Wandering In the Wild: Jesus Clears the Temple

John 2:13-22

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 doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” 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 forty-six 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.

“Can you give it good purpose beyond your need to be right?”

I ask myself this question whenever I feel my anger change from a simmer to a boil, which is often. So often, in fact, that it became a blessing in one of my books.

I am grateful for the scripture stories that reveal a jealous, snippy, or outraged God. I lean in for the verses that show Jesus upsetting a perfectly civil and placid social situation, creating awkwardness because he’s picking at the veneer, rolling back the rug to showcase all the crud that’s been tucked away out of plain sight.

I need these examples of righteous anger and healthy conflict because they offer permission and guidance for the inconvenient emotions our society would rather see suppressed.

How many of us remember being told not to feel a particular way during childhood – to hold back tears because boys don’t cry, to pull it together because you’re embarrassing yourself, to avoid being seen as weak, sad, hysterical, or angry?

How many of us were taught to limit our emotional responses so they don’t make other people uncomfortable or require a complex reaction from others in return?

Feelings can become fragments of feelings, nursed with logic and intellect so often they almost forget their home in our bodies. But emotions are physical, a symptomatic language that communicates even more strongly than words.

So when Jesus is curt or exasperated or spent or weeping tears – I am glad for the reminder that he is fully human and these emotions are honored by God’s own body. It keeps me from putting him in one socially acceptable box.

The other gospel accounts set this story much later in their telling, once Jesus’ ministry has been established and his authority has become a threat to both religion and politics. But John tells us right away in chapter 2. John moves from a story about Jesus’ very first sign – the miracle of turning water into wine – to the temple tantrum.

In the first scene, at the wedding, Jesus snaps at his mother saying, “Women, don’t involve me. My time has not yet come.” But then he gets involved, making something from nothing, sparing the host social and economic embarrassment, extending the party with cisterns of abundance and overflow. He removes the barrier so everyone has access to the celebration.

John invites this lens, this glimpse of the kingdom, to be our guide as we enter the temple before the Passover. He wants us to notice how far the scene feels from the Wedding at Cana, where everyone was welcome, no one was put to shame, and the people had access to the good stuff.

In the second scene, the text for today, we are stopped in our tracks by bureaucracy and barriers. Weary travelers wait in line with no choice but to exchange their currency for the temple’s coin – at the temple’s rate. They shop for animals pre-approved for sacrifice, again, priced for the sake of someone else’s margins. They hand over whatever they have to these money-changers and vendors, these officials who sit in between the people and God’s mercy, price-gouging forgiveness as if it is theirs to sell, barricading mercy and justice as if it needs protection from the people.

The poor are getting poorer, extorted by the schemes of the rich.
Middlemen are selling forgiveness like a commodity.
The guest must first afford the welcome.
The oppressed are put to shame.

The people are being kept from the good stuff.
This is the heat that turns Jesus’ anger from a simmer to a boil,
that gathers like cords into a whip,
that moves him from words to full-body action.

Jesus is showing us how to emote,
how to express what we’re feeling,
how to live in these bodies

when we see something that is seriously wrong,
when God’s name is conflated with the empire’s priorities,
when God’s temple is occupied by the economy of the oppressor,
when lines are long, and cisterns are empty, and grace is scarce.

Jesus does not show this kind of rage when we are pious or forgetful or scared.

He reserves this righteous anger for the ways we herd the vulnerable into economic abuse, for the ways we perpetuate systems that take advantage of our neighbors, for the refuge we seek in a silent status quo, in an apolitical faith, while injustice hums along.

He gets angry even though he knows his own disciples won’t understand this anger, not right away, and even though two thousand years later, we will do our best to make it small and partisan so we don’t really have to hear it. So we don’t really have to feel it in our bodies.

I know I don’t want to hear it. I know I want to make it about a different time, a different culture, a different group of people so I can make assumptions about their values and faith.

