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| Lent 4 "Cleansing the Temple" |
I would point out, to start, that very few stories appear in all four gospels. Even the ritual of breaking bread and pouring wine, the central sacrament of Christian churches, appears only in three. So the cleansing of the Temple must have been a particularly memorable experience. If it wasn't the reason why the Temple establishment felt they had to get rid of Jesus, it was certainly a factor. We regard anger with suspicion – it feels too much like losing control. I would find a story about a time when I failed to control my anger, and regretted it later. Depending on the congregation, I might ask for examples of how we teach children to control their anger (e.g., by counting to ten). Yet here we have Jesus losing his temper, not once but twice. (It's worth looking at parallel passages in the other gospels, too.) Was he wrong? Anger was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But without anger, we would have no social justice movements. (See excerpt from SIN: A New Understanding of Virtue and Vice, below) Historically, I might look at the civil rights groundswell of the 1960s or the anti-Vietnam marches of the 1970s. Today, I would explore the anger that motivates, say, environmentalists trying to save an old-growth forest, or trying to protect a heritage building from bulldozers. Biblically, I would connect the anger of Moses (Exodus 32) over the Golden Calf. And the anger of John the Baptist (Luke 3:7-18). Anger, in other words, is not necessarily bad. In this case, I would suggest, Jesus used it as a teaching tool. He knew he had little time left to leave a lasting impression. Words had had little effect. So he dramatized his message by acting it out. I could elaborate on the feelings of his disciples must have had, as they expected the police to arrive. And they certainly didn't forget it. (see excerpts from Last Chance, pages 39-45, below) What, I would wonder, could cause us to fix the message that firmly in our psyches? Perhaps someone in the congregation has had their lives changed by going on a volunteer mission to Guatemala or Mozambique, marching on Washington or Ottawa, or riding with police or paramedics on patrol. Let them tell their story. Let their passion be visible. And memorable. Excerpt from SIN: A New Understand of Virtue and Vice, (Northstone, 1997 pages 58-59) Every vice has, at its core, a virtue. Every sin has a saving grace. Take egotism, for example. Pride. It's simply self-esteem, a sense of personal worth, taken to an extreme. Everyone needs some self-esteem. Without some sense of our own worth, we can't affirm the worth of anyone else. That's the origin of the term “worship.” Anger is often a by-product of intuitive convictions about injustice, about unfairness. We feel ourselves badly treated, or we see others slighted and ignored, and anger spurs us to try to improve their situation. Envy and covetousness have, at their roots, an entirely defensible desire for self-improvement. Even cows, contentedly browsing, will seek the greenest grass to munch on. The desire to do better is intrinsic to being human. Vices and virtues are always connected. Excerpt from Last Chance: the Final Week of Jesus Life, (Wood Lake, 1989, pp 39-45) In the whole of the Bible, there is only one example of Jesus using physical violence on other people. That's the incident that we call “The Cleansing of the Temple.” It's utterly uncharacteristic of him. In his temptations in the desert, Jesus specifically rejected any use of power – natural or supernatural – to accomplish his purposes. He would not bribe people into believing; he would not awe people into believing; he would not force people into believing. Several times during his ministry, Jesus found himself in situations where he might well have been tempted to use physical force... But he explicitly rejected violence... By his last week, he moved in an atmosphere of confrontation and heckling. In that atmosphere, only the most faithful of his disciples would hang on. And even they must have wondered if his commitment to releasing captives and freeing victims was just rhetoric, a politician's empty promises (Luke 4). They wanted to share his throne, not his jail cell. Jesus had to show them, somehow, that he really meant it. So he walked into the outer court of the Temple and starting kicking over tables. He dumped the money boxes, scattering cash. He flung open the cages, freeing captive birds and animals. And when the merchants and the money-changers fled, he refused to let them come back in. But he let the women and children in, and the blind and the crippled – the lowest levels of Jewish society. And the children sang songs and played in the Temple yard, as if they had paid good rent for that space! As an act of audacity, it compares to pulling the plug on Wall Street's computers and turned the Stock Exchange into a daycare. To his disciples, Jesus must have seemed suicidally inclined. The probably cowered in the corners, expecting the local SWAT team to appear over the walls any minute... But Jesus was right – those disciples didn't forget... His acted-out lesson dramatized, indelibly, the conviction he had shown all along for the poor, the outcasts, the children. Trashing the Temple was a deliberate exception to his own rule, done to make a point. We make a mistake if we treat this incident as a model for our own actions. Some Christians use it to justify violence against repression. I think they're wrong. By taking an uncharacteristic incident out of context, they're as guilty of proof-texting as those who quote verses from the Bible to “prove” anything from child abuse to a flat earth. Jesus had many other opportunities to combat evil and oppression with force. But he didn't... Rather, he did it this time to teach an unforgettable lesson. JIm's full List of suggestions for preaching these stories
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