[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Imagine for just a moment that you’re the parent of a young family. You’ve spent a rare evening out with your husband or wife. It’s about midnight. As you get closer to your house, you hear sirens. Then, you see flashing lights. A block from your home, you see that your cul de sac has been blocked off by emergency vehicles. Terrified, you pull your car off to the side of the road and run toward your house. Within seconds, you see that your house is engulfed in flames, destroyed. But you don’t care about that. When a second later, you see your kids huddled with the babysitter and some neighbors, you fall on your children with tearful embraces.
The house is just a building. What matters is the people inside it.
In today’s gospel lesson, John 2:13-22, we see that God feels the same way.
Let’s take a look at the lesson: “When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 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. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”
That last line quotes Psalm 69:9. On the face of it, the verse would seem to say that Jesus is protective of the temple, like the member of one of my previous parishes who was upset that I wasn’t upset when people brought coffee to worship.
In fact, Jesus is upset by the extortionists preying on the faith of those who have traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple. Many of these pious Jews came from long distances, many for the only time in their lives. It was impractical for them to bring sheep or pigeons from Spain or Italy or Egypt, or wherever they lived. So, once they got to the temple in Jerusalem, they exchanged their gold or local currencies for temple cash, the only stuff they could use to buy animals for sacrifice there.
Jesus didn’t like it that people who came to worship God were gouged for the privilege! It would be like Living Water charging admission to people who came to worship God on Sunday mornings. It was out of zeal for His fellow Jews, the household of God, that Jesus became angry.
And this is important to note. Jesus’ zealous ire is aroused against those who would stand between God and people who need God.
This reminds me of something Jesus said when His disciples tried to keep children away from Him: “Let the little children come to me [Jesus said], and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19:14)
Listen: The only thing that seems to ever have made Jesus angry was when someone--be it the Pharisees, the religious authorities, the devil, the demons--got in the way of people who wanted to know God.
That’s because for the God we know in Jesus, nothing is as important as people.
All people.
Including you and me.
Jesus’ fellow Jews who made up the temple leadership were upset by what Jesus did. He was cutting into their revenue, disrupting their routine! So, they ask Jesus in verse 18 of our gospel lesson: “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus proves His authority with these words: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (v.19)
“I’m going to give an evil, cynical world a sign of my authority,” Jesus is saying. “My Body is the temple of God’s Holy Spirit, as is the body of every person who confesses faith in Me (1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19). And if you cut this body down, if you kill Me, I will be raised again on the third day.”
The sign of Jesus’ authority is His resurrection.
It isn’t just the sign that He had the authority to throw the money-changers out of the temple, though.
It’s the sign too that He has authority over all that keeps people made in the image of God from experiencing life with God.
Jesus has authority over the sin that blackens your conscience, the public disclosure of which would mortify you, the sin that makes you sick to remember.
Jesus has authority over death.
He has authority over your heartaches and sadness.
He has authority over your deepest regrets and your most earnest desires.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can erase the power of sin, death, heartaches, and disappointments over your life.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can give life--abundant, never-ending life with God--to all who dare to daily turn from their sin and daily trust in Him.
But is it true? Did the resurrection, this sign of Jesus’ authority over everything in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18) really happen?
An Israeli scholar, rabbi, historian, and diplomat of the last century wondered the same thing: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
This scholar, Pinchas Lapide, set out to learn the truth. Lapide looked at the witness of the early church--of Peter, who had spinelessly denied knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest; of the other apostles who had run away from trouble when Jesus was executed; of the 500 or so early Christians who had made themselves scarce on the first Good Friday.
He saw how these same once-gutless people, after they’d received the gift of the Holy Spirit, had staked their lives on proclaiming that Jesus was risen from the dead.
He considered how a rational scholar like Paul, a hard-headed businessman like Peter, and all the other first followers of Jesus Christ faced death and persecution and refused to renounce what they knew to be true: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, true God and true man, crucified, dead, and buried, was also risen from the dead and now seated at the right hand of the Father, offering new and eternal life to all who believe in Him.
Lapide looked at how the resurrection had changed these people’s lives and said that the resurrection of Jesus must be true.
As He put it: “I accept the resurrection of Jesus not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as an historical event." We can accept that too!
The resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign of what Jesus bore witness to on that day in the temple: People, people made in the image of God, people lovingly formed in their mothers’ wombs, people for whom Jesus died on the cross, people, all people, including you and me, are what matters most to God.
It is people--your friends, your enemies, your family, your neighbors, YOU--that Jesus came to this world came to save, to gift new life, to know God for eternity.
And it is this resurrection that Jesus came to share with you and me if we will follow Him, day in and day out.
As Jesus promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25)
Houses and skyscrapers will crumble.
Empires and fortunes will be lost.
But the God we know in the risen Jesus and all who trust in Him will live forever.
It is on this fundamental truth--and nothing else--that we baptized believers in Jesus are called to live our lives.
May we always do just that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label Psalm 69:9. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psalm 69:9. Show all posts
Sunday, March 04, 2018
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Where God Lives
[This was shared this morning during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”
The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.
But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!
This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.
This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.
But these practices were far more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.
This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.
It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “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. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”
The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.
People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.
The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”
There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.
But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
In the end, the Temple was just a building.
It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.
The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 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.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.
First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.
But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.
But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.
First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.
Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.
We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.
We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.
We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.
He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.
God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.
That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.
Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.
In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”
Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.
Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.
May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen
John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”
The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.
But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!
This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.
This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.
But these practices were far more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.
This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.
It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “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. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”
The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.
People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.
The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”
There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.
But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
In the end, the Temple was just a building.
It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.
The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 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.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.
First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.
But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.
But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.
First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.
Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.
We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.
We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.
We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.
He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.
God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.
That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.
Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.
In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”
Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.
Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.
May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen
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