But then I remember that this divine and righteous anger is not bellowed from a distant mountaintop, nor is it unsympathetic to the messy tension of mortals.

Jesus is fully human. A person in a body. A body that needed money to buy food and clothing, that had aches and pains, that smelled like sweat and tasted food and felt the distance between heaven and earth. Jesus gets this angry knowing full well the multitude of systems in which we operate and integrate. He gets angry knowing that we are clothed by baptism, but we are also drenched in the power dynamics and capitalistic pull this world.

All of us, liberals and conservatives, all of us are contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism. We want that to be our universe of meaning and when you get a poetic articulation that moves outside of that it’s just too anxiety-producing for most of us so we try to stop that kind of talk. 

– Theologian and prophet Walter Brueggemann 

None of us want to have this exposed as an inadequate and dehumanizing way to live. So we don’t let our faith communities talk about it. These silences are hard to break.

These silences were hard to break 2,000 years ago and they’re hard to break now. No one at the temple that day felt laid back and comfortable about the truth Jesus was telling. And no one feels a rush of glee when the gospel points to our normalization of injustice these days, either.

It’s offensive. We’re offended. And we can feel it in our bodies.

Once Jesus has thrown his whip and turned over tables and chased out the payday lending schemers, the temple authorities show up. They have one question for him,

Who do you think you are?

They want to talk about power and authority. Maybe they’re looking for a permit or an apology. After all, he should be ashamed of himself. What a foolish thing to do, what a scene he caused – only a contrite explanation will do.

Who do you think you are? 

Jesus answers. He is a body. He is a temple. He is breath from heaven. You can destroy this, but God will raise it up again in three days.

They laugh and guffaw in disbelief.  He has no idea what it takes to build a temple. What it costs and the politics of construction.

They are still consumed by consumption. It is the default lens that pulls us back, no matter how many hymns we sing, no matter how many prayers we whisper, no matter how many times we turn around and confess our sin.

We are still suckers for systems that divide, rituals that keep us in bondage to scarcity, questions that do their best to make someone else smaller than we feel.

Even when we are face to face with Jesus.

But Jesus knows who he is – even and especially when they do not.

He is a body. He is a temple. He is breath from heaven.

He has come to disrupt the profit margins of the oppressor, to show concern beyond brick and mortar, to violate the long lines that keep folks waiting for the good stuff.

It’s emotional. It’s offensive. It will get him killed. But he feels it anyway – and shows us how.

Friends, the righteous anger of Jesus does not expect you to abandon the temple or the economy altogether. But it does expect you to be honest with yourself about who you are and where your power actually comes from.

It does show you how to feel your emotions in your body, to rage without apology whenever you find barricades between God’s mercy and God’s people, to turn over tables that take advantage of the poor.

For if we are called to be Christ’s body in the world, then every economy, every politic, every human being is on holy ground, a temple for God’s breath, a location for our faith to engage fully.

It means making a mess of things that look like good order, to see what God is revealing, and to resist covering everything up again.

Tomorrow people will gather online and at 38th and Chicago to mark the beginning of Officer Chauvin’s trial. Because we are all bodies. We are all temples. We are all breath from heaven. And so was George Floyd.

People will gravitate together
because layers of grief and trauma are opening again,
because people are feeling this occasion in their bodies,
because sometimes the only thing we can do in the face of death is long for something else – another way, another world that turns toward justice and mercy without so many barriers in between.

People will keep silent for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, an excruciating amount of time to consider the barriers that keep God’s people from the good stuff, to remember every body as temple and breath from heaven.

We are all learning to feel this world in our bodies – and how to honor that others carry grief in theirs, too.

We are all counting on a God who chases out and turns over everything that separates the vulnerable from mercy.

We are all tied to the liberation of the One who knows who he is and where real power comes from.

May God bless our discomfort with hearts that open wider still, with faith in Jesus, who is still turning tables, with the Spirit’s breath that lives and lives and lives.