[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Imagine for just a moment that you’re the parent of a young family. You’ve spent a rare evening out with your husband or wife. It’s about midnight. As you get closer to your house, you hear sirens. Then, you see flashing lights. A block from your home, you see that your cul de sac has been blocked off by emergency vehicles. Terrified, you pull your car off to the side of the road and run toward your house. Within seconds, you see that your house is engulfed in flames, destroyed. But you don’t care about that. When a second later, you see your kids huddled with the babysitter and some neighbors, you fall on your children with tearful embraces.
The house is just a building. What matters is the people inside it.
In today’s gospel lesson, John 2:13-22, we see that God feels the same way.
Let’s take a look at the lesson: “When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”
That last line quotes Psalm 69:9. On the face of it, the verse would seem to say that Jesus is protective of the temple, like the member of one of my previous parishes who was upset that I wasn’t upset when people brought coffee to worship.
In fact, Jesus is upset by the extortionists preying on the faith of those who have traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple. Many of these pious Jews came from long distances, many for the only time in their lives. It was impractical for them to bring sheep or pigeons from Spain or Italy or Egypt, or wherever they lived. So, once they got to the temple in Jerusalem, they exchanged their gold or local currencies for temple cash, the only stuff they could use to buy animals for sacrifice there.
Jesus didn’t like it that people who came to worship God were gouged for the privilege! It would be like Living Water charging admission to people who came to worship God on Sunday mornings. It was out of zeal for His fellow Jews, the household of God, that Jesus became angry.
And this is important to note. Jesus’ zealous ire is aroused against those who would stand between God and people who need God.
This reminds me of something Jesus said when His disciples tried to keep children away from Him: “Let the little children come to me [Jesus said], and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19:14)
Listen: The only thing that seems to ever have made Jesus angry was when someone--be it the Pharisees, the religious authorities, the devil, the demons--got in the way of people who wanted to know God.
That’s because for the God we know in Jesus, nothing is as important as people.
All people.
Including you and me.
Jesus’ fellow Jews who made up the temple leadership were upset by what Jesus did. He was cutting into their revenue, disrupting their routine! So, they ask Jesus in verse 18 of our gospel lesson: “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus proves His authority with these words: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (v.19)
“I’m going to give an evil, cynical world a sign of my authority,” Jesus is saying. “My Body is the temple of God’s Holy Spirit, as is the body of every person who confesses faith in Me (1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19). And if you cut this body down, if you kill Me, I will be raised again on the third day.”
The sign of Jesus’ authority is His resurrection.
It isn’t just the sign that He had the authority to throw the money-changers out of the temple, though.
It’s the sign too that He has authority over all that keeps people made in the image of God from experiencing life with God.
Jesus has authority over the sin that blackens your conscience, the public disclosure of which would mortify you, the sin that makes you sick to remember.
Jesus has authority over death.
He has authority over your heartaches and sadness.
He has authority over your deepest regrets and your most earnest desires.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can erase the power of sin, death, heartaches, and disappointments over your life.
Because of His resurrection, Jesus can give life--abundant, never-ending life with God--to all who dare to daily turn from their sin and daily trust in Him.
But is it true? Did the resurrection, this sign of Jesus’ authority over everything in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18) really happen?
An Israeli scholar, rabbi, historian, and diplomat of the last century wondered the same thing: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
This scholar, Pinchas Lapide, set out to learn the truth. Lapide looked at the witness of the early church--of Peter, who had spinelessly denied knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest; of the other apostles who had run away from trouble when Jesus was executed; of the 500 or so early Christians who had made themselves scarce on the first Good Friday.
He saw how these same once-gutless people, after they’d received the gift of the Holy Spirit, had staked their lives on proclaiming that Jesus was risen from the dead.
He considered how a rational scholar like Paul, a hard-headed businessman like Peter, and all the other first followers of Jesus Christ faced death and persecution and refused to renounce what they knew to be true: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, true God and true man, crucified, dead, and buried, was also risen from the dead and now seated at the right hand of the Father, offering new and eternal life to all who believe in Him.
Lapide looked at how the resurrection had changed these people’s lives and said that the resurrection of Jesus must be true.
As He put it: “I accept the resurrection of Jesus not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as an historical event." We can accept that too!
The resurrection of Jesus is the sure and certain sign of what Jesus bore witness to on that day in the temple: People, people made in the image of God, people lovingly formed in their mothers’ wombs, people for whom Jesus died on the cross, people, all people, including you and me, are what matters most to God.
It is people--your friends, your enemies, your family, your neighbors, YOU--that Jesus came to this world came to save, to gift new life, to know God for eternity.
And it is this resurrection that Jesus came to share with you and me if we will follow Him, day in and day out.
As Jesus promises: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25)
Houses and skyscrapers will crumble.
Empires and fortunes will be lost.
But the God we know in the risen Jesus and all who trust in Him will live forever.
It is on this fundamental truth--and nothing else--that we baptized believers in Jesus are called to live our lives.
May we always do just that. Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label John 2:13-22. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John 2:13-22. Show all posts
Sunday, March 04, 2018
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Where God Lives
[This was shared this morning during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]
John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”
The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.
But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!
This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.
This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.
But these practices were far more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.
This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.
It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”
The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.
People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.
The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”
There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.
But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
In the end, the Temple was just a building.
It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.
The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.
First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.
But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.
But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.
First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.
Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.
We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.
We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.
We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.
He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.
God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.
That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.
Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.
In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”
Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.
Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.
May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen
John 2:13-22
Talk to anyone who has ever had their home broken into and they will always speak less of what was stolen and more about their sense of being violated, the feeling that their personal space has been desecrated by greedy hands. The experience evokes anger, even fury. Remembering this may help us to understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did during the incident recounted in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22 (page 740 in the sanctuary Bibles). Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Verse 14: “In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.”
The temple was the one place on earth where God had promised to dwell among His chosen people. It was a holy place. The word holy, as we’ve mentioned before, means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would encounter all who worshiped Him.
But what Jesus saw when He arrived at the temple infuriated Him!
This holiest place on earth, set apart for the worship of God, was being violated, turned into a shopping mall.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if they were exceptionally poor, grain. Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they didn’t always bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them at the temple. Merchants sold livestock there. And because the temple had its own money system, “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, also did business in the Temple court.
This was all authorized by the temple priests. They would have argued that, by doing so, they provided a service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to obey God by celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem.
But these practices were far more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their pretender kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied. In exchange for priestly appointments, the Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The rates of exchange charged by the money changers and the prices commanded by the sellers of sacrificial livestock were inflated exorbitantly to allow the Romans and the priests to profit handsomely. It’s easy to do that when you have a monopoly.
