3/3/24 Lent 3 Sermon

Our reading this morning is from the Gospel of John 2:13-22.  It’s a familiar and famous story of Jesus going into the temple and driving out the money changers.  But before we get into the reading itself I want to point out a few things because John is doing something different here than the other three Gospels.  The first thing to know is that John is just a very different Gospel than the other three.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke form what we call the synoptic Gospels.  They generally follow the same plot and same timeline. Things happen in the same order. Hence, Synoptic coming from the word synopsis or to form a general summary.  There are several differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. And I’m not going to get into all of them, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus’ ministry basically taking place in one year, where John has it going for about three years.  There are three passover celebrations in John. There’s only one Passover in the other three.  The scripture reading this morning takes place during the first passover celebration in John.

And our reading is going to be a huge departure from the other three Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus going into the temple and throwing out the money changers at the very end of his ministry.  It happens right after Palm Sunday and it’s the final straw that leads to Jesus’s arrest and execution.  John locates this story at the very BEGINNING of Jesus’ ministry and gives the raising of Lazarus as the reason to why the Pharisees plot his arrest.  Interestingly, John is the only Gospel that records the story of Lazarus.   But let’s now listen to Gods word as it may speak to us at this time and in this place as we find it in John 2:13-22

 It was nearly time for the Jewish Passover, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple those who were selling cattle, sheep, and doves, as well as those involved in exchanging currency sitting there.  He made a whip from ropes and chased them all out of the temple, including the cattle and the sheep. He scattered the coins and overturned the tables of those who exchanged currency.  He said to the dove sellers, “Get these things out of here! Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business.” His disciples remembered that it is written, Passion for your house consumes me.

 Then the Jewish leaders asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things? What miraculous sign will you show us?”

Jesus answered, “Destroy this temple and in three days I’ll raise it up.”

 The Jewish leaders replied, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days?”  But the temple Jesus was talking about was his body.  After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered what he had said, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Friends, this is the word of the Lord.

Now, the first question should be why?  Why does John move this story?  It’s tempting to ask who’s right - John or the other three Gospels?  Now, I wasn’t there but pretty much everyone agrees that if we are talking actual facts, the other three have it right.  This story happens at the end of his ministry.  But John clearly doesn’t care.  So why?  Why does John move this story especially when there were probably listeners to his Gospel that may have had 1st or at least 2nd hand knowledge of what had happened?

And the reason is that John isn’t interested in the facts.  He’s interested in the truth.  This gospel is trying to tell us the truth about Jesus and not necessarily the facts about Jesus.  Maybe John felt that if you wanted the facts you could look at other Gospels but John was more interested in giving us a confession of Faith - a testimony into the character and importance of Jesus.  John is essentially trying to develop a mythology.  Now, I know that mythology and myth are somehow dirty words now.  We equate myths with primitive people and cultures or if a story isn’t factual, we call it a myth.  And we like to think that we don’t live our lives by myths anymore but we do.   And it’s important that we understand myths and what they are.

Myths aren’t interested in facts as much as they are in trying to tell us something much deeper, usually.  We have national myths we teach our children.  George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and coming clean about it. It never happened but the story is trying to tell us something about the character of our 1st president. He was an honest man.  The story of John Henry the steel driving man who beats the machine driving in railroad spikes. Not factual but it’s trying to tell us something about humanity, its’ work ethic, and the rise of technology.  These are myths that are trying to convey a truth to us.  John even says in his Gospel that it’s point is to convey to us who and what Jesus was in order that we may believe.  He’s not interested in laying down an orderly account of what happened like the author of Luke is.  He’s interested in people knowing the Truth with a capital T about Jesus.

So, instead of this story coming at the end, it happens at the beginning. But why?  What’s he trying to say?  First, John is the only Gospel to use this story as a prediction of Jesus’s death and resurrection.  Right of the bat, Jesus knows the outcome of his ministry.  We don’t get that sense in the other three.  And The scripture story about the Wedding in Cana says that after Jesus turns water into wine the disciples believed in Jesus.  After this temple story, it tells us that after the resurrection they believed in the scripture.  A foundation is being laid.  John’s outlining what faith is supposed to look like.  Believe in Jesus first, believe in the scriptures and the words Jesus spoke next.  But also, John is laying down here right in the beginning what Jesus is all about and what this faith that Jesus is teaching actually is.  It’s a return to pure religion.  It might look like something very new but it’s a return to something very old.

