Third in Lent 2018

 John 2: 13-22

In the middle  weeks of Lent this year we step back briefly from St. Mark’s Gospel and have three readings three weeks in a row from St. John: this morning in the second chapter,  the account of the Cleansing of the Temple; next week in the third chapter,  the last part of the conversation with Nicodemus; and then on March 18 in the twelfth chapter, the conclusion of Jesus’s public ministry and the hour of his turn toward Jerusalem.   What these have in common, as we get ready for Holy Week and Easter, is that they each give us a way of picturing or thinking about what in the formal language of theology is called the “Doctrine of the Atonement--the Church’s formal teaching about the “work of Christ.”  Everybody knows and pretty much agrees on the story.  Jesus came to Jerusalem.  He was arrested, tried, and executed—dead and buried on a Friday afternoon.  And then on Sunday morning the tomb was empty and his disciples proclaimed that they had seen him again, alive, but in a new and transformed way.  The journalist’s who, what, where, and when .  But the “why” of the story still needs to be addressed.  To what end, for what purpose?  That’s what is covered by this word, Atonement.

The reading today, the “Cleansing of the Temple,” is one of those parts of the Jesus story that is included in all four gospel s—John 2, Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke place the event in Holy Week, right after the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem.  John seems to organize his gospel thematically rather than chronologically, and he tells the story near the beginning , right after the story of Jesus and his first miracle at the Wedding Feast at Cana.  As though he were saying that we won’t really be able to understand the story he is about to tell, unless we’re hearing it with this story in mind.   In all four gospels  the event happens  at the Passover, which is the defining celebration of the great Covenant between God and his Chosen People, remembering the Bible story of their being rescued from slavery in Egypt and delivered to the land God had promised to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  What we might call the central narrative symbol of the Old Covenant, the heart of the Old Testament, the story that tells the Chosen People that they are indeed chosen, and who it is who chose them.  And in all four accounts Jesus at this Passover  turns over the tables in the Temple and announces that things have gone horribly wrong.  The Temple is the great visible sign of God’s continuing presence with his people, his House, his earthly Throne Room, the place where the priestly representatives of the Chosen People come into his presence and offer sacrifice as a prayer for forgiveness of sin.  And through neglect and misconduct those charged with the care and stewardship have failed to do their job.  Though we don’t need to be too hard particularly on these priests and officials.  Their failures really just stand for our sinfulness.  It’s all a sign of something deeper.  None of us would be of sufficient purity and righteousness to maintain this holy place in the perfect way that it needs to be maintained.  Perfect Spirit and perfect truth.   All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.  Even if the Temple were being operated perfectly this whole system of ceremony and sacrifice is just a dog chasing his own tail.  We all work and work, struggle and sacrifice, try to make things right by our own huge and heroic efforts, but no matter how much we do, how hard we work, we wake up the next morning and the whole rat race just starts up all over again.  It was an instrument God allowed for a season to maintain the Covenant relationship, but it was always going to be imperfect and provisional.

And now, now, we hear and read and come to understand:  a new day is here.  The old is being swept away.  The new has come.   John describes the scene: Jesus charges into the outer section of the Temple complex, where those selling animals for people to offer as sacrifice are keeping their oxen and sheep and birds and where pilgrims  can exchange their Roman coins for Temple Coins to present in offerings, and he makes a whip to drive out the animals and he boisterously overturns the Moneychangers’ tables.  This whole crazy effort to turn our relationship with God into some kind of transaction where we can somehow earn or purchase our right relationship to him simply has to come to an end.  A system given to God’s people as a kind of place-holder,  until the appointed day and hour when the price could be paid once and for all. 