This entire system was driven by greed and selfishness.
It desecrated the holy place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verses 15 and 16. Jesus “made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’”
The house of God and the grace of God had been monetized.
People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business or to steal from the pious.
The understandable anger that people feel when their homes are broken into is but a fraction of the fury that Jesus felt on seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier: “...zeal for your house consumes me.”
There, David was saying that God was so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had subordinated all his other thoughts, motives, and priorities! This is what Jesus was feeling as He entered the temple.
But truly, it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
In the end, the Temple was just a building.
It was never meant to be anything other than “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns.
The real issue in all this commerce in the temple was this: If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
Verse 18. “The Jews [meaning here, the Temple authorities] then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God in the flesh, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 19-22. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood at that moment wasn’t the first one built on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And, the one in today’s Gospel lesson would, in 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, be destroyed by the Romans. Today, all that remains is a wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another and more important way. Look at John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” You’ll remember that this literally means that Jesus, God the Word, tabernacled or pitched His tent in the world. God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God. God would live among us on this earth in other ways.
First of all, God would come to the world in the person of Jesus Himself. Colossians 1:19 says that, “...God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus Christ].” Jesus is the Holy of the holies. He is God.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling salvation and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that, it seems.) So, just as Jesus foretells in our Gospel lesson, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple, Jesus. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
In John 10:18, Jesus says of His crucifixion and resurrection: “No one takes [My earthly life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for and He, not human beings, has the power to take up the life He voluntarily sacrificed.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us. In Jesus, God has acted and today, He lives.
But if Jesus is God among us and He is the temple, how can we be made right with Him? The temple was a place where people made sacrifice for their sins. This is like a question once asked of Jesus: “What must we do to do the works God requires? Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
Because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
He can be seen today in God's Word and in the Sacraments, of course.
But He can also be seen in the people who follow Jesus.
First Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells! Imagine that.
Through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on this earth.
We don’t need to go to buildings to find Him.
We don’t need to make sacrifices to reach Him.
We don’t need to burn candles in order to attract Him.
He comes to live in all who welcome Him into their lives. In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
Now, the holy of holies can be found in all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ and who daily live that belief by turning to Christ for grace, guidance, forgiveness, and hope.
God lives in all who acknowledge with both their lips and their lives that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and King over everything.
That's a somewhat scary thought because, speaking for myself, I know that I can be a somewhat shaky temple for the Holy Spirit. I can forget to trust God. I sin. The truth is that like the temple in Jerusalem, we frail temples of the Holy Spirit, we believers in Jesus, must regularly be cleansed by the savage grace of Jesus Christ.
Without regular prayer, confession and repentance, worship with God’s people, receiving Christ’s body and blood, personal study of God’s Word, and submission to examination and correction by our Lord, these temples of flesh and blood can be desecrated by sin as certainly as the temple in Jerusalem was.
In Psalm 51, David prays: “Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Each day we need to pray, “Lord, cleanse this temple.”
Christ can cleanse the repentant, forgive our sin, strengthen our faith, and fill us with His Holy Spirit’s power for living.
Christ can make each of us ever fitter places for the King of kings to take up residence, places where the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are kept at bay and Jesus reigns as our loving God, Lord, and King.
May we daily submit to Christ so that, like the temple cleansed, God will live in us and through us, now and eternally. Amen
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Welcome the King!
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
Mark 11:1-11
(Palm Sunday)
Some of you may remember the song, The New Kid in Town. Though the melody is somber, its opening lyrics seem filled with the promise of a new hero who will make everyone happy. It starts:
But this picture of popularity and happy anticipation gets interrupted in the first iteration of the chorus, when we hear:
Those words sound like a warning to me, as if people are saying: “We’re all behind you, as long as you please us and do what we expect of you, when we expect it, and how we expect it.”
The song has it right. People can be fickle. One day, they’re for you. The next, they’re shouting, “Crucify!”
That’s especially true when they feel that the “Johnny Come Lately” they hailed on Sunday has “let them down” later in the same week.
In many ways, this is the story of Palm Sunday.
Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem. Everybody was happy. Everyone was His friend. Everyone wanted Him to be the Messiah King, to take the throne of ancient King David.
Yet, amid the Palm Sunday celebrating was an atmosphere of implied violence, of threatened rejection. The actions and the words with which the crowds welcomed Jesus were fraught with ambiguity.
Like the happy first verse of the Eagles song, the words of the crowd seemed to speak of belief in Jesus as their King.
But the word they used, “Hosanna,” meaning “Save us,” is one of those phrases that can cut two ways.
On the one hand, it can be a statement of faith and surrender: “Only You can save, Lord. We need You!”
But it can also carry a threat: “We’re putting our hopes in you. So, be the king we want you to be...or else!”
The Palm Sunday crowd, itching for war and conquest and personal vindication, must have scratched their heads at what Jesus did that Palm Sunday evening.
Instead of giving people their marching orders, Jesus did something strange. At the end of our gospel lesson, Mark tells us:
...Jesus went into Jerusalem and into the temple. So, when He had looked around at all things, as the hour was already late, He went out to Bethany with the twelve. (Mark 11:11)
This is a strangely anticlimactic ending to a day in which Jesus' fellow Jews had proclaimed Him their King. It would be like inaugurating a president in this country--the oath administered, the crowd cheering, the Marine Band playing, Hail to the Chief--and then seeing the new president simply sit down. No speech-making. No marching orders. No crowing.
Jesus showed no interest in being a king who would lead the people in battle to rid themselves of the Romans.
The crowds and Jesus’ own followers must have been further mystified by what Jesus did the next day.
Mark 11:15-19 says that Jesus went back to the temple and still didn’t take up arms against the enemies of His homeland.
Instead, for the second time in His ministry, He turned on His fellow Judeans, throwing the money changers out of the temple. After being hailed as King, Jesus didn’t go after the Romans. He indicted His own people--the people of God--for turning the worship of God into an occasion for doing business! He was telling them that their real enemies weren't Roman soldiers, but the sin that drove them to worship money and worldly comforts and family and nation instead of the one true God of the universe!
On Palm Sunday, the crowds welcomed Jesus because they thought Jesus had come to do their will.
By Thursday of that week, what they came to realize was that He had really come to do the Father’s will. He had come, as He had already told them, “to serve, not to be served and to give His life as a ransom for many,” to bring the possibility of new and everlasting life with God to all who dared to surrender their lives to Him.
And so, like the crowds in The New Kid in Town, disappointed by the Messiah they thought they could keep in their hip pockets, the Jerusalem crowd turned on Jesus.
On Thursday night, just four days after His triumphant entry into the city, Jesus was arrested and the next day, the same crowd that had laid down their clothes and branches to welcome Him like a military hero cried for His blood.
