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Where should they begin, these leaders of Israel’s spiritual life? Jesus, in his tirade at the temple, offended in so many ways. He threw around the furniture. He attacked the system of sacrifice, and the economic engine that drove it. He showed no respect or decorum. Yet these transgressions likely paled in comparison to his words: “Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!”
His father’s house? This was the holy temple where God resided on earth. It belonged to Israel. It was the only place where holy rituals could be enacted, where ordinary people could come into contact with the Holy God. And this itinerant teacher presumed to call it his father’s house? This was blasphemy.
When Jesus called the temple in Jerusalem "his father's house" he may have been referencing Israel’s history and the tradition of King David who wanted to “build a house for God.” God replied that it was not David who would build a house for God, but God who would establish a house, a lineage for him, a line from which would come the Messiah. Was Jesus citing his Davidic heritage when he called it “my father’s house?” Not that it would have sounded any less blasphemous to his listeners than calling God his father.
Are places of worship meant to be houses for God? Is that what they are, and is that how we treat them? Or are they spaces for us, places we set apart for us, hoping to find in them a moment of holy connection, buildings in which we enact rituals that sometime mediate the divine for us, in which we offer prayers and praises and portions of our wealth in hopes of encountering God? Is that what a sanctuary is for?
Or is a sanctuary a place to welcome people who don’t yet know the living God, but know they are missing a connection they crave? Should we decorate and arrange our churches for God – who likely doesn’t care where we meet, as long as we come in love and openness, for ourselves, or for outsiders who are hungry for God? How would it change the way we arrange and decorate them, and how we conduct ourselves in them, if we saw them as houses for God’s hungry people rather than as houses for God?
Just next in our passage, Jesus refers to his body as the temple that cannot be destroyed. Peter describes the people of God as a holy temple built of living stones. I suggest that God’s house is anywhere God’s name and power and love are invoked – every heart, every relationship, every place of prayer and desperate hope can be “my father’s house.”
What if we began to treat our street corners as holy spaces? Our living rooms? Doctor’s offices? Shelters? Police stations?
Where do you pray? Where do you invite Jesus to make himself known? That is his father’s house today.
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Funny thing about the derivatives of the word “zeal.” We think of “zealous” as “on the case,” or “committed,” while “zealot” conjures images of bug-eyed maniacs raging about. The word originally referred to members of a Jewish political group in Jesus’ day who were eager to overthrow the occupying Romans. However, Jesus’ zeal is directed not at the Romans but at his own religious leaders. Presumably he had an opinion about Roman oppression and cruelty visited upon his countrymen and women, but the concern the gospels speak to was the corruption of message and heart which he saw in the temple leadership.
After Jesus' rampage, John tells us, "His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” (Here is Sunday's gospel reading.)
What is the place for zeal in the Christian life? The early monastic hermits whom we call the Desert Fathers and Mothers, men and women who went into the desert to seek union with God away from the temptations of society, preached the spiritual virtue of apatheia, a detachment from worldly concerns and agendas that they saw as the goal of the spiritual life. The point was not to be passion-less, but to channel our passion into relationship with the God who loves us passionately. I wonder what the abbas and ammas taught about Jesus’ scene in the temple.
Where do we find our balance between wholehearted passion – for justice, for evangelism, for liberation, to name a few, and apatheia, the spiritual value of letting go?
One way to explore this is to discern when we are hearing God’s call to a particular area of justice-making, and when our interest might be driven by personal needs. I have a friend who is taking real leadership on the issue of sex trafficking. I asked her why that issue, and she said she felt God clearly tell her to work on that. She avoided it for years because it is such an ugly area of human life – but ultimately she said yes. She is galvanizing communities to shine a light on perpetrators and bring freedom to survivors. She is engaging in God’s mission, not furthering a personal agenda.
What issues get you “hot under the collar?” What about that matter hooks you, do you think? Do you feel God has invited you to participate in that aspect of God’s mission to reclaim, restore and renew all of creation? Do you feel the power of the Holy Spirit with you as you work, and speak, weep or rejoice – or are you drained by the effort? Those are some ways to know where our passion is to be expressed.
However we discern our motivation, let's constantly invite the Spirit into our passion. When we are gripped with outrage over some injustice or corruption, start to note our reaction and pray right then and there – “God, is this a holy anger? Or is this anxiety or guilt or something else?” And if we sense it is a holy anger, we can take the next step and ask, “How would you like me to proceed? Show me where to hold back and wait on you, and where to move forward with all the fullness of your Spirit working in me.”
We call the great sacrifice our Lord Jesus endured for us – the whole thing, from his arrest through his crucifixion – his “passion,” from the word passio, or suffering. And yet this is also the word we use for ardent love, which is what drove Christ to endure his passion for us. If we let Christ live in us, I believe we will know when to bring it on and when to dial it back. It has to be his work in us, or it’s for nothing.
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Jesus must have walked past those tables and vendors and stalls of doomed animals a hundred times. He must have checked out the tellers exchanging Roman coins for temple currency. Maybe he shook his head, even seethed inwardly. But to our knowledge he never said a thing. Until now:
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 marketplace!”
(Here is this week's gospel passage.)
Why all this commerce in the temple courts? The place had become a killing floor, awash in the blood of animals being sacrificed to meet arcane demands in the Law of Moses. For the requirements and regulations of the Law came with some loopholes. Instead of committing your firstborn son to God’s service, as the law required, you could offer a sacrifice. Over time, these loopholes accumulated and widened enough to drive a wagon through. Any demand of the Law could be satisfied with the blood of some animal, if you had the cash.
An economy developed to satisfy this bloody business. You didn’t have to bring your own sacrificial animal – you could purchase one right there, one stop shopping. No temple currency on you? No worries – we’ll exchange your Roman coins for our own, and take a little fee for our pains. The whole place had become a well-oiled enterprise – what Jesus called a “marketplace.”
What was it that caused him to go ballistic now, driving out people and livestock, knocking over tables, generally having the kind of fit that got so many zealots before him into trouble with the temple leadership, arrested and crucified by the Roman authorities? Or was that the point? Was this part of the plan to move toward his own passion and death, to play out the mission to which he was called by God?
Still, I'm puzzled why he seemed to lose his temper so thoroughly, when elsewhere we see him exercise such grace under pressure. This scene launches months of increasingly heated exchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day (in Matthew, it comes at the end). Over and over he accuses them of having lost the heart of the Torah, the Law of God, and having distorted it. And they, from their vantage point of power – limited as it may have been under Roman rule – can’t help but resist his challenges to their authority.
Later, during the events of his passion, Jesus appears to accept his treatment meekly. Where is this outrage then? He was certainly capable of expressing his anger. Perhaps he reserved his ire for those who would pervert his Father’s love and oppress the weak, not for his own preservation.
And maybe that’s the lesson for us, as we wrestle with when and how to express our anger, with what “Resist” looks like for Christ-followers. There is one way to handle personal anger, however reasonable it may be – we can invite Jesus to hold it with us, ask God to transform it into something life-giving. But righteous anger at injustice or misrepresenting God? There are times for letting that anger show, even when it means knocking tables around.
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