3rd Sunday in Lent Year B

Lent 3B
March 11, 2012
The Christian writer Anne Lamott once wrote, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” And that is truly the temptation with the gospel reading for this the 3rd Sunday in Lent, isn’t it? Today, we have John’s account of Jesus’s purging of the temple. And it is tempting to imagine what it would be like if Jesus were to purge and scourge all the institutions (and people) that we each think need a little spring cleaning, fine tuning, or even major overhauls. (After a weekend full of phone-calls from Mitt Romney, I personally would be in favor of Jesus going after the current political process, with special attention to the robo-call system.) But that is not what happens in this story.
There are some key points in the telling of this story that are unique to the way that the author of John tells it, which are important for us to note.
First, John differs from the synoptic gospels (that is Mark, Matthew, and Luke) in where he places this story in the chronology of Jesus’s life and ministry. The synoptics place this story of the purging of the temple at the end of Jesus’s ministry, after he has come to Jerusalem and is about to die. This act of Jesus is “the final straw that breaks the camel’s back”, and it is what motivates the powers that be to eliminate him.
For John, this story takes place at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus goes to Jerusalem as a pilgrim to participate in Passover. And his cleansing of the temple is Jesus’s first public act in the gospel of John. (He’s turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he’s called the disciples, and then he cleanses the temple).
Another key point that is unique to the telling of this story in John’s gospel is that Jesus doesn’t refer to the temple as being a “den of robbers” as he does in the synoptic gospels, (referencing how the money changers are defrauding the poor); instead, Jesus’s critique in John’s story is that the temple has become “a marketplace.”
When Jesus enters the temple in Jerusalem, he finds livestock for sale in the court of the Gentiles. The sellers of the livestock were fulfilling an important purpose in the function of the Jewish religion. The people who came to the temple were in need of unblemished animals which they could use to make a sacrifice to God, and they were not able to bring their own animals on the long journey and keep them unblemished. But the animal sellers had set up in the court of the Gentiles, which was the only place in the temple into which Gentiles could enter. So, in fulfilling an important purpose for the spiritual life of the Jews, the animal sellers had created a zoo in the one place which was holy for the Gentiles.
One commentator writes of this passage: “Last Sunday’s text focused on the Lenten question, ‘What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?’ Today’s text focuses on the question, ‘What does it mean to be the church of Jesus?’…Entering the temple, Jesus discovered how deceiving appearances can be. While the place appeared to fulfill its function, closer inspection revealed that it had forgotten its purpose. …The ways of the world invade the church gradually, subtly, never intentionally, always in service of the church and its mission.”i
Last fall, I got to hear a man named Brian McLaren speak at our clergy conference. McLaren is known for being one of the leaders in the Emergent Church movement, whose focus is on making the church relevant in the lives of people in this post-modern world that we live in. Several things that McLaren said came to mind, as I was spending time with this story of Jesus scourging the temple. McLaren talked to us about how people don’t come to church to find religion. They come to church to find spirituality. People come to church to find and encounter God. It is the role of the church to provide a place for that encounter. And it is also the role of the church to give people the tools, the exercises, the support so that they may encounter God in their lives, in their work, in their families, and during the rest of the week, beyond Sunday morning. ii
What does it mean to be the church of Jesus? For us, it means being a resurrection community; a beacon of hope and healing in a world full of deep pain and suffering. It means offering people hope and healing in their own lives and equipping them to encounter God in their everyday lives, in the most mundane of tasks, in the joys, and in the great upheavals. It means nurturing in people the gifts of joy and gratitude so that they may live the good news of the resurrection in their daily lives.
What would Jesus clean out, overturn, etc, in the life of our own church? And let me just clarify. By church, I don’t mean the building; I don’t mean the vestry or the priest or the choir or the Sunday school or even the Sunday services. By church, I mean all of us together. By church I mean all of us who have decided that walking this way of faith is much more meaningful when we do it together.
So what would Jesus clean out, overturn in the life of all of us who walk this way of faith together? Anything that impedes and distracts us from our purpose of being a resurrection community, a community of mutual support and nurture that is even richer for our diversity and our differences.
What would Jesus clean out, overturn, in our own hearts and souls and faith? What aspects of our own being need to be purged so that we may deepen our relationship with God and with other people?
“John’s Gospel continually warns us against the danger of misunderstanding—thinking we understand Jesus, when the Jesus we think we understand is a Jesus of our own design, a Jesus with whom we are quite comfortable. But what if there is more to his words than we are hearing, more to his will than we are doing?” iii

Readings for today are found at:
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Lent/BLent3_RCL.html

i.Gloer, W. Hulitt. Homiletical Perspective. Feasting on the Word. Year B Vol 2. Ed. Bartlett and Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox: Lousiville, 2008, pp 93, 95, 97.
ii.From my notes on Brian McLaren’s presentation to the Clergy Conference of the Diocese of Mississippi in October 2011.
iii.Gloer, W. Hulitt. Homiletical Perspective. Feasting on the Word. Year B Vol 2. Ed. Bartlett and Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox: Lousiville, 2008, pp 93, 95, 97.