They cried too that the Roman governor would release a terrorist named Barabbas. The crowds may have thought that, unlike Jesus, Barabbas had the stomach to fight the war against the Romans they wanted.
Truth is, they wanted a leader who would follow them, not a leader like Jesus, Who took His direction from God the Father.
And it's precisely here that we're hit with the questions that Palm Sunday forces us all to confront:
Will we be like the crowds or will we learn to be true followers of Jesus?
Will we follow our own selfish impulses and the habits of a dying world?
Or will we follow Jesus through tough times--even through death--so that we can receive what Jesus, because of His faithfulness to the will of God the Father, received on Easter Sunday: never-ending resurrection life with God?
And how exactly do we make this choice?
Above all, we must realize that faith in Jesus is not our achievement.
You and I are incapable of choosing to trust anyone or anything except ourselves.
We human beings are not born with free wills.
Left to our own devices, we will always choose the same selfish and self-destructive path the Palm Sunday crowd chose.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re without hope! Turn to 1 Corinthians 12:3. There, we read that “no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”
Listen: Faith in Jesus, the capacity to believe in Him and surrender to Him despite what the crowd is saying, is a gift.
And how do we get the gift of faith? Turn to Romans 10:10. It says: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Notice that faith does not come by our decision. It doesn't come by our effort. Faith comes when we receive God's Word, when we let it invade our consciousness, get past our self-justifications, and speak to us.
God’s Word is the most powerful force in the universe!
The Word of God has the power to comfort us when we grieve, assure us of God’s presence with us through every moment we live, and give us the certainty that Jesus “is the resurrection and the life” and that all who believe in Him, even if they die, will live and that whoever believes in Him will live forever. Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.” Faith comes only to those who dare to listen to the Gospel word about Jesus.
The Palm Sunday crowd would have done well to follow the example of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. One day, you remember, Jesus was in the home of these three siblings, teaching.
Martha was busy hustling around. She made sure that everyone's glasses were full of drink and their plates were replenished with hors d'oeuvres. She served dinner. She cleaned up messes and saw that everyone was comfortable.
Mary, meanwhile, sat listening to Jesus.
Martha became enraged. Luke 11:40 says: “Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?...Tell her to help me.”
Martha thought she was a good person, just like the Palm Sunday crowd. “I’m a good person, a nice person” they must have thought. “I even belong the First Jerusalem Church of Nice! I do lots of good stuff! I deserve a break! I deserve a better life, some comfort, some perks for what a nice person I am!”
Jesus’ reply to Martha, in verses Luke 11:41-42, is stunning: “Martha...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from you.”
All the things that the Palm Sunday crowd wanted could be taken from them: freedom from foreign conquerors, lower taxes, more possessions and financial security.
Jesus was offering them “the one thing” they needed: Himself. (He offers us the same thing.)
If, instead of celebrating on that first Palm Sunday, the crowd had listened to Jesus, allowing His Word to work faith in them, they would have had much more than anything they were shouting or striving for.
They would have received the gift of faith and a life with God that never ends.
And that is an incredible gift!
A man I know spent many years warming a pew at the church he attended, but never believed. Then, after a member of his family became gravely ill, he realized that all his attempts to control his life and his world were futile. A crack in his personal armor finally allowed the word about Jesus, the King Who saves helpless people from sin and death and gives eternity to those who believe in Him, got through.
God gives faith to all who truly hear the good news that God took on human flesh, voluntarily took the death sentence for sin you and I deserve, and then find, miraculously, God’s Holy Spirit has made it possible for us to say, “I believe. I believe in Jesus more than I believe in money, or good grades, or lottery winnings, or Ohio State basketball, or upholding or dismantling national health care, or my family, or America. None of these things has ultimate importance. When we peer into the mystery of eternity and the mysteries of each day, I believe that Jesus is all I need, the only One Who can see me through!”
Gary, a friend of mine, recently wrote about getting word from the family of a friend that the friend was in the last stages of dying.
Gary’s friend had always been a hard-charging businessman who resisted the notion of surrendering to Christ. He had no time to listen to the Word, the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus. There were too many deals to be struck, too much riding on his executive judgment.
Still, Gary and he had remained friends through the years. Now, called to his friend’s death bed, Gary prayed that finally, his friend would listen to the Word of God and surrender to and trust in Jesus. Gary didn’t want his friend to face an eternity separated from God. Jesus says that God so loved this world that He gave His Son Jesus so that everyone who believes in Him won’t perish, but have life with God forever.
When Gary got to his friend’s hospital room, he found him not only suffering, but deeply disturbed. Maybe now this friend, who Gary loved like a brother, would finally listen to the Word about Jesus and God would impart the gift of faith to him.
“How are you?” Gary asked. “Oh,” the friend said, “I’m really depressed. All my stocks tanked yesterday.”
Only a few heartbeats from eternity, Gary’s friend still kept his heart, just like the hearts of the Palm Sunday crowd, closed to Christ, the only King Who can save us to live as we were meant to live, forever!
If anyone listening to my voice on the radio today has heard the message that Jesus died and rose to give everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him, then I urge you to surrender to Jesus.
Let Him give you the gift of faith.
Let Him be your King.
And if anyone who already believes has unfinished business with Jesus--and we all do--some part of your life you’ve been keeping to yourself and out of Jesus’ hands, some part of you that doubts Jesus’ love for you--I urge you now: Surrender to Jesus.
Daily repent and daily let Jesus give you new life.
Let God’s Word, recorded in the Bible, dwell richly within you.
Gladly receive the Word of forgiveness and new life He gives to believers who taste the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.
Welcome Jesus as the King of your life “while it is still called 'today.'” You will never regret it...and if you will endure in trusting in Jesus alone, I guarantee that you will spend eternity joyfully celebrating what God’s Word did in you when you opened your heart, mind, and will and truly listened to Jesus. Amen
Mark 11:1-11
(Palm Sunday)
Some of you may remember the song, The New Kid in Town. Though the melody is somber, its opening lyrics seem filled with the promise of a new hero who will make everyone happy. It starts:
There’s talk on the streets it sounds so familiar
Great expectations, everybody’s watching you
People you meet all seem to know you
Even your old friends treat you like your something new.
But this picture of popularity and happy anticipation gets interrupted in the first iteration of the chorus, when we hear:
Johnny Come Lately, the new kid in town
Everybody loves you, so don’t let them down.
Those words sound like a warning to me, as if people are saying: “We’re all behind you, as long as you please us and do what we expect of you, when we expect it, and how we expect it.”
The song has it right. People can be fickle. One day, they’re for you. The next, they’re shouting, “Crucify!”
