By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, March 3, 2024)
The words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight. Oh God, of our salvation. Amen.
This lesson from the Gospel of John is a well-known one. It's one of the few stories about Jesus, in fact, that recurs in all four of the Gospels. Jesus comes into the holy space, throws down the gauntlet to those who are working in that space.
I did not know when I was thinking about this lesson that this morning Elizabeth would come into this space and throw down the gauntlet to the choir regarding coffee hour. There's nothing new under the sun.
This passage does occur in all four Gospels, but there are differences in the version that the Gospel of John gives us today. And I want to focus on some of those differences because I think it speaks to us in a way that's important and meaningful.
In the other three Gospels, when Jesus comes in, he accuses the money changers of making his father's house a den of thieves or a den of robbers. In John, he says, you've made it into a marketplace. The Greek word here is actually emporium. You've made it into an emporium. There's a deeper critique. It's not just that you're exploiting a marketplace. The fact that it's a marketplace at all seems to be Jesus's concern.
And I want to give you a little bit of background around the sacrificial economy of the temple. The temple, as I've said many times before, was the center of cultural, religious, and intellectual life in ancient Judea. And one of the central parts of that life was ritual sacrifice. People would come to the temple and offer sacrifice, the killing of animals, lambs and pigeons and doves, that the priests would perform on behalf of people. And especially now, the beginning of this passage says that it is Passover.
And so literally hundreds of thousands of Jewish people are coming from all over the Diaspora. Anyone who can get to Jerusalem is going to the temple to make their annual sacrifice. So there are hundreds of thousands of extra people in Jerusalem, maybe tens of thousands of people gathered, crowded around the temple. And they need animals. They need to buy animals for sacrifice, which is why the passage tells us that there were cattle and sheep and all these animals in the temple ready to be purchased.
The problem is, and I've noted this in other sermons, is the currency. Roman currency had an image of Caesar on it and it claimed that Caesar was God. And so this money could not be used at the temple. So people would show up with their Roman money and have to exchange their currency in order to buy animals. And there were money changers facilitating this.
I will say more about them and about the leaders of the temple in a minute, but this is the scene into which Jesus comes. Tens of thousands of people who want to get their sacrifices done, and Jesus disrupts everything. Turns over all the tables. Let's loose all the animals. We can imagine not many sacrifices made that day.
So what was Jesus so angry about? A few things really. First of all, the priests in the temple were appointed by Rome, the oppressor, the Empire. And Rome was getting a cut on the exchange rate. So the temple would set the exchange rate, the priests were put there by Romans or at least appointed by Romans, approved by Romans, and then Rome was getting a cut on the exchange.
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The temple kept a large store, a large treasury of this income. And they would use that income. Wealthy Judeans would use that income, to make high interest loans to poor people who are in danger of losing their land. Jesus and everyone in the temple would've been aware of these practices, and this is what he's attacking when he overturns the tables and calls it a marketplace. He's attacking these elite clerics. He's attacking them for collaborating with Rome and exploiting the Jewish people, these hordes of people who are coming from all around devotionally to make their sacrifices and to honor their God.
The Gospel of John, maybe among all the Gospels, is the most pointed in its criticism of the religious leadership in Jerusalem. And for that reason, among others, it has received in its interpretation by Christians in later years and centuries, it has often been very anti-Semitic. And I want to name that reception that Christians have received this gospel and used it towards violently anti-Semitic ends.
But it's also true that the original audience for this gospel were Jewish people, ethnically Jewish people. This gospel is not written by Gentiles against Jews. It's not even written by Christians against Jews. There was no such a thing as a Christian at the time.
It was written on behalf of a broader Jewish public against a narrower band of elites. But we do have to own and name this reception, this anti-Semitic reception. And another line here in this passage has been used to do that. Jesus has destroyed this temple, and I will raise it up in three days. And there's a long tradition in Christian thought of seeing this as sort of the destruction, the supersession, the overcoming of Judaism and the lifting up of Jesus as the replacement of that tradition.
But I think this line too, we have to read very differently. I've said this from this pulpit many times I feel like a broken record, but at the time that this gospel was written, the temple had already been destroyed. In the year 70 AD, the Romans came and they burned down the temple and they slaughtered hundreds of thousands and enslaved hundreds of thousands and raised the whole city, held it under siege for several years. Immense, immense suffering. And the people who are reading this gospel for the first time, the people who are writing this gospel for others to read, it was in the smoking ruins of that city.
And so the question is not, or what Jesus is saying, is not we ought to replace this temple with me. The question the gospel asks its reader is the temple, the city, has been destroyed. What do we do now? The cultural, religious, and intellectual heart of our people, of our nation, has been raised and burned to the ground. How do we serve God? What do we do now?