The faith had been corrupted by people trying to make a profit off of it.  It had been perverted and changed and what Jesus is calling for right off the bat in the Gospel of John is a religion with God at the center of it, where people have access to God without being exploited or taken advantage of.  Now listen, Throughout the years many people have used this passage we read to make all sorts of arguments as to what can or can’t be done in a church as far as selling things.  It’s been used to say church bingo is wrong, or a fashion show to raise money for the church is in violation of scripture, or any other fundraiser you can think of shouldn’t take place. We shouldn’t have “money changers” in the parlor.  But that entirely misses the point.  That isn’t what angers Jesus here.

What would anger him is if Randy took out all the hymnals from the pews and set up a table before you entered the sanctuary where you had to rent the the hymnal before going in, and he pocketed the money.  Or if I decided you had to pay $15 a piece to pay for the communion bread and wine before you took communion and used the profits to buy a jet ski.  In essence, you shouldn’t have to pay to pray when it comes to God. People shouldn’t financially profit in order for you to practice your faith.  Now, some of you may be sitting out there thinking, “then why do we pay you?” To which I say, “good point.”  But it isn’t mandatory that you have clergy or a minister to worship.  Not even back then with Jesus. But his argument isn’t against the priests or what they may or may not have been paid.  Its against people making money off of a mandatory sacrifice. People making money off of a requirement to practice your religion. Religion isn’t about paying to pray.

John starts the Gospel with this story to set a tone, to say that through Jesus we’re going to get back to an understanding of and relationship with God that we once had but lost, that something very new and something very old is happening at the same time.  John is saying hold on to your hats because the ways we’ve come to understand God are going to be dramatically challenged and re-thought.  Everything is going to be questioned and re-examined and brought into new light.  Not just for the sake of questioning it, not just for the sake of throwing out old traditions and upsetting people, but for the sake of pulling us closer to God and into deeper relationships with God.  John is setting the pace for the rest of his Gospel by moving this story to the front instead of keeping it at the end.  Jesus is doing something different and John is trying to make that point by rearranging the story.

So, what is our take away from this?  What does it mean for us today and how we live out our faith?  I don’t know if I can answer that for you.  And I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been studying and reading John a lot lately or if it’s because of other things going on in my life and in the world, but I’ve been re-thinking a lot of things lately.  And John seems to be reinforcing it.  I’m not saying that you have to think about any of this or ask yourself any of this. This is one of the few times I’m going to make this totally about me, but I do so in the hope that it might help some of you.

Jesus challenges the tradition here and the socially accepted norms of how we understand faith.  And if I’m understanding any of this, he’s trying to get people to refocus on God, that God is the center, the foundation, and the thing of primary importance.  And so I wonder… How much of what I believe and what I have faith in is because it sounds good to me or because it’s what God truly wants?  If when I truly study scripture and do so honestly and openly and I find that it conflicts with something I held to believe or am taught to believe, which do I let go of?  What happens when I find the teachings of Christianity to conflict with say… what I believe politically?  Or What happens if I find it to conflict with the Presbyterian church or the Reformed tradition?  What if it raises a conflict within myself and my own philosophy or understanding of life?

If I take this passage in John seriously, if I take Jesus seriously here, I think what it means is that I don’t run away, I keep my focus on God, and I work through the conflict but ultimately God has to win.  Jesus is supposed to come in and flip over the tables in my life.  Faith isn’t always about comfort. Sometimes Scripture and Jesus are there to challenge us and the way we think and mess everything up.  And that’ll lead to a death of some sort.  Faith leads to death sometimes.  The conflict it raises tears down the temples we build.  Sometimes those temples are built out of belief or ideology or worldview or politics. And Jesus comes in and turns it all upside down and can leave what we once were certain of in rubble.  But the promise here that Jesus makes is that even though those temples are torn down, if and maybe ONLY if for people like us, if we keep God and Christ as the primary importance, the primary influence upon our lives, those temples get rebuilt into something greater, something better, something where the barriers between God and other people no longer exist.  I truly believe that.  I truly have faith in that.  But I cannot let my allegiance to anything else hold greater sway over my life than Christ.  And if something is in conflict with Christ, I have to pick Christ.

That doesn’t mean I leave things or walk away from people or organizations I find to be important and central to my life no matter what those people and organizations may be.  That isn’t what Jesus did.  He worked to make them better and to call them to a higher standard.  He didn’t just walk away from the temple. He confronted it to make it better and to make it what it should be.  Maybe he calls on us to do the same things.  Maybe he calls on us to not run from but to embrace the conflict our faith sometimes calls us into with the rest of the world in the hopes that we’ll focus more clearly on him and work to make a newer and better temple both of ourselves and of the world in which we live…