March 03, 2024 | Rev. Loren McGrail
Become Zealots for Love
John 2:13-22
Rev. Loren McGrail
Holmdel Community United Church of Christ
March 3, 2024
In John’s Gospel Jesus comes to Jerusalem for Passover at the beginning of his ministry to show his disciples who he is. This is Jesus’ second public act, right after turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. It is important to note that John’s audience had already witnessed the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
Jesus wants everyone to know from the get- go that he has come to disrupt the way things are including the whole temple system that included the buying and selling of God through animal sacrifices for forgiveness. When he sees the moneychangers taking the doves from the poor, he loses it and shouts, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” or as it says in the Message, “Stop turning my Father’s house into a shopping mall.” Then he poured out the coins of the moneychangers on the ground and overturned their tables. Next, he made a whip of cords and drove them out of the Temple like cattle and sheep. Jesus was angry. His tone is violent though he doesn’t actually hurt anyone. Dear Ones, I am wondering what cherished version of Jesus does this threaten?
Like Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea before him he could not stand for violations in God’s house of Prayer. He was outraged. He was enraged by how at this holy time of Passover, a time of remembering enslavement and liberation, the Temple was being used to exploit and exclude the poor who would find it difficult to pay the half-sheckle tax for a turtle dove and therefore be excluded from worship.
Rev. Bill Wylie Kellerman, theologian, and activist, reminds us that the Temple had special permission from Rome to collect its own taxes. He writes, “This half-shekel tax may have a modern equivalent in the tax emption of the churches, by which their silence and complicity with the State is effectively purchased. Pilate was able to dip into that half shekel treasury on occasion without objection from the temple bigwigs. He built his aqueduct in part with such funds.” There was deep complicity between synagogue and state. Some would say there still is an unholy alliance between religion and state.
Dear Ones, during this season of Lent and stewardship, I hope you are hearing that our call for financial support is not a call to take your money to enrich our coffers or buy your way into heaven but rather a very real call to ask that everyone find a way they can comfortably give to support our church living out God’s call for building the Beloved Community through love, mercy, and justice. And yes, our sanctuary and our buildings need repair and upkeep too. And yes, God can be found here in this lovely space or in the company of people who love us no matter how difficult we all can be sometimes. God dwells within our humble temple and in each other. This is what your giving supports.
However, in John’s Gospel Jesus has come to pull down the pillars of the temple and replace it with himself. This is more than cleansing but actual destruction. It is for this reason many people find John’s Gospel anti-Semitic for it emphasizes Jesus replacing the Temple or Judaism with Jesus.
In spite of this warning of replacement theology, I think there is something important for us to consider about the value of turning over tables or how our Houses of Prayer can become enslaved to the marketplace.
Dear Ones, Jesus was enraged over the exploitation of the poor and the desecration of his Father’s house of prayer. What is calling out righteous anger in you? How are you expressing it? Father Richard Rohr this week has been posting each day about anger and its’ uses.
In Monday’s post he talked about how the healthy expression of righteous anger can translate communal despair into compassionate action and justice-seeking. I was thinking about this as I listened to podcasts from people across the country speak out in rallies and marches to protest the ongoing genocide and now starvation going on in Gaza. Some are sending angry letters to their representatives while others are committing civil disobedience to stop ‘business as usual.’
I translated my anger and despair into a new art project—drawing a hungry young Gazan boy with his empty pot. It took me quite a few tries to draw the mixture of starvation and terror in his heavy lidded eyes. Who is he looking at? Then I prepared a canvas to make another cross. This time it would be made out of the dead bodies of children. So, I stuffed tin foil parcels with tissues and covered them with paper towels to make their small bodies. It only took four to make a cross. My anger melted into tears---the crucified ones starved to death or killed in the Flour Massacre--- a tribute to their unnecessary deaths or a reminder that this happened on our watch with our approval and money.
Dear Ones, there are many places in our troubled world that might be arousing your anger or provoking your tears, I invite you to bring them to God. I also invite you to practice the breath prayer. Breathe in the suffering, breathe out peace. Breathe in the suffering, breathe out love. Feel the tightness around your heart soften. Anger can be a spark that can motivate us forward, but love is the pathway that can funnel our motivation into meaningful action.
Dear Ones, God chose to incarnate god’s self in human bodies, human temples. Jesus came, in part, to tell us that he himself would take over the temple’s function as a place of mediation between God and human beings. In essence he was saying, “I am this, this place where you come to sacrifice and celebrate, where you come to be in community. I am this. This why you should follow me so you can learn how to do this too as one of God’s beloved ones.
Jan L. Richardson says, “Jesus carries the temple in his bones. Within the space of his own body that will die, that will rise, that he will offer to us, a living liturgy unfolding.”
Jesus offers his body as a way to evoke and provoke us to abide in him. We become Christ’s body when we welcome and mediate his presence; when we honor, respect, and cherish other bodies as holy places, as homes for God.
Dear Ones, if we are to become living sanctuaries worthy of the indwelling of God’s Spirit, to become the body of Christ, we must work as Jesus did to cleanse or dismantle the structures of oppression and exclusion that threaten not only our Houses of Prayer but all of creation. We must embrace the Jesus with the whip as well as the babe in the crib, or the one that hangs limp on the cross. Only then can we celebrate his resurrected still bleeding self.
Go forth today, Dear Ones, knowing you have been called to cleanse and dismantle all that stands in the way of God’s consuming love. Remember what St. Augustine said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” Adopt Hope’s daughter’s then and become zealots of love, living sanctuaries for God. Amen.