Temple Talk (John 2:13 - 22)

It was Passover the day Jesus walked onto the Temple grounds, and Jerusalem was packed with humanity of all persuasions: pious Jews from the hinterlands competed for hotel rooms with Gentiles in town to make a buck and, some of them, at least, to check out this God whose name the Jews wouldn’t say aloud.  And every one of those visitors was packed into the courtyard they entered, or that’s what it seemed like: it was the Court of Gentiles, that least exclusive of all the Temple spaces.  Everybody could enter the Court of Gentiles—Temple authorities, priests, Israelite men and women, even Gentiles.  That day, the place was full: the heat radiated off packed bodies, and the stench of human expectation threatened to overpower even that given off by the animals kept nearby.

Straight ahead, in the Eastern Wall, Jesus and his followers could see the Beautiful Gate, the entrance to the walled compound.  To approach the heart of the Temple, one had to go from this outer Court of Gentiles, where all were welcome, through the Court of Women, where only adult Jews were allowed, through the Court of Israel, where only Jewish men were allowed, and into the Court of Priests, where stood the slaughterhouse and altar and where only priests were allowed.  For most people, that was as far as they could go: beyond the Court of Priests lay the Sanctuary, where the Holy of Holies was.  Only the High Priest could go there, and then only once a year.  God lived there on a great stone throne, and God didn’t like company.

But out in the Court of Gentiles, where Jesus stood, anybody was allowed, and at Passover, it had the air of a sweaty three-ringed circus.  There were stalls of the food-sellers, loudly hawking their wares—get your sweet breads here!—and scores of roving priests, giving directions and answering questions.  There were sages—scribes and the like—answering queries of great theological import, and a stall where you could hire a guide for a group tour.  Individual tours were available, but at a sharply increased rate.

After dragging Peter away from a falafel stand, Jesus made a bee-line for the animals, pulled out a whip of cords and started driving away the sheep and calves, for sale to Israelites for propitiary sacrifices.  As the beasts charged joyously off through the open columns surrounding the place, he stalked over to a money-changer’s table and stared straight into the man’s eyes, which were widened in astonishment.  Now, the whole business of money-changing was based on a particular set of circumstances.  Once a year, each Jewish male was required to pay a half-shekel for the atonement of his soul, and this came to be called the Temple Tax.  Because Jews came from all over the Roman Empire, they used a fair number of different kinds of money, perhaps especially Roman coins, which had the picture of the Emperor on them, and were thus anathema. Furthermore, the Israelites were forbidden from minting their own currency.  So for a fee, money-changers exchanged Roman and foreign currency for Tyrian shekels, the only coin the Temple accepted.  This was kind of like a company-store situation, because the Temple made money—either through leasing space to the changers, taking a cut, or employing them directly.  So they collected money from Jewish males both from the Temple tax and the fee they paid to pay the Temple tax.  As my son Mike might say: “Sweet!”

And so Jesus took an extra measure of pleasure from staring those guys straight in the eye and upending their tables, sending coins of all make and model, all currency and nationality, flashing through the air. Finally, he turned to the dove-sellers and said “Get these things outta here!  Stop making my Father’s house a market house.” And his disciples, in good rabbinic style, remembered the passage from the Psalms which said “Zeal for your house will consume me,” although they couldn’t say, exactly, whose zeal it was or, for that matter, who was being consumed.

In one sense, Jesus’ behavior is entirely in line with the Hebrew prophetic tradition: its practitioners generally stayed outside the religious establishment, just as Jesus stayed in the outer Court of Gentiles.  Prophets critiqued the establishment, sometimes with speech, like Isaiah, sometimes with symbolic acts, like Ezekiel, sometimes with both, like John the Baptist and now, Jesus.  That is likely why the Temple authorities didn’t seem overly concerned, or even angry: this is what prophecy was all about.  And really: they all knew that what he said was true.  After all, they weren't monsters, bent on fleecing the people, they were just people themselves, trying to do their best in the service of their God.  Over the centuries, things had just . . . snowballed.  Rules kept getting added to their operating manuals, each one for a very good reason, until there were so many of them that they need professionals, called scribes, who could spend all their time studying and applying them. Their God was an awesome God, who lived and reigned above, but needed a place to stay here on Earth, so he didn’t have to get a motel.  Thus, the Temple was born, and it needed funding, so thus the Temple tax, and thus the money-changers.  But not only was God awesome, but he needed sacrifices to keep him happy— see Rule 37/2.c—and thus the cattle and sheep and doves.