In the post-apocalyptic context of this story's writing and reading, that is the basic question. And here Jesus is reminding his reader, whether that reader reads in the first century or in the 21st century, Jesus is reminding his reader that the basic responsibility of following God is not keeping up the building. It's not a project in property management. The basic of serving God is justice. Jesus is telling them, God was with us before there was a temple. God will be with us now if you do what God asks of you, if you remember what the prophets our prophets have always called us to, if you remember that the offering God wants is the one that the powerful make on behalf of the poor. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
Imagine the destruction of the temple, the terrible catastrophe of this event. But also imagine the hordes of destitute, terrified people in the wake of that event, hungry and poor and sick and outcast all around. All around the region, fearful of continuing persecution.
This is the voice of this passage. This is what Jesus is saying to those people and to us. The home of God, my father's house, is not just a building. The home of God, as the book of Revelation says, the home of God is among mortals. "As long as the work and the people of God still remain," Jesus says, "So also does our command to serve both them and him."
To put a finer point on it by analogy, I love this church. This beautiful church. We celebrate and consecrate holy moments in it every week, more than once a week. But if, God forbid, these walls came down, God would still dwell among us, especially insofar as we serve those outside these walls. And indeed that is true whether the walls stand or not.
It's interesting that in the other three gospels, in Matthew and Mark and Luke, this disruption at the temple, the overthrowing of the tables, the throwing down of the gauntlet, the thousands of people who cannot make their required sacrifices, this is the last thing Jesus does. This is the offending crime. It is because of this that the temple priests try him and take him to Pilate.
It's this unrest and upheaval that leads Pilate to decide to have him crucified. But in John, it's not at the end. You can look in your bulletins. This is Chapter Two. This is the beginning of Jesus's ministry. He had one other small miracle in Cana, but this is how he begins. In John, the offending crime, the thing for which he is arrested, is actually the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Why would that be?
After he causes this upheaval at the temple in the Gospel of John, Jesus then goes forth and he does all the things he says that God calls us to do. He feeds the hungry. He heals the sick. He embraces outcasts. He welcomes enemies. He forgives sinners. He does this for chapter after chapter after chapter through the majority of the Gospel of John. And at last, in Chapter 11, he raises a man from the dead as the crowds weep for the loss of Lazarus. And he weeps too. He raises Lazarus from the dead.
And then the religious leaders gather around and they say to one another, he's too powerful. If the Romans catch wind of what he is doing, if they see his power, they will come and destroy us. They will destroy our nation. We can't let him keep doing this for the sake of our nation.
To be fair, this is a reasonable fear. Within a generation, the city will be destroyed. They're right to be afraid. Rome was merciless and cruel and as ruthless as they feared Rome to be. But think of what they are choosing. All Jesus has done is heal the sick, feed the poor, forgive sinners, welcome strangers, love enemies, and raise the dead. The priests, these priests choose their security, the deal that they have temporarily made with power over the good news of God's Kingdom.
Out of fear, the priests choose the stability of their institution, over the cries of the prophets, and the needs of the people, and the promises of God. Again, they are right to be afraid. Mercy is a grave risk. But security, especially security won through force and violence and the sacrifice of the innocent, that security is an illusion.
Last week, Peter was the topic of the gospel passage in my sermon, and I mentioned that it's easy to condemn him 2000 years later. And it's tempting to condemn these priests now. But, of course, that would be the laziest and most obvious sort of hypocrisy, wouldn't it? Especially for me, a priest standing and preaching in this magnificent temple.
Lent, this season of Lent, is a time for Christian self-examination. So before we condemn these priests who themselves were no doubt slaughtered by the Romans only a few years after this scene, let me say that we know, we Christians know, that at nearly every turn in our long history, the Christian Church, when given the chance to choose between its own institutional power and the needs of the stranger or the outcast or the exile or the enemy or the immigrant or indeed the Jew, when we have been given the power to choose between power and prophetic justice, we have far too often chosen poorly.
We have been building this temple for 2000 years and I don't wish for it to be torn down. But you can look at the statistics. Mainline Protestantism in this country is collapsing, hemorrhaging members. And it's easy to despair, to wish we could raise attendance or raise more funds. But that's not it. Discipleship is not building management.
It's not raising attendance or raising funds as long as we who remain raise up the courage to answer Jesus's accusation today, as long as we raise up the faith to heed his risky call, and as long as we do so out there in the world, this broken world beyond the crumbling walls that we have labored so long to build.
As long as we do those things, then the promise of God's Kingdom will still live.