Sermon For March 26, 2000
Third Sunday after Lent
CHRISTIAN LETTERS: Proclaiming Foolishness ~ I Corinthians 1:18-25
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Turning the Tables ~ John 2:13-22
When you go to sell your house the realtor will tell you that location is everything. We can take that same idea and apply it to the scripture passages because often indeed, location is everything. The story about Jesus in the Temple appears in all four gospels. But in Matthew, Mark and Luke, which are called synoptic gospels, synoptic meaning they are looking at things with the same eyes, this event about the Temple is right at the end of Jesus’ ministry. In fact it is one of the things that angers the authorities so much that they call for his crucifixion. In John’s gospel, however, it is in an entirely different location, not at the end of Jesus’ ministry, but at the very beginning. In fact it is paired with another event, Jesus’ miracle of turning the water into wine. That is usually one of the passages that we read during the season of epiphany following the Christmas celebration, because the first miracle of Jesus points to His uniqueness, to His special role. It gives people a hint of what is to come. Now, John pairs this story with the story of Jesus’ in the Temple to point out that Jesus is not only going to be a unique individual with a special relationship with God, a relationship that leads us to call Jesus “fully divine”, but that Jesus is going to live his life motivated by that relationship. He is not going to sit back and let things go on as they always have. Instead, he is going to call on people to make the changes that he believes are necessary to really live in God’s ways. Jesus was steeped in the scriptures of the Jewish tradition. He knew about prophets in the past that had spoken out against the abuses that people carried on during their worship. When he walked into the temple and saw all the busyness going on, all of the commerce, all of the money that people had to spend in order to follow the rules about what was acceptable and not acceptable to God, he was filled with a righteous anger. These rules not only missed the point, but they made it more difficult for the poorest people to worship God appropriately. They had to buy an animal. They had to change their money into the proper kind of money, and they had to pay a tax with that money on top of it. Jesus said, “You want an unblemished animal, you want the right kind of money for the temple tax, but you don’t say a word about the purity of heart, and purity of heart is what it is all about. All of us are called on to worship God in love and in justice, in truth and in beauty, and you’ve missed it all. You have missed the point.” These were not people who were bad folks. They weren’t running scams on everybody. These were just the rules that had developed over the years about the right way to live a life. If you want to please God, here are things that we have learned by experience are the right things to do. But they forgot to ask the questions about motivation, about what is inside. So these rules became the important thing, instead of living God’s love, being faithful as God’s people. So Jesus was filled with an anger. He dumped the tables upside down. We have heard this story so often, that it is a familiar friend to us. We don’t always stop to think about what it really means for our view of Jesus, or our view of the Christian faith.
I was thinking about one of those “paint by number” pictures. I haven’t seen any recently, but I know 20 or 30 years ago you could buy those masonite boards and they would have things all divided up with different numbers for each color and paint with numbers so you could fill in the picture. We had a couple of those at our house, I don’t remember if a friend of the family or my mother painted them. We had a couple of horses in a pasture and a picture of Jesus. Paint by number Jesus. The purpose of those paint by number exercises was that if someone was starting out as an artist and was uncomfortable with their own abilities, they could use the colors and some markings, much like a coloring book, and end up with a picture that was recognizable. Now I hope that anyone that had any artistic intent deep within them set aside those paint by numbers soon, to begin painting their own pictures to express their views about God and the world. If you stayed stuck in the paint by number you were stuck with what someone else decided Jesus would look like. You never had an opportunity to develop your own views. Many of us are in exactly that situation in our views about Jesus. We learned about Jesus when we were children. From Bible storybooks, from Sunday school classes, worship services, vacation bible school, church camp, we get that “paint by number” picture of Jesus fixed in our head. We never move beyond it to do our own interpretation of who Jesus is. Never move beyond it to explore the deeper feelings, the subtle variations in color, the complexities of what it means to be a person. When we stay with that “paint by number” picture of Jesus, we are most likely to see Jesus as a representative of God. Instead of understanding Jesus as a way in which God is revealed to us, we see Jesus as God walking in human form on the earth. This was one of the early heresies of the church. When people were sorting out what it meant to understand Jesus as the messiah, there were those that wanted to worship Jesus as God here with us. Not just a revelation of God, but God completely here. Knowing everything, controlling everything. Well, when we limit Jesus to only a revelation of God’s presence and fail to recognize Jesus also as a fellow human being that walked this earth, who was on a journey through life, who was carrying out his very own pilgrimage of faith, then we are likely to discount some of the things that he does. If Jesus was only God in human costume, then it didn’t mean anything at all for him to be nailed to a cross. It didn’t mean anything for Jesus to die on that cross. If it was an all powerful God who was just allowing the children to go through their play, knowing that the next day God would be alive and well, then there was no sacrifice, there was no giving at all. But Jesus, fully in keeping with God’s purposes, but fully human, now that is a different situation. Jesus having to struggle with what it means to be faithful. Jesus having to prayerfully consider what he believed God wanted him to do in his life. Jesus reluctantly going to the cross. Jesus suffering human pain. Gasping for air. Jesus dying on the cross as a human. That is an entirely different story. Then God’s power over death is not just something God accomplished for the divine self, but God’s power is over our death, too, for each and every one of us.
