The Rev. Kristin Krantz
Lent 3, March 7, 2021
St. James’, Mt. Airy
Exodus 20:1-17, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22
Gracious God, take our minds and think through them;
take our hands and work through them; take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
Today’s gospel reading is one of only a handful of stories that appear in all four gospels. That doesn’t mean that the story is the same in all four gospels, and in fact today’s story is a case in point as to how each gospel writer conveys different meanings for the same events.
If you know the story of Jesus “cleansing the temple,” then if you’re like me you probably think of the story as it is written in the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) where Jesus’ righteous anger is on display and he condemns the corruption of the traders for making the temple a “den of robbers.”
But here in John’s gospel we see something a little different.
It begins with where the story is placed chronologically. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke it happens at the end of Jesus’ ministry as a part of the actions that lead up to his crucifixion. In John, however, this story is placed at the start of Jesus’ public ministry, right after he performs his first miracle at the wedding in Cana, changing water into wine.
John’s focus on Jesus’ actions is different too. The word the disciples used to describe him was as one full of zeal, not anger. Coming from the Greek word zelos, it meant indignation rather than rage.
And yes he made a whip of cords to drive out the sheep and cattle, but unlike in the synoptics, Jesus didn’t condemn the sellers in the same way – he didn’t call out their corruption, rather his ire was focused on the way that the Temple had been made into a marketplace.
Yes this can be read as Jesus critiquing the practice of sacrifice that was central to temple worship in his day, but it goes beyond that.
The temple was destroyed in the year 70 ce. All the gospels, which began as evolving oral accounts, were written down and circulated after that: Mark right around 70, Matthew and Luke around 85, and John sometime between 90-100.
This, along with the fact they were originally writing to different cultural and geographical audiences, can account for the variations in the focus of their storytelling.
And John, being the last written, shows us in a unique way how some early Christians were struggling with both their emerging identity separate from Judaism, and how they were trying make sense of a world without what had been considered its sacred axis – the temple.[1]
These early Christians refigured “the temple” as the body of Jesus, which is also the body of the church.
This is why John has Jesus make the reference to the destruction of the temple and it being raised up in three days – prefiguring his passion and resurrection.
John’s Jesus was casting a new vision for worship, where his body was the temple, and those who abide in him therefore abide in the house of the Lord.[2]
As Matthew so poetically put it, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”[3]
This is our inheritance as modern day disciples of Christ, the promise that coming together is how we meet God – not where we come together, but the fact that we do.
Which is why today, we have another of those experiences where the lectionary feels divinely inspired.
The Church in her wisdom set up for us this lectionary, the three year cycle of readings, so that we are able to circle back to the same stories again and again to go deeper into them and wonder about their meanings for our lives.
And yet, as many people have remarked from time to time, it is uncanny how often these readings seem to speak directly to what is going on in our lives.
This weekend marks the one year anniversary of the last time we gathered in the church building for our regular 8:30 and 10:30 services. Liturgically, today is the Third Sunday in Lent, which a year ago was the first Sunday we suspended in-person worship – expecting it to only be for a short period of time.
Our inability to gather together fully over the last year, even as we were able to have some in-person worship from July-November, has been something akin to the destruction of our own temple.
This building which we love, and that many of you helped to literally build from the ground up, has not been the space we’ve held in common.
Instead we’ve had to go back to our roots and learn again what our forebears in faith learned all those centuries ago – the church is not a building, the church is the body of Christ gathered in his name, and then sent out into the world to do the work they are given to do.
And so we’ve learned new ways to gather and to serve that are not anchored to 1307 North Main Street – and perhaps we’ve also expanded our understanding of holy ground.
Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann once warned that the quickest way to desecrate a landscape was to build a church building – since the supposed “holy ground” would instantly imply that everything outside its doors is profane (and sure enough the word “profane” comes from the Latin for “outside the temple.”). Like the prophets before him, Jesus can be understood in today’s gospel passage as challenging our tendency to domesticate God and hem him into a specific place.[4]
If the last year has taught us nothing else, it’s that God and that family of families we call the church are not bound by location. Like those first Christians we’ve had to be creative and learn new ways of living faithfully.
And as we begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel, with mass vaccinations and Covid metrics hopefully continuing to drop, we’ll begin to enter our own “post-temple” period of meaning-making – sorting through “the way things used to be” and all the new things we’ve learned, a distillation process that will bring us to a new place in the months and years to come.
The hope in all of this is in the knowledge that the path before us is well trod. From those earliest Christians and down through the centuries, people of faith have continued to hold fast to God and to community – from the earliest house churches, to basilicas and cathedrals, to hometown churches, and now with the addition of virtual gathering.
Through it all God has been faithful and calling us to faithfulness. Let us remember and believe like the first disciples, and continue to step forward trusting in God’s promise to be with us always. Amen.
[1] SaltProject, Lectionary Commentary for Lent 3.
[2] SaltProject, Lectionary Commentary for Lent 3.
[3] Matthew 18:21, NRSV.
[4] SaltProject, Lectionary Commentary for Lent 3.