In His Holy Temple (John 2: 12-22) 3/11/12

A billboard advertises “A going church for a coming Savior.”  Another reads “A new church for a new world” We use signs to grab people’s attention, to make them stop and think, to demonstrate something. Many televangelists talk about the end times. They keep soliciting money so they can buy more air time in order to tell us that we are pretty much out of time. Signs direct us, encourage us, discourage us, warn us and inform us. Signs point the way.

The gospel of John is a book full of signs. The book contains seven major signs. It is also a book of sevens which, you will remember, is a number associated with completeness. It is the book of the “I am” sayings, of which there are also seven. The scripture we look at today tells us about a hurt and righteously indignant Jesus, indignant and angry enough to fashion a whip made from cords and to use it to chase people from the Temple. That’s pretty indignant.

The story of Jesus clearing and “cleansing” the temple in Jerusalem is well known to us. It appears in all four Gospels, although in John, it follows Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana. In the other gospels, the story doesn’t occur until the Passion Week. To hear the writers of the synoptic gospels tell it, Jesus made only one trip to Jerusalem. To hear John tell it, one might think Jesus spent more time in Jerusalem than in Galilee. John mentions three different Passovers that found Jesus in Jerusalem.  There are several explanations for this. The most plausible one to me is offered by William Barclay, who says that it’s all a matter of point of view. John’s point of view is different from the Synoptics. They told the story from a Galilean perspective. John told it from a Jerusalem perspective. The stories are complimentary, not contradictory.  Barclay reminds us that John is an evangelist telling a story; that John is always more concerned with the truth than the facts. As usual, John is profound. It has been said that this Gospel is a pool in which both an elephant can wade and a child can swim. It is at once both simple and complex. This story is no exception. The truth of this story lies in the temple, the holy temple.

Try to imagine a fence in front of the church. Start at the parking lot and run a fence across the front and down to the church building on each side. Imagine that this area is what John called the temple courts. In that day, it was also probably called the Gentile court. It was the outermost area where Gentiles were allowed to come and worship. What we are sitting in---the sanctuary—would have comprised inner courts for Jews and then scribes and priests.

So Jesus comes to the area where the Gentiles are allowed—right in front of the temple—and there are sheep and doves and even cattle. There are also money changers. It’s a pretty wild scene. Add to this that during Passover week, the population is estimated by some to have swelled to 2.5 million people. It would be like filling up Darlington raceway 35 times and moving the whole crowd to Jefferson for the week.  I’m trying to figure out where the Gentiles were worshipping while all this commerce was going on. 

Now, imagine Jesus coming in and taking a look around. This was a major league concession stand. Only one type of coin was allowed to pay the temple tax and all the out of towners had to get their money changed—at a cost. The sacrifices had to be without blemish and you can guess what happened when the inspectors came by to look at those who brought their own. And the price gauging was no laughing matter either. It took two days wages just to pay the temple tax. A pair of doves might cost over three weeks wages for normal working folks. This was a sorry state of affairs and Jesus saw it for what it was.

Jesus makes a whip from cords and what John tells us next really defies imagination. Again, I want you to try to picture cattle and sheep and bird stands and money changers’ booths and more people milling around than you can count, all in the front yard of the church. Then picture Jesus cracking his whip and stampeding the cattle and the sheep, screaming at the dove sellers to get out, and flipping all the tables of the moneychangers, sending them scurrying to grab their money. Jesus is triggering a major commotion! This is not the peaceful Sermon on the Mount. This is the riot in the Temple courts. And Jesus says that they have turned his Father’s house into a market.  On a normal day, this would have gotten him stoned. But this is not a normal day. The priests and scribes and the Pharisees are probably all inside being holy and devout. This leaves only the normal everyday Jews outside to question Jesus. They want a sign. People back then were just like people today. They wanted signs to prove the authenticity of the speaker. Needless to say, they usually got little proof, but sometimes they got some good entertainment.

Well, we are finally to the point of today’s message, sort of. Jesus says: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days.” There we are. Decipher that riddle. Remember John’s gospel is both simple and complex. The elephant is wading, the child is swimming and John, more clued in sixty years later when he is actually writing this Gospel, sets the hook. The Jews milling around in the courtyard now begin to come together after the ruckus and one of them observes astutely that it had taken forty six years to build the temple. He then adds in a sufficiently sarcastic manner the question:  how would Jesus rebuild it in three days?

Now John has his day. He didn’t get the point at the time. He even admits it. But now as he writes his Gospel, he knows what Jesus really meant. Jesus wasn’t talking about a building.  The building held no interest for him, except that he would not allow it to be called God’s house and permit fraud to take place upon its grounds. Jesus was standing in His holy temple, and when he walked away, he took it with him. “The temple Jesus spoke of was his body,” says John.

Forty six years to build the temple in Jerusalem. At that point, it was still incomplete. Only fifty years later, the Jerusalem temple would be completely destroyed by the Romans, never to be rebuilt. The temple to which Jesus spoke was also destroyed, but it indeed was rebuilt in three days.  Whether John’s Gospel story is wrong chronologically hardly seems important. His perspective helps us to see the point of Jesus’ ministry from its very beginning. And Jesus’ perspective helps us to see the truth in spite of the facts.

The apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 1 that God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world.   The writer of Hebrews calls Jesus the high priest and mediator of the new covenant. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is grilled by the Sanhedrin late into the night. In response to their accusations, Jesus promises that they, and we, will see him on God’s right hand coming on the clouds of heaven. Jesus understood the real house of God. Jesus never worried about the presence of the temple. He never worried about the geography of the temple. He only dealt with its structure, and its structure was divine.

Paul talked about the body being the temple of God. He talked about trying to keep it pure and unblemished in order to set a good example and to honor that which God has given us as the vessels for our souls. This is important in many ways, but it is not the focus of this lesson. The focus here is to remind us where the temple is. When Jesus spoke of it, He spoke rightly because as the Son of God, wherever He was, the temple of God was contained within him, for he was the object of worship, the very embodiment of God Himself. In speaking about the temple of God in such way, Jesus not only shows us where the temple is, but also where it isn’t. The temple of God is not contained within a building or a set of buildings or ten thousand buildings for that matter. The temple of God is as big as the universe and as small as the human soul. The temple of God cannot be destroyed. That was tried once. It didn’t work then and it never will.

Want to see God’s temple? Serve on a bread line and see a hungry child reach up for her soup cup.  Want to see God’s temple? Watch the flag being lowered at Arlington cemetery or at Normandy cemetery or presented to a widow at a funeral. Spend an afternoon on a lazy river watching nature and wildlife interplay. Want to see God’s temple? Take a walk with someone and hold their hand while you listen to the birds singing.

Destroy this temple? In John’s Gospel, Jesus reminds us that just like the temple in Jerusalem, all our man made temples will be destroyed. He shows us instead the real meaning of God’s house. God wants us to recognize that his house has no roof, knows no geography, that his house is indestructible, that on his front porch you can see forever. It takes God to make God’s temple. When we are in church or in