It’s kinda like what has happened to modern Christianity here in the West, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s gotten so complex that you need professional interpreters to help figure it out.  We Protestants call those folks ministers or pastors, and seminaries and divinity schools are needed to train them, as well as provide a place for theologians and other scholars to go so they can make Christianity even more complex and inscrutable.  Meanwhile, we need places for God to visit so groups of people we call “congregations” can go see God, and so pastors can have offices in which to store all the books they need to help them figure out Christianity and convey it to congregations.  And because all of this takes money, it leads to elaborate fund-raising campaigns and continual worry about dwindling membership instead of doing the will of God. Make you wonder what Jesus would overturn if he walked into one of those places, doesn’t it?

Well.  As I said, the religious authorities in Jesus’ day were well aware of all of this, but they lacked the will or wisdom to do anything about it.  So they only asked Jesus, mildly, for a sign that he could do what he just did, some mark of his authority. Jesus said “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And they scratched their heads and said “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you’re gonna raise it up in three days?”  But though he doesn’t tell them, and as John takes pains to point out, he was talking about the temple of his body.  And in fact, it wasn’t until after his resurrection that the disciples got the punchline.

 Jesus is speaking of his body, and it’s during the season of Lent that we remember the destruction of that temple.  And if we look at the Greek word we translate as “temple,” we see that it’s naos, which means a place where a god or goddess dwells, a house where  resides the divine.  As we’ve seen, that was exactly the meaning it had in the Jerusalem Temple.  As the people entered, beginning in the Court of Gentiles, they went through increasingly restrictive courtyards, shedding inferior classes like a dog sheds hair, until they didn’t get to God.  The Temple served to fence the people off from God, to isolate God from even the majority of priests.

This passage is not just a tale of prophetic crankiness, but one of incarnation as well.  Jesus used the word “temple” referring to his own body.  Therefore, the locus of God, the place wherein God lived, was not in the Holiest of Holies, not inside some concrete bunker destined to keep out the great unclean masses, but inside a human being.  A living, breathing, sweating, talking, loving human being named Jesus of Nazareth.  And moreover, you didn’t have to be a high priest or even a regular priest to approach this God-in-human.  You didn’t have to be a Jewish male or a Jewish anything to walk with, talk with or even touch this God-in-human.  He was there, available for everyone, available to comfort, heal and console.  Available to cry with anybody, sigh with anybody, and even to die like anybody else.

But wait, there’s more: the Gospel of John vacillates between God in Christ, as in the Temple analogy, and Christ being God, as in his poetic prologue “in the beginning.”  But regardless of how it shakes out, Jesus uses—in this same Gospel—multiple metaphors for our unity with him.  Metaphors like Jesus is the vine and we are the branches.  Abide in me as I abide in you.  And just plain old you in me and I in you.  Some folks call it “the God spark,” some (like the Apostle Paul) call it the Holy Spirit, some call it simply “God.”  But no matter what you call it, no matter where else it is, one thing is certain: it is in you and me.

Karl Barth said that our notion of God is incomplete without both immanence and transcendence–and he should know better than me.  And if the divine is both within us and beyond us as well,, we ought to be able to get in touch with at least the part that’s inside, shouldn’t we?  But except for the first few centuries, Christianity in the West has ignored this route to the divine.  And along with many others,  I suspect, that this has more to do with power and control than theology, ‘cause how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm if God is in each one of them, in addition to (or instead of) the temple, or the denomination, or the priesthood or, or, or . . .

But there has of late been a revival in the West, a rediscovery of pathways to the divine within, and not just within Christianity, either.  Jews like Rami Shapiro and Sufis like Kabir Helminski join Christian teachers and scholars like Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr and the late Raimon Panikkar.  This Lent, there are more resources to guide us on this journey than ever before.  If you’re interested, let me know, and I can point you to some good ones, and you can find you own way to the God that is in the center of your heart.  Amen.