March 3 Worship

The Passover of the Jews was near and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

In the temple, he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves,

and the money changers seated at their tables.

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple,

both the sheep and the cattle.

He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

He told those who were selling the the doves, take these things out of here.

Stop making my father's house a marketplace.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me.

The Jews then said to him, what sign can you show us for doing this?

Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

The Jews then said, this temple has been under construction for 46 years,

and will you raise it up in three days?

But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the

dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the

scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Music.

I want you to imagine.

He's walked into this temple many times before, often during the Passover,

and seen what he encounters on this day.

He sees the stables full of cattle and sheep. He sees the pens full of doves and other birds.

He knows why they are there.

He knows his scripture. After all, all Leviticus 1.

Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, when any of you bring an offering

of livestock to the Lord, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock.

And he knows for whom all these things are available.

They're there for him and for his friends and all the other Jews who have traveled

by sea or over mountain to come to Jerusalem,

who have come so far that they couldn't bring the flocks of their fields to

worship God and sacrifice them in the holiest of holies. And the money changers?

They're there for a reason, too. I mean, yeah, they take a little cut,

but they're making sure everyone stays right with God.

It's Scripture Scripture 101 as well.

Exodus 20 verse 4. Yeah, he knows that one. Everyone knows that one.

Exodus 20:4

It is, in fact, the one, number one, commandment one.

You shall not make for yourself an idol or a graven image.

And in a perfect world, they wouldn't

be Roman subjects and they wouldn't have of pockets full

of money with the emperor's head on it that they need to exchange for non-blasphemous

money to use in the temple to buy the livestock that they couldn't afford to

schlep to the temple from half a world away.

So yeah, it's all there for a good reason, even scriptural reasons.

Something's different. Today feels different. It's all how it's supposed to

be, but maybe that's the problem.

Maybe that's why he feels this Holy Spirit urge to, I don't know,

make a whip and just drive them all out of the temple, every last one of them.

That's what I imagine. That's how I cook it up. That's how I imagine.

That's what is going going through Jesus' head when he enters the temple in

our gospel reading for today.

Because while it may seem like a great sacrilege what is taking place by the way Jesus reacts,

and this is sometimes how we read this text, there isn't really anything particularly

wrong with what's going on.

But maybe that's the problem, too. It turns out Jesus is not quibbling about

about financial malfeasance or malpractice or mismanagement,

at least not in John's version of the events.

And the quibble with money changers, taking a little off the top to make a living,

that would not usually make Jesus react this way.

After all, Jesus ate with tax collectors,

went over to their houses, and those people were charged with much more serious

financial crimes in the ancient world than these money changers who were there

in the first place so that people didn't break the first of the Ten Commandments.

No, Jesus' grievance is much deeper.

What Jesus does and is calling for is a complete dismantling of the entire temple

system, and only one thing could justify that.

That there's no longer any need of it. What Jesus is calling everyone to consider

with his actions and what he says is this incredibly bold claim that this temple,

this holiest of holies, which for centuries,

since King Solomon built the temple a thousand years ago,

and then it was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century and rebuilt

to be the one that stands in Jesus's time, that that temple,

the literal dwelling place of God Almighty,

where divinity and humanity tangibly meet,

which had served its purpose relatively well as the center of worship of the

one true God, that that temple would now give way to a new and definitive temple,

example, Jesus' own body.

Jesus would be the place where divinity and humanity meet, the hypostatic union

of God and man, and therefore, the place of true worship and praise.

Friends, this is a bold claim.

But what Jesus does in today's reading is also bold.

And to back it up, Jesus shares with with those who are gathered there that

day, that this God-man would do the boldest thing the world had ever seen.

The new temple of his body would be destroyed and in three days rise again.

And if that is true, then not just the temple system, but the system of the

whole world, the cosmos, is flipped on its head.

When we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness

to Gentiles, the entire world should look different.

And yet, let us not fool ourselves. The world in most ways suffers from the

same sins and shortcomings as those in Jesus' day.

And so when we hear that Jesus challenges a religious system so embedded in

its own rules and practices that it's no longer open to a fresh revelation from God,

might we hear Jesus speaking to us as well and challenge us to see a world in a new way?

Because knowing knowing how his death and resurrection would rewrite the relationship

between God and the cosmos,

Jesus didn't hesitate to make a bold new claim, a new way to see where we look

for God and where we know God to be.

And might it be for us as well? Might we believe the truth about Jesus and flip the tables of our world,

of the status quo that have always been there in our minds and begin to live

and see the world from the foot of the cross and the empty tomb.

And here's what that might look like. This is a story about a surgeon, Dr. Paul Brand.

And Dr. Brand was serving in Valore, India, working among leprosy patients.

And on one of his first days there, he was invited to say a few words to the

community, all these outcasts from society.

And they all gathered to hear from this caring man.

And as he spoke, his eyes were drawn to their hands.

Some with no fingers, many drawn in on themselves in something called a leprosy claw.

Many patients, though, they just sat on their hands, too embarrassed to show them.

And noticing this, Dr. Brand, he started talking. He said, I'm a hand surgeon.

And so when I meet people, I can't help but look at their hands.

He says, I can tell a lot by hands.

I can often guess what someone's profession is just by looking at their hands.

And then seemingly out of nowhere, he says, I would, I'd love to see Jesus's

hands, the rough hands of when he was a carpenter, the righteous hands that

flipped the tables and drove out the money changers.

The compassionate and sensitive hands of the healer.

And I would even like to see his crucified hands as they were nailed to the

cross, crippling them, drawing them in on themselves in that moment.

And as he said this, a ripple of recognition spread through the crowd.

Jesus? With hurt, clawed hands just like their own, Dr. Brand continued.

I would also have loved to have seen his resurrected hands, which we know portrayed

all the same marks he had while he was living.

The disciples, we are told, got to place their hands in those marks. And why?

So that we can see ourselves in him.

All the brokenness, all the hurt, all of the imperfection of our humanity,

not gone still there but changed flipped.

Resurrected. And as he finished, Dr. Brand was again conscious of hands in the

crowd, but this time they weren't hidden.

All over the courtyard, hands were lifted up in the Indian gesture of respect.

The hands hadn't changed. They were the same stumps, the same missing fingers,

the same crooked arches, but these hands were now held up high with a new pride and dignity,

with the the acknowledgement that God's own response to their suffering could

change the way they saw their own broken bodies,

no longer outcasts, but members of Christ's crucified and resurrected body.

Friends, when Jesus walked into the temple that day, so long ago,

and as you walked in here today, day, things kind of look the same.

And yet, through our confession,

through the revelation of the truth of who Jesus is as he is revealed in the

scriptures and proclaimed in our creeds, as we experience him in the breaking

of bread and pouring of wine,

the places where divinity and humanity meet are revealed to us and change us

so that we may leave today with our tables flipped.

The old things driven away so that we are able to see the world in a new way,

the way Christ intends us to.

Because left to our own devices, we'd keep on buying and selling and changing

out our money, just as we have been taught to do and just as we have always done.

But friends, the temple is torn down.

The Romans made sure of that in 70 AD, and to this day, it still lies in ruin.

And friends, Jesus died too, torn down from the cross.

The Romans made sure of that as well. But what no one saw coming was what happened three days later.

Let us have eyes to see the world in light of this great truth.

And with these new eyes, may we change how we We see our broken world,

the tables that need to be flipped, the money poured out, the temples to our idols torn down,

outcasts restored to dignity.

A new way of seeing, a new reality of being, a new heaven, a new earth,

a new humanity, a new you and me.