With the paint by number picture of Jesus, we tend to want to see Jesus as this nice person, who was always kind and loving, always a pat on the head for child, or a healing hand for someone who was sick. Walking around with a peacefulness, untouched by all the difficulties of the world. But this is an unfair picture of Jesus. This is unfair because we never fully understand who Jesus is. Unfair because we never fully accept who we are, because we are not happy and peaceful and loving all the time. We live our lives as humans with struggles, with passions, with anger, with pain and suffering. If we take Jesus’ humanity seriously, then Jesus shows us the way to live.
My title, Anarchist in the Temple, is drawn for Seattle events of a couple of months ago. Before the newspapers and TV broadcasts were filled with images of rioting in the streets of Seattle, “WTO” were not special initials for us. But now the gathering of the World Trade Organization reminds us of a significant event in the history of Seattle, a significant event for the economics of our whole planet. Many of us were disgusted by anarchists coming up form Oregon to run through the streets of Seattle breaking windows and spray painting graffiti on buildings. But they knew something that Jesus also knew. Sometimes you have to do something drastic to get attention. Can you imagine the horrors that people felt when Jesus walked into the Temple and began turning over tables? Can you imagine what people screamed at him while he was throwing money across the floor? Driving them out with a whip? Do you think that there were many people that said, “Oh that’s Jesus. He knows what he’s doing.” He knew that in all of the excitement of pilgrims coming into town, gathering there for worship, and all the business of the Temple, that if he raised his hand and said, “Excuse me can I say something?” no one would pay any attention at all. He knew that if he wrote a letter to the editor it wouldn’t have accomplished very much. He knew that if he went and talked to the priests of the Temple that they would have laughed at him and said, “Get out of here!” He believed in what he was doing, he was filled with an anger that was a righteous anger. That was fueled not only by his understanding of his relationship to God and to God’s people, but also the whole faith history that stood behind him. He knew himself to be a prophet of God, a teacher, a messenger, the chosen one. He lived that out. A couple of weeks ago when we celebrated Holy Humor Sunday, we reminded ourselves that God doesn’t want all seriousness from us, but God also wants us to be able to laugh, to enjoy things, to not take ourselves so seriously. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that was read this morning was also read during our Holy Humor service. There is a whole deeper level of being a fool for Christ, of being foolish for God. It is not just telling jokes, or wearing jester’s hats, or laughing at cartoons. It is being willing to do the right thing even when the right thing looks like a pretty stupid thing to do. If we were the parents of Jesus and he had just come home from dumping the tables in the Temple? “Young man, sit down. I want to have a talk with you. I understand why you did what you did, but it wasn’t a very bright thing to do. You are in a lot of trouble, young man. It is going to take you a year’s worth of allowance to pay back the damage that you did. Couldn’t you have done something else? Gotten a few friends together, made signs? Marched around outside the Temple? Couldn’t you have done something positive? Why did you go in there and cause such a mess? Everybody is angry with you! It was a foolish thing to do.”
Being a fool for Christ doesn’t always mean doing the easy thing. It doesn’t mean doing the nice thing. It means being willing to do the right thing. Maybe what made Jesus so special was that Jesus was much more willing to do the right thing than we are, much more willing to walk the difficult path of discipleship. Walking a closer walk with his creator. Lent is a time to look at our AAA road map and see where it is we are traveling. Lent is a time for us to look at our faith journey and our pilgrimage to see if we are just doing the easy thing, or whether we are really doing what God wants us to do in our lives. Amen.