That’s especially true when they feel that the “Johnny Come Lately” they hailed on Sunday has “let them down” later in the same week.
In many ways, this is the story of Palm Sunday.
Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem. Everybody was happy. Everyone was His friend. Everyone wanted Him to be the Messiah King, to take the throne of ancient King David.
Yet, amid the Palm Sunday celebrating was an atmosphere of implied violence, of threatened rejection. The actions and the words with which the crowds welcomed Jesus were fraught with ambiguity.
Like the happy first verse of the Eagles song, the words of the crowd seemed to speak of belief in Jesus as their King.
But the word they used, “Hosanna,” meaning “Save us,” is one of those phrases that can cut two ways.
On the one hand, it can be a statement of faith and surrender: “Only You can save, Lord. We need You!”
But it can also carry a threat: “We’re putting our hopes in you. So, be the king we want you to be...or else!”
The Palm Sunday crowd, itching for war and conquest and personal vindication, must have scratched their heads at what Jesus did that Palm Sunday evening.
Instead of giving people their marching orders, Jesus did something strange. At the end of our gospel lesson, Mark tells us:
...Jesus went into Jerusalem and into the temple. So, when He had looked around at all things, as the hour was already late, He went out to Bethany with the twelve. (Mark 11:11)
This is a strangely anticlimactic ending to a day in which Jesus' fellow Jews had proclaimed Him their King. It would be like inaugurating a president in this country--the oath administered, the crowd cheering, the Marine Band playing, Hail to the Chief--and then seeing the new president simply sit down. No speech-making. No marching orders. No crowing.
Jesus showed no interest in being a king who would lead the people in battle to rid themselves of the Romans.
The crowds and Jesus’ own followers must have been further mystified by what Jesus did the next day.
Mark 11:15-19 says that Jesus went back to the temple and still didn’t take up arms against the enemies of His homeland.
Instead, for the second time in His ministry, He turned on His fellow Judeans, throwing the money changers out of the temple. After being hailed as King, Jesus didn’t go after the Romans. He indicted His own people--the people of God--for turning the worship of God into an occasion for doing business! He was telling them that their real enemies weren't Roman soldiers, but the sin that drove them to worship money and worldly comforts and family and nation instead of the one true God of the universe!
On Palm Sunday, the crowds welcomed Jesus because they thought Jesus had come to do their will.
By Thursday of that week, what they came to realize was that He had really come to do the Father’s will. He had come, as He had already told them, “to serve, not to be served and to give His life as a ransom for many,” to bring the possibility of new and everlasting life with God to all who dared to surrender their lives to Him.
And so, like the crowds in The New Kid in Town, disappointed by the Messiah they thought they could keep in their hip pockets, the Jerusalem crowd turned on Jesus.
On Thursday night, just four days after His triumphant entry into the city, Jesus was arrested and the next day, the same crowd that had laid down their clothes and branches to welcome Him like a military hero cried for His blood.
They cried too that the Roman governor would release a terrorist named Barabbas. The crowds may have thought that, unlike Jesus, Barabbas had the stomach to fight the war against the Romans they wanted.
Truth is, they wanted a leader who would follow them, not a leader like Jesus, Who took His direction from God the Father.
And it's precisely here that we're hit with the questions that Palm Sunday forces us all to confront:
Will we be like the crowds or will we learn to be true followers of Jesus?
Will we follow our own selfish impulses and the habits of a dying world?
Or will we follow Jesus through tough times--even through death--so that we can receive what Jesus, because of His faithfulness to the will of God the Father, received on Easter Sunday: never-ending resurrection life with God?
And how exactly do we make this choice?
Above all, we must realize that faith in Jesus is not our achievement.
You and I are incapable of choosing to trust anyone or anything except ourselves.
We human beings are not born with free wills.
Left to our own devices, we will always choose the same selfish and self-destructive path the Palm Sunday crowd chose.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re without hope! Turn to 1 Corinthians 12:3. There, we read that “no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”
Listen: Faith in Jesus, the capacity to believe in Him and surrender to Him despite what the crowd is saying, is a gift.
And how do we get the gift of faith? Turn to Romans 10:10. It says: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Notice that faith does not come by our decision. It doesn't come by our effort. Faith comes when we receive God's Word, when we let it invade our consciousness, get past our self-justifications, and speak to us.
God’s Word is the most powerful force in the universe!
The Word of God has the power to comfort us when we grieve, assure us of God’s presence with us through every moment we live, and give us the certainty that Jesus “is the resurrection and the life” and that all who believe in Him, even if they die, will live and that whoever believes in Him will live forever. Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.” Faith comes only to those who dare to listen to the Gospel word about Jesus.
The Palm Sunday crowd would have done well to follow the example of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. One day, you remember, Jesus was in the home of these three siblings, teaching.
Martha was busy hustling around. She made sure that everyone's glasses were full of drink and their plates were replenished with hors d'oeuvres. She served dinner. She cleaned up messes and saw that everyone was comfortable.
Mary, meanwhile, sat listening to Jesus.
Martha became enraged. Luke 11:40 says: “Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?...Tell her to help me.”
Martha thought she was a good person, just like the Palm Sunday crowd. “I’m a good person, a nice person” they must have thought. “I even belong the First Jerusalem Church of Nice! I do lots of good stuff! I deserve a break! I deserve a better life, some comfort, some perks for what a nice person I am!”
Jesus’ reply to Martha, in verses Luke 11:41-42, is stunning: “Martha...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from you.”
All the things that the Palm Sunday crowd wanted could be taken from them: freedom from foreign conquerors, lower taxes, more possessions and financial security.
Jesus was offering them “the one thing” they needed: Himself. (He offers us the same thing.)
If, instead of celebrating on that first Palm Sunday, the crowd had listened to Jesus, allowing His Word to work faith in them, they would have had much more than anything they were shouting or striving for.
They would have received the gift of faith and a life with God that never ends.
And that is an incredible gift!
A man I know spent many years warming a pew at the church he attended, but never believed. Then, after a member of his family became gravely ill, he realized that all his attempts to control his life and his world were futile. A crack in his personal armor finally allowed the word about Jesus, the King Who saves helpless people from sin and death and gives eternity to those who believe in Him, got through.
God gives faith to all who truly hear the good news that God took on human flesh, voluntarily took the death sentence for sin you and I deserve, and then find, miraculously, God’s Holy Spirit has made it possible for us to say, “I believe. I believe in Jesus more than I believe in money, or good grades, or lottery winnings, or Ohio State basketball, or upholding or dismantling national health care, or my family, or America. None of these things has ultimate importance. When we peer into the mystery of eternity and the mysteries of each day, I believe that Jesus is all I need, the only One Who can see me through!”
