Sermon from March 3, 2024: Saying No to Transactionalism based upon John 2:13-22

John 2:13-22   Jesus Cleanses the Temple
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

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Sometimes, a story we read at church is only found in one Gospel. Sometimes it's in two or three of them. And, sometimes, it’s in all four. Dr. Nyasha Junior, in her commentary on this text, reminds us that the story in today’s reading is a story that is in all four Gospels. That means that all four of the people who compiled the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry thought this was an important story to share. In three of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the story takes place the week before the crucifixion. In John, it takes place at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. First, he gets baptized. Then he invites a group of people to work with him. Then he performs the miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding. Then, after a brief respite in Capernaum, Jesus goes to Jerusalem and gets in a fight with some people in the Temple.

This story is pretty wild. Jesus chases people and animals with a whip. He knocks over people’s stuff, and he screams at people who are doing an important job for pilgrims to come to Jerusalem during religious festivals. Sometimes, regardless of which Gospel is being read, this story gets called “Jesus Cleansing the Temple.” But, as Dr. Junior writes in her commentary, none of the versions of this story in any Gospel use the word “cleanse” to describe what’s going on. That is a name that got added by later Christian readers. In fact, Dr. Junior reminds us that the version we heard today doesn’t even tell us exactly what made Jesus so mad or what the purpose of his outburst is. She jokes that it might be better to call this story “Jesus flips out!,” or “Jesus loses it!” I’m inclined to agree. It makes me wonder why the person who wrote John thought this story was so important that they made it the fifth big thing that Jesus did in his public ministry.

​Like I said, all the people selling and buying stuff in the temple were supposed to be there. It’s not like our church fair, a fundraiser (though could you imagine Jesus knocking over our Second Time Around table). That’s when we have people buying and selling things in our church. In his notes on this story, Obery Hendricks outlines some of reasons why people were selling and trading things in the temple in Jerusalem. One reason was that ancient Jewish religious practice required bringing an animal to sacrifice. What animal you brought was usually based on how much money you had. Remember from back when we talked about Jesus’ parents bringing him to the temple for the first time. They brought two doves as a sacrifice. They probably bought the doves from people working around the temple just like the people Jesus got mad at in this story.

The people called money changers had a job, too. There was a certain amount of money worshipers gave when they came to Temple. But, they couldn’t give that offering, usually called the Temple tax, in any old kind of money. Remember, people in this era of the Roman Empire might have money created by many different governments, not just Roman money. They couldn’t use the regular Roman money either. They had to get their donation converted to something called the “half-shekel of Tyre” in order to give it during worship. Hendricks says it this way: “Roman money was changed into Jewish money to pay the Temple tax.” If all these people are supposed to be there to help devout people worship in the way God told them to, why would Jesus get so mad at them?

Karoline Lewis, in her commentary on this story, makes an interesting point. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the ones that put this story much later in Jesus’ life, show Jesus calling the venders in the temple a “den of robbers,” indicating that he thinks they are cheating people who have to use their services. That’s not what he says in John. In John, he says, “stop making my Abba’s house a marketplace!” Lewis thinks that means that Jesus isn’t calling people out for cheating other people, especially since buying and selling things was necessary for the whole system of sacrifice in worship. You had to get the right stuff somewhere. Best to get it at the temple. Lewis thinks that Jesus is being critical of that whole system, and maybe even saying that the whole system of sacrifice is unnecessary. And, that is a radical statement.

I haven’t decided if I think Dr. Lewis is right yet. Part of the reason why is because interpretations of this story where people argue that Jesus wanted to replace worship practices centering God’s presence in the temple with worship practices centering God’s presence in him have often been used to justify harming Jewish people. Dr. Dong Hyeon Jeong describes this kind of interpretation as “replac[ing] the Second Temple of Jerusalem (Judaism) with the body of Jesus (Christianity).” Historically, when Christians have talked about replacing Judaism, it has led us to persecute people who opt to be Jewish instead of being Christian. Because I know what kind of harm those interpretations continue to do in this world, I am leery of leaning too hard into the idea of trading one Temple, the one in Jerusalem, for another, the one that was Jesus.

Dr. Jeong offers a bit of context on John in his commentary on this text that might help us avoid interpretations that justify harming our Jewish neighbors. Jeong notes that at the time when this scripture was written, there wasn’t actually a distinct religion called Christianity. There were only followers of the teacher Jesus, some of whom were Gentiles but many of whom were Jewish. Those who were Jewish had to contend with Rome’s destruction of the temple in 70 CE... that is the same temple that is central to this story. According to Jeong, the community that the author of John was trying to address with this Gospel was a community that was looking for an explanation for how God could allow a second Temple to be destroyed by a brutal empire. For a people who have seen their temple, the very resting place of God, destroyed, it might bring comfort to them to understand that God was still at home among them, but this time in the body of Jesus whom they called Christ. Dr. Cheryl Lindsay interprets Jesus-as-Temple this way: The God who had once given them their religious law, including directions for temple sacrifices, as a means of maintaining right relationship with God and with one another, in the wake of the destruction of the temple, would offer another means for connecting with the Divine. This time, it would be the Incarnation. 

Dr. Lindsay is the primary crafter of the seasonal theme I have been attempting to follow this Lent. She is the one who suggested “saying no to transactionalism” as an interpretation of this story. While she acknowledges that humans are relational beings, and a certain amount of exchange of goods, ideas, and services is simply part of being a person, what she is concerned about is when the give and take that is a part of human life gets shifted into a competition to see who can construct their relationships around the idea that people owe them something. You can become very powerful when people owe you things... owe you money, owe you allegiance, owe you control. When we only exchange goods, ideas, and services so that other people, or even God, will do something for us, we run counter to the kind of relationships Jesus invites us to create. Jesus doesn’t want your faith to be a transaction that gains you more power in this world. Jesus does want you to build relationships like he did, through sharing, healing, and fighting for those who have been abandoned.

Too often, Christians have traded Christ-like relationships for power that destroys. Time and time again, through our history, when Christians have felt like the world owes them power, money, and loyalty, we have strayed the farthest from Christ’s teaching. God has not given us the world to make us powerful. God has given us Christ to teach us to love. We do not need to sacrifice our neighbors’ lives and well-being in order to maintain our cultural power. If Jesus did think he, himself, was the new temple for God, Dr. Lindsay points out that he did not rebuild the temple through “force, power, or might.” He rebuilt the temple, his body, in the mystery of the tomb. May we never feel like we must build the Body of Christ using the tools that killed Jesus. May we be assured that in saying no to transactions of injustice, we can more forward, sharing Christ’s gift of love.

Resources consulted while writing this sermon:
Cheryl Lindsay: https://www.ucc.org/sermon-seeds/sermon-seeds-transactionalism/
Nyasha Junior, "Third Sunday in Lent," Preaching God's Transforming Justice, A Lectionary Commentary, Year B Featuring 22 New Holy Days for Justice, eds. Ronald J. Allen, Dale P. Andrews, and Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm
Obery Hendricks's notes on John in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: The New Revised Standard Version with Apocryphya, ed. Michael Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Karoline Lewis: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-213-22-3
Dong Hyeon Jeong: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-213-22-6