of Meeting in the Exodus wilderness, then by Solomon, then rebuilt to part of its former glory by retuned exiles under Nehemiah and Ezra and then finally made great again by Herod for his own political purposes and personal ego. We hear that it has taken Herod 46 years to build so far.
Like security people at the footy, when Jesus disrupts the whole show, the keepers of the Temple are on the job straight away.
‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’
In other words, ‘Who do you think you are?’
As Paul says, “Jews demand signs” (1 Corinthians 1:22). “C’mon Jesus, make the water into wine again. Call down a pillar of fire. Cause an earthquake….”.
Jesus doesn’t put on a show. But he will.
‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’
Ridiculous! Impossible!
They think they are talking with Jesus about this huge building which is the immovable centre of their faith their identity, their national identity. They aren’t. Jesus is talking about another one…. Another temple that will be built, that will not be like this one.
This new dwelling place of God with his people will not be a building. Buildings are not big enough, permanent, trustworthy enough …
As Stephen would quote from Isaiah 66 before these same people would drag him out and stone him as the first witness to die for Jesus,
48 … the Most High does not live in houses made by human hands.
49 ‘“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord.
50 Has not my hand made all these things?”
Like Jesus making that whip-chord with his own hands, God is hand-making another temple not made with human hands, even if it will soon come to be founded on human flesh and blood spilt at human hands.
God is making a completely new thing – a new dwelling place for himself among people; all people, not just Jewish people. Rather shockingly, Jesus is saying, ‘I am that place’.
But making a building the dwelling place of God is much easier for them and us. It is easier. You can see a building, build a building, achieve a building, control a building, tend a building. You know you built it. It looks good. It lasts beyond yourself. It assures you that the God is still present and will be present into the future.
John is telling you, ‘Not true’. Since the resurrection, no building assures you that God is still here and active and with us. You don’t seek God in a building but in the one who speaks to you, gathers you, calls you and enlightens you with his gifts anywhere he chooses.
You can be assured that God is here and active, that he hears and does, not because of this building but because of the word of the resurrected Jesus, in the gifts he bears – water and word of baptism, flesh and blood of the new Passover meal, in his ‘Body’, which is his people, and not just in a church building, but anywhere,
19 ‘ … if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.’ (Matthew 18:20)
Now, it is all Jesus:
18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and[b] is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
(John 1:18)
This is a challenge to us. We seem to prefer buildings more than the new temple of flesh and blood.
Lutherans in the Valley seem so tied to our buildings,
- as if they are the place of God’s presence and life and hope – not the Word of Jesus we speak and hear in them;
- as if they are thing that must be kept at all costs, not the living breathing fellowship of faith we share in Jesus;
- as if our mission is to tend them and fix them and keep them open rather than use them to hear Jesus, speak Jesus, love this community in his name;
- as if they cannot be touched lest God is somehow altered or removed or lost. He is never lost. Jesus has built the everlasting temple, his body, the Church, which will outlast all the buildings. Not the other way around. We can touch the buildings!
O that so many Lutherans in the Barossa (including me) could hear the sound of that cracking whip-chord and the coins tipping off those tables and the flight of spooked doves! And then be with Jesus sipping wine transformed from water at a wedding, eating fish and bread on the grassy slope be the sea, smelling the strong scent of perfume around that room as she anointed him for his burial, ate more fish on the beach with a risen Jesus doing the cooking, hearing the rapid words of a woman who no one ever saw or wanted to see in the village inviting everyone to come out and ‘meet a man who told me everything I ever did’ (John 4:29).
If they did, they would hear the New Temple say this:
21 ‘Woman, … believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem … 23 … a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.’ (John 4:21-24)
John does know what he is talking about. He saw that Messiah crucified and then resurrected and ascended to rule, and then in AD70, in his lifetime most probably saw or at least heard about the raising of the Jerusalem temple to the ground by an angry Roman Caesar Nero by the hand of his top general Vespasian in response to those annoying Jewish revolutionaries.
If we need a building in which to gather, we can have one. The Lord seems to allow this. We can enjoy it, look after it, change it any way we want because it could be here today and gone tomorrow and we would be none the worse for it because it is not the temple, not the dwelling place of the Lord. Jesus is – his living word is, his grace to forgive me is, his gift in my baptism is, his holy meal of life and love I share with you is; the love he gives to share between us is.
And with him we are the dwelling place of God in this town
“ … the living Stone – rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him – 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Our mission is not to keep the doors of a building open but to use the building to open up Jesus for them.
The Father will always have his house. Together by faith in Jesus, we are it.
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