Gary, a friend of mine, recently wrote about getting word from the family of a friend that the friend was in the last stages of dying.
Gary’s friend had always been a hard-charging businessman who resisted the notion of surrendering to Christ. He had no time to listen to the Word, the good news of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus. There were too many deals to be struck, too much riding on his executive judgment.
Still, Gary and he had remained friends through the years. Now, called to his friend’s death bed, Gary prayed that finally, his friend would listen to the Word of God and surrender to and trust in Jesus. Gary didn’t want his friend to face an eternity separated from God. Jesus says that God so loved this world that He gave His Son Jesus so that everyone who believes in Him won’t perish, but have life with God forever.
When Gary got to his friend’s hospital room, he found him not only suffering, but deeply disturbed. Maybe now this friend, who Gary loved like a brother, would finally listen to the Word about Jesus and God would impart the gift of faith to him.
“How are you?” Gary asked. “Oh,” the friend said, “I’m really depressed. All my stocks tanked yesterday.”
Only a few heartbeats from eternity, Gary’s friend still kept his heart, just like the hearts of the Palm Sunday crowd, closed to Christ, the only King Who can save us to live as we were meant to live, forever!
If anyone listening to my voice on the radio today has heard the message that Jesus died and rose to give everlasting life to all who repent and believe in Him, then I urge you to surrender to Jesus.
Let Him give you the gift of faith.
Let Him be your King.
And if anyone who already believes has unfinished business with Jesus--and we all do--some part of your life you’ve been keeping to yourself and out of Jesus’ hands, some part of you that doubts Jesus’ love for you--I urge you now: Surrender to Jesus.
Daily repent and daily let Jesus give you new life.
Let God’s Word, recorded in the Bible, dwell richly within you.
Gladly receive the Word of forgiveness and new life He gives to believers who taste the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.
Welcome Jesus as the King of your life “while it is still called 'today.'” You will never regret it...and if you will endure in trusting in Jesus alone, I guarantee that you will spend eternity joyfully celebrating what God’s Word did in you when you opened your heart, mind, and will and truly listened to Jesus. Amen
Sunday, March 11, 2012
What Was Jesus So Mad About?
[This is the sermon that was prepared for delivery during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
John 2:13-22
After the parsonage was broken into during the Christmas season a few years ago, Ann and I experienced what all victims of break-ins feel: a sense of being violated. Our personal space, we felt, had been desecrated by greedy hands. It made us furious.
You may have similar or even worse stories of being violated or of your world being desecrated by evil. If so, you can understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22. It begins: “Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.”
By this point in His earthly life, Jesus lived in Capernaum, a town on the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee. From Capernaum, Jesus and His disciples walked the eighty miles south to Jerusalem for the Passover. You may be thinking right now, “That can’t be. The verse says that ‘Jesus went up to Jerusalem.’ But when the Biblical writers spoke of “going up” or “going down” to a destination, they were thinking topographically. Capernaum stood at about 700 feet below sea level; Jerusalem is about 2500 feet above sea level. Whatever direction you came from, you always went up to Jerusalem.
Passover, of course, is the Jewish celebration remembering God’s deliverance of His people Israel from slavery in Egypt about 1500 years before Jesus’ birth. No matter where Jews lived, they were expected to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem at least once in their lifetimes. Jesus was, of course, God as well as human. He was also a faithful Jew. And so He went to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem.
Now look at verse 14: “He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business.”
The temple, as we’ve mentioned before, was the one place on earth where God chose to dwell among His chosen people. He did so in the holy of holies within what was called the tabernacle of the Temple.
The word holy means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would meet those who worshiped Him, seeking His forgiveness and direction over their lives, offering sacrifices for their sins and praises for His grace and blessings.
The temple was a holy place. But what Jesus saw when He arrived at what was called the Court of the Gentiles of the temple, a place where non-Jews who were respectful of God were allowed, infuriated Jesus!
This holiest of places on earth, set apart for the worship of God, had been turned into a shopping mall, a place of wheeling and dealing.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if one was exceptionally poor, grain.
Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they weren’t always able to bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them in Jerusalem. The temple priests allowed merchants to sell livestock in the place of worship. And because the temple had its own money system, they also let “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, do business in the Temple court.
The temple priests undoubtedly argued that, in this way, they provided a vital service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to celebrate the Passover.
But it was more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their almost-Jewish kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied.
The Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The entire system, this collusion between what we would call "Church and State," was driven by greed and selfishness. It desecrated the place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verse 15 to 16: “When [Jesus] had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, ‘Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!‘“
Jesus is furious!
The house of God had been, as people say today, monetized. People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business, or toady up to their Roman overlords, or adulterate faith in the one true God of the universe.
The anger that some of you may have felt if your home has ever been broken into is just a hint of the fury Jesus felt at seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples now remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier. Take a look at it: “Because zeal for Your house has eaten me up.”
Think of that. David is saying that God is so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had devoured him.
I think that it’s also good, as we think of what I call Jesus' temple tantrum, to note how the rest of that verse goes: “And the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me.”
“I so identify with You, Lord,” David was saying, “that when You are insulted or shown disrespect, I feel it.”
This passage helps us to understand that it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
You see, the Temple was meant to be “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns. The holy of holies was an earthly hint of the power and majesty of God’s presence in heaven.
If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
How far had they wandered from God?
The answer was obvious. Jesus needed to take emergency measures, driving those who were driving a wedge between God and His people out of the temple.
Jesus showed the same fury for His people that the God of the Old Testament had shown when His people had wandered from His commandments.
Go back to the Gospel lesson, to verse 18. “So the Jews [here referring to the temple priests] answered and said to [Jesus], ‘What sign do You show us to us, since You do these things?”
According to the apostle Paul, himself a Jew, writing in 1 Corinthians 1:22: “Jews request a sign...”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 20-22. “Jesus...said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews [the priests again] said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body. Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood wasn’t the first one built on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
Two had been destroyed.
Then Herod the Great, the puppet king installed by the Romans, who was on the throne when Jesus was born, had started construction of the temple in today’s Gospel lesson. It was still being built during Jesus' time on earth.
But its days too, were numbered.
In 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, while crushing a Jewish rebellion, the Romans destroyed the temple.
To this day, all that remains is wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another way. Look at John 1:14, a passage we looked at together a few weeks ago. It says: “...the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...” You’ll remember that we said dwelt literally means tabernacled or pitched His tent.
God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God.
The fullness of God dwells in Jesus.
He is the Holy of the holies.
He is the One Who brings God into our lives.
He is the One Who gives us a new birth when we turn from sin and believe in Him.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that. it seems.)
So, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
As Jesus says later in John’s gospel, “No one takes [My life] from Me, but I lay it down of Myself, I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again...”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us.
“What shall we do to be doing the works of God?” Jesus was once asked. “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He sent.”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
But, because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
We worship God “in spirit and truth,” wherever we may be, when we become followers of Jesus.
You can worship the God we know in Jesus Christ at work, in your car, at your home, in your relationships, in the decisions you make.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells!
By belief in Jesus, God can be with you and working in your life all the time.
It turns out that through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on earth.
The holy of holies can be found in anyone who gives up on being in control of their lives and allows Jesus to take the throne.
Don’t let your life be broken into by the desecrating power of sin and death!
May each of us give Jesus free reign to drive sin from the tabernacles of our souls.
And, may God help us to honor Him by turning from sin each day, surrendering ourselves completely to the will, the grace, the Lordship, and the life that only comes to those who walk with Jesus.
Amen
John 2:13-22
After the parsonage was broken into during the Christmas season a few years ago, Ann and I experienced what all victims of break-ins feel: a sense of being violated. Our personal space, we felt, had been desecrated by greedy hands. It made us furious.
You may have similar or even worse stories of being violated or of your world being desecrated by evil. If so, you can understand something of what Jesus felt and why He acted as He did in today’s Gospel lesson.
Please turn to the lesson, John 2:13-22. It begins: “Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.”
By this point in His earthly life, Jesus lived in Capernaum, a town on the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee. From Capernaum, Jesus and His disciples walked the eighty miles south to Jerusalem for the Passover. You may be thinking right now, “That can’t be. The verse says that ‘Jesus went up to Jerusalem.’ But when the Biblical writers spoke of “going up” or “going down” to a destination, they were thinking topographically. Capernaum stood at about 700 feet below sea level; Jerusalem is about 2500 feet above sea level. Whatever direction you came from, you always went up to Jerusalem.
Passover, of course, is the Jewish celebration remembering God’s deliverance of His people Israel from slavery in Egypt about 1500 years before Jesus’ birth. No matter where Jews lived, they were expected to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem at least once in their lifetimes. Jesus was, of course, God as well as human. He was also a faithful Jew. And so He went to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem.
Now look at verse 14: “He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business.”
The temple, as we’ve mentioned before, was the one place on earth where God chose to dwell among His chosen people. He did so in the holy of holies within what was called the tabernacle of the Temple.
The word holy means set apart. God had set apart this place on all the earth as the place where He would meet those who worshiped Him, seeking His forgiveness and direction over their lives, offering sacrifices for their sins and praises for His grace and blessings.
The temple was a holy place. But what Jesus saw when He arrived at what was called the Court of the Gentiles of the temple, a place where non-Jews who were respectful of God were allowed, infuriated Jesus!
This holiest of places on earth, set apart for the worship of God, had been turned into a shopping mall, a place of wheeling and dealing.
As you know, one of the things worshipers did when they arrived at the temple was offer sacrifices to God. Depending on their incomes, they might offer oxen, lambs, doves, or, if one was exceptionally poor, grain.
Because many Passover celebrants traveled long distances, they weren’t always able to bring their offerings with them, instead purchasing them in Jerusalem. The temple priests allowed merchants to sell livestock in the place of worship. And because the temple had its own money system, they also let “money changers,” people who dealt in foreign currency exchange, do business in the Temple court.
The temple priests undoubtedly argued that, in this way, they provided a vital service to people who had traveled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles to celebrate the Passover.
But it was more sinister than that.
Under the Romans and their almost-Jewish kings, the Herods, the chief priests of the Jewish faith were appointed by the Roman governors. Being the chief priest was a plumb job for which many of the priestly types vied.
The Romans got a cut of all the temple taxes collected.
The entire system, this collusion between what we would call "Church and State," was driven by greed and selfishness. It desecrated the place where God dwelt.
This explains what happens next, in verse 15 to 16: “When [Jesus] had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, ‘Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!‘“
Jesus is furious!
The house of God had been, as people say today, monetized. People who should have known better were ignoring the fact that the Temple was a space set apart for God to meet His people, not a place to transact business, or toady up to their Roman overlords, or adulterate faith in the one true God of the universe.
The anger that some of you may have felt if your home has ever been broken into is just a hint of the fury Jesus felt at seeing the house of God being used wrongly!
Verse 17 says that Jesus’ disciples now remembered a passage from Psalm 69:9, written by King David about one-thousand years earlier. Take a look at it: “Because zeal for Your house has eaten me up.”
Think of that. David is saying that God is so central to his existence that passion for God’s house, for the place where God lived, had devoured him.
I think that it’s also good, as we think of what I call Jesus' temple tantrum, to note how the rest of that verse goes: “And the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me.”
“I so identify with You, Lord,” David was saying, “that when You are insulted or shown disrespect, I feel it.”
This passage helps us to understand that it wasn’t the desecration of the temple as a place that aroused such fury in Jesus.
You see, the Temple was meant to be “a shadow” of the heavenly throne room from which God reigns. The holy of holies was an earthly hint of the power and majesty of God’s presence in heaven.
If the people were buying and selling as though they were lining up for an attraction at Disney World had no zeal for the place where God had graciously promised to meet them on earth, what sort of zeal did they have for God Himself?
How far had they wandered from God?
The answer was obvious. Jesus needed to take emergency measures, driving those who were driving a wedge between God and His people out of the temple.
Jesus showed the same fury for His people that the God of the Old Testament had shown when His people had wandered from His commandments.
Go back to the Gospel lesson, to verse 18. “So the Jews [here referring to the temple priests] answered and said to [Jesus], ‘What sign do You show us to us, since You do these things?”
According to the apostle Paul, himself a Jew, writing in 1 Corinthians 1:22: “Jews request a sign...”
Jesus had already given one sign of His authority and identity as God, at Cana, where He turned water into wine.
Now, in response to the priests’ demand, Jesus gives a new sign of Who He is, a miracle that will require patient faith to see and believe. Look at verses 20-22. “Jesus...said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews [the priests again] said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body. Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.”
The temple in which Jesus and the others stood wasn’t the first one built on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
Two had been destroyed.
Then Herod the Great, the puppet king installed by the Romans, who was on the throne when Jesus was born, had started construction of the temple in today’s Gospel lesson. It was still being built during Jesus' time on earth.
But its days too, were numbered.
In 70AD, about forty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, while crushing a Jewish rebellion, the Romans destroyed the temple.
To this day, all that remains is wailing wall in Jerusalem.
But the temple’s days were numbered in another way. Look at John 1:14, a passage we looked at together a few weeks ago. It says: “...the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...” You’ll remember that we said dwelt literally means tabernacled or pitched His tent.
God no longer would live in buildings so easily desecrated by human beings who forget the fear and love for God that make up faith in God.
The fullness of God dwells in Jesus.
He is the Holy of the holies.
He is the One Who brings God into our lives.
He is the One Who gives us a new birth when we turn from sin and believe in Him.
Short-sighted human beings thought they could be their own gods, buying and selling and sinning with no accountability to God. (We still think that. it seems.)
So, they tried to tear down the new and best Temple. They crucified Jesus. But He rose again.
As Jesus says later in John’s gospel, “No one takes [My life] from Me, but I lay it down of Myself, I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again...”
This, Jesus says, is the sign of His authority, that He, by his own decision voluntarily gives Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin that nobody has to buy or pay for.
Nobody--not the devil and not sinful people trying to swipe our money, or plague our consciences, or build their own egos at our expense--can put themselves between God and us.
“What shall we do to be doing the works of God?” Jesus was once asked. “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He sent.”
Jesus was outraged that people who should have known better forgot that God had blessed them out of pure fatherly and divine mercy, made them His own people, and called them to be a light to all nations, helping the nations see that all who will turn from sin and believe in Him will live with God forever.
But, because of God's grace, through Jesus, God’s presence on earth is no longer confined to a tabernacle on a Judean hill!
We worship God “in spirit and truth,” wherever we may be, when we become followers of Jesus.
You can worship the God we know in Jesus Christ at work, in your car, at your home, in your relationships, in the decisions you make.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says that whoever turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ is a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells!
By belief in Jesus, God can be with you and working in your life all the time.
It turns out that through Jesus, Christians are the places where God today dwells on earth.
The holy of holies can be found in anyone who gives up on being in control of their lives and allows Jesus to take the throne.
Don’t let your life be broken into by the desecrating power of sin and death!
May each of us give Jesus free reign to drive sin from the tabernacles of our souls.
And, may God help us to honor Him by turning from sin each day, surrendering ourselves completely to the will, the grace, the Lordship, and the life that only comes to those who walk with Jesus.
Amen
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Holy Anger: The Conrtolled Burn That Can Change the World
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
John 2:13-22
Once, back when our daughter was a teenager, a headline on the front cover of one of her magazines caught my eye: “Chill Out! Take Our Anger Quiz.” I flipped to page 122 and found eight multiple choice questions. I’m going to try a couple of them on you. If you’re not a teenage girl, pretend that you are for just a second and consider how you might answer:
Someone has said that, “Anger is an emotional reaction to your interpretation of a life experience in which your expectations are not met or are violated.” A wife comes home from work expecting a quiet evening alone with her husband and kids only to learn that her husband has invited buddies over to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. An employee gets good reviews for three years in a row and is promised a promotion, but the promotion never comes. Our lives are filled with a hundred potential flash points each day. Anger happens. We need to learn to manage it, harness it, and use it creatively.
The Institute for Mental Health Initiatives has developed a method for coping or controlling our anger built on the acronym RETHINK:
I must confess that anger doesn’t come easily to me. I would probably lean toward the tepid end of that quiz’s reckoning. It takes a lot for me to get angry. There may be others here today who tilt toward the boiling over end of the spectrum. Either place is probably unhealthy. But if we can find a way to use our anger, putting it under the discipline of God, it can become a force for good.
Our Gospel lesson for this morning recounts a famous incident in which Jesus, visiting the temple in Jerusalem, gave full vent to holy anger. In those days, people would go to the temple to offer sacrifices to God. Wealthy folks could afford to sacrifice cattle and sheep. Poorer people sacrificed doves or even grain. In the outer court, the place where non-Jews were allowed to be, the temple featured a kind of shopping mall. At the temple, you could only use temple money to buy the animals that were used for sacrificing. But out on the streets of Jerusalem, Roman money was used. If you came to the temple to offer a sacrifice then, the first thing you had to do was exchange your Roman coins for temple coins. You did this with a person called a moneychanger. These moneychangers were notorious gougers. They didn’t care what the exchange rate was. They were the only game in town, so to speak. So they got away with charging the worshipers exorbitant service charges. The same gouging was practiced by those who sold the animals to be sacrificed. Jesus was enraged by all of this!
That was when Jesus had His famous temple tantrum, throwing the moneychangers out of the place, upsetting their tables, freeing the animals from their cages, and generally setting loose what forest firefighters might call a “controlled burn.”
As followers of Jesus, the only legitimate kind of anger is Jesus’ brand of holy anger. But what is holy anger?
Holy anger, first of all, has to do with zeal for God. After Jesus’ anger, they remembered words from the Old Testament’s Psalm 69:9: “Zeal for Your house will consume me.” Jesus was zealous for the things that make God the Father zealous.
We see similar zeal in people who follow God.
Holy anger is also about love for others. Jesus didn’t give vent to rage because somebody had cut him off in traffic or because somebody took the last scoop of black walnut crunch ice cream that He’d wanted. Jesus was upset that the merchants at the Temple Mall had put a price tag on God’s love and forgiveness. You and I know that these are gifts that God offers to all through Jesus Christ. When we see others being hurt, our call is clear. Holy love demands that we get angry for our neighbor’s sake.
Holy anger is productive and useful. Martin Luther knew this. “When I am angry,” Luther said. “I can write, pray, and preach well, for my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.” Luther’s holy anger compelled him to do the right thing as he sought to give all people personal access to the God we know through Jesus Christ.
Anger is an inevitable element of our humanity. But God calls us to harness our anger for His purposes. In 1979, on a Maryland street, the car in which five-and-a-half month old Laura Lamb and her mother, Cindi were riding was hit head-on by a drunk driver traveling at 120 miles per hour. Laura became the world’s youngest quadriplegic. In California less than a year later, thirteen year old Cari Lightner was killed by a drunk driver. Just two days earlier, he had been released on bail for a hit-and-run drunk driving crash and already had two drunk driving convictions behind him. Cari’s mother Candace formed an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and soon linked her efforts with those of Cindi Lamb, who had already undertaken similar efforts in Maryland. Twenty-three years later, MADD is still a controlled burn, translating the anger and rage of parents who have seen the pain inflicted by drunk drivers into positive actions. MADD has heightened our awareness of the dangers of driving while under the influence of alcohol and of the need for designated drivers. They’ve gotten laws passed that get drunks off of our roads and highways and make all of us safer.
What holy anger do you have today?
Maybe you’re angry over child abuse.
It may be the increasing evidence of drug addiction here in Logan or the crying needs of the unemployed.
It could be the way in which Satan and the evil of the world fogs people’s minds and wills, turning them from the better and eternal life offered by Jesus Christ.