The sudden burst of holy energy in Jesus makes the disciples remember  Psalm 69, a Psalm associated with the expectation of the Messiah:  “Zeal for thy house will consume me.”   I find my own associations also rolling back to the scene in Luke chapter 2, when the young boy Jesus has been separated from Mary and Joseph while they are in Jerusalem on an earlier Passover pilgrimage.  Recall how they finally find him in this very Temple engaged in a precocious discussion with the elders and teachers.  When they begin to scold him he says, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”  Why was Jesus born?  What did his life and death and resurrection accomplish?  The answer is in this, deep down.  “I must be in my Father’s house.”

And then there is this deep level shift as Jesus speaks to the authorities with amazing boldness.  “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  They think he’s talking about the building and scoff, but John tells the story even here right at the beginning of the Gospel with the Cross and the Empty Tomb clearly in mind, and he knows better.  The reference is not to this physical structure, this building, but to the “Temple of his Body,” he tells us--and we just note as well John’s statement that this was the moment that the disciples immediately thought of later on, when they began to try to make sense of their encounter with Jesus in his Resurrection Body.  Of all the things that they may have thought about as they tried to get their heads around what it meant to know for a fact that Jesus was executed on the Cross and then on Sunday to see him alive again, this was what came to their minds first:  Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.  This soaring edifice of stone only a foretaste, a hint, of the perfect Temple God was about to establish and make of himself in the midst of his people.

So for the Third Sunday in Lent, on our way to Holy Week, this is a way of thinking about Atonement, about the Work of Christ, about the “why”-- what the Cross of Jesus accomplished.  To commend to our contemplation, prayer, imagination.   The old Temple is no more.  Where do we go now to find our peace in God?  Where is the Temple now, where is the place of sacrifice, where you and I can find forgiveness, restoration, holiness, life eternal? 

Perhaps on Good Friday we will connect the story to the account in Matthew, how at the end of the Third Hour Jesus breathes his last, and how at that very instant at the Temple the great curtain separating the Holy of Holies was torn in two.  Through his death and resurrection Jesus tears down and then rebuilds, restores, renews the Temple, the Father’s House, in his own Body.  A place now—if we can think of the Resurrection Body of Jesus as a place, with dimensions that are spiritual instead of material—a place of true and radiant holiness--for God to have a home again with his people.  The Lord God almighty, renewed and purified, lifted up, again seated on the Throne of Israel—no longer hidden somehow behind walls and curtains, but here.  And everywhere, all at once.  Jesus fulfilling in himself, in his own flesh, the promise of God in the Scriptures that he would be with his Chosen People always as their one true priest and king.   

We might say that it’s a great association here on a Sunday as we celebrate a baptism, a renewal here for young Graham Frankle and for all of us of the New Covenant, as we are built into the one perfect Holy Temple of his crucified and risen Body.  In Advent we heard about how in his dream Joseph heard the Angel  tell  of the coming birth of Jesus by quoting from the Prophet Isaiah, “’. . . his name shall be called Emmanuel,’ which means,  God with us.”  That is what the Jerusalem Temple meant for God’s Chosen People.  God with us.  And through the Cross, God with us not in a building and human institution made with stones and stained glass and massive altars and priestly offices and rituals of sacrifice offered again and again and again—but with us in the true Temple of his own Body, where now God’s life and the life of his people will intersect, in one communion, where pure offerings may be lifted up, and true and perfect worship.  Where his one oblation of himself, once offered,  a true and perfect sacrifice, is accomplished once and for all.  That’s what we say to and for and with Graham today: Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, come into his courts with praise.  The mystery of the Cross, the mystery of his Church.  God with us.  When the disciples started in their amazement and confusion to try to make sense of it all, the Cross and the Empty Tomb and their first encounter with his Resurrection Body, his true and living presence, they remembered this moment at the Temple, and something clicked, fit together, made sense in a deep and spiritual logic.  Pray that he would open up our hearts and minds in this Lent to see what they saw when they looked up at the Cross, when he revealed himself to them in the radiance of his resurrection.  To know what they knew—that the strife is over, the labor done, and the victory won.  The Lord is in his holy Temple, let all the earth keep silent before him.