I get angry sometimes with the Church at large and at times, myself in particular, for failing to invite others to know and experience life with God or hiding God behind a lot of churchy language.
Today, commit yourself to harnessing your holy anger—the anger that comes not from selfishness, but from the love and passion of God for people in need around you--and using it in positive, productive, proactive ways.
Burn for God and let the world see the glow of Jesus’ love in you.
John 2:13-22
Once, back when our daughter was a teenager, a headline on the front cover of one of her magazines caught my eye: “Chill Out! Take Our Anger Quiz.” I flipped to page 122 and found eight multiple choice questions. I’m going to try a couple of them on you. If you’re not a teenage girl, pretend that you are for just a second and consider how you might answer:
(1) Your dad won’t let you go [to a] concert. When you ask why, the answer is, “Because I said so.” You: a. scowl and request a better explanation. b. hurl the TV remote at his head and stomp upstairs. c. shrug.At the end of this quiz, you were supposed to know whether your anger was too tepid, medium hot, or boiling over. We can quibble with the accuracy of a magazine quiz. But it is based on a reality about us as human beings. It’s this: the capacity for anger is something God has built into us and there are times when it’s right and times when it’s wrong to be angry!
(8) A really bad cold has your brother laid up in bed for two days. You happen to walk by his room, and he demands in a pompous tone that you get him a glass of orange juice. You: a. tell him that saying please doesn’t hurt, and then head to the kitchen. b. immediately walk to the garage and slash both of the tires on his bike. c. rush to see if there’s any fresh-squeezed in the fridge.
Someone has said that, “Anger is an emotional reaction to your interpretation of a life experience in which your expectations are not met or are violated.” A wife comes home from work expecting a quiet evening alone with her husband and kids only to learn that her husband has invited buddies over to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. An employee gets good reviews for three years in a row and is promised a promotion, but the promotion never comes. Our lives are filled with a hundred potential flash points each day. Anger happens. We need to learn to manage it, harness it, and use it creatively.
The Institute for Mental Health Initiatives has developed a method for coping or controlling our anger built on the acronym RETHINK:
- Recognize when you’re angry and what’s causing it;
- Empathize, trying to see the other person’s point of view;
- Think of other ways you might be able to interpret the situation making you angry;
- Hear what the other person is saying;
- Integrate love and respect into the way you deal with your anger;
- Notice your body’s reaction to anger and find ways to calm down;
- Keep your attention focused on the present and don’t bring up past offenses.
I must confess that anger doesn’t come easily to me. I would probably lean toward the tepid end of that quiz’s reckoning. It takes a lot for me to get angry. There may be others here today who tilt toward the boiling over end of the spectrum. Either place is probably unhealthy. But if we can find a way to use our anger, putting it under the discipline of God, it can become a force for good.
Our Gospel lesson for this morning recounts a famous incident in which Jesus, visiting the temple in Jerusalem, gave full vent to holy anger. In those days, people would go to the temple to offer sacrifices to God. Wealthy folks could afford to sacrifice cattle and sheep. Poorer people sacrificed doves or even grain. In the outer court, the place where non-Jews were allowed to be, the temple featured a kind of shopping mall. At the temple, you could only use temple money to buy the animals that were used for sacrificing. But out on the streets of Jerusalem, Roman money was used. If you came to the temple to offer a sacrifice then, the first thing you had to do was exchange your Roman coins for temple coins. You did this with a person called a moneychanger. These moneychangers were notorious gougers. They didn’t care what the exchange rate was. They were the only game in town, so to speak. So they got away with charging the worshipers exorbitant service charges. The same gouging was practiced by those who sold the animals to be sacrificed. Jesus was enraged by all of this!
That was when Jesus had His famous temple tantrum, throwing the moneychangers out of the place, upsetting their tables, freeing the animals from their cages, and generally setting loose what forest firefighters might call a “controlled burn.”
As followers of Jesus, the only legitimate kind of anger is Jesus’ brand of holy anger. But what is holy anger?
Holy anger, first of all, has to do with zeal for God. After Jesus’ anger, they remembered words from the Old Testament’s Psalm 69:9: “Zeal for Your house will consume me.” Jesus was zealous for the things that make God the Father zealous.
We see similar zeal in people who follow God.
- Mother Teresa was zealous for loving and cherishing life.
- Martin Luther was zealous for tearing down the walls the Church of his day had erected between Jesus Christ and the world for which He died and rose.
Holy anger is also about love for others. Jesus didn’t give vent to rage because somebody had cut him off in traffic or because somebody took the last scoop of black walnut crunch ice cream that He’d wanted. Jesus was upset that the merchants at the Temple Mall had put a price tag on God’s love and forgiveness. You and I know that these are gifts that God offers to all through Jesus Christ. When we see others being hurt, our call is clear. Holy love demands that we get angry for our neighbor’s sake.
Holy anger is productive and useful. Martin Luther knew this. “When I am angry,” Luther said. “I can write, pray, and preach well, for my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.” Luther’s holy anger compelled him to do the right thing as he sought to give all people personal access to the God we know through Jesus Christ.
Anger is an inevitable element of our humanity. But God calls us to harness our anger for His purposes. In 1979, on a Maryland street, the car in which five-and-a-half month old Laura Lamb and her mother, Cindi were riding was hit head-on by a drunk driver traveling at 120 miles per hour. Laura became the world’s youngest quadriplegic. In California less than a year later, thirteen year old Cari Lightner was killed by a drunk driver. Just two days earlier, he had been released on bail for a hit-and-run drunk driving crash and already had two drunk driving convictions behind him. Cari’s mother Candace formed an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and soon linked her efforts with those of Cindi Lamb, who had already undertaken similar efforts in Maryland. Twenty-three years later, MADD is still a controlled burn, translating the anger and rage of parents who have seen the pain inflicted by drunk drivers into positive actions. MADD has heightened our awareness of the dangers of driving while under the influence of alcohol and of the need for designated drivers. They’ve gotten laws passed that get drunks off of our roads and highways and make all of us safer.
What holy anger do you have today?
Maybe you’re angry over child abuse.
It may be the increasing evidence of drug addiction here in Logan or the crying needs of the unemployed.
It could be the way in which Satan and the evil of the world fogs people’s minds and wills, turning them from the better and eternal life offered by Jesus Christ.
I get angry sometimes with the Church at large and at times, myself in particular, for failing to invite others to know and experience life with God or hiding God behind a lot of churchy language.
Today, commit yourself to harnessing your holy anger—the anger that comes not from selfishness, but from the love and passion of God for people in need around you--and using it in positive, productive, proactive ways.
Burn for God and let the world see the glow of Jesus’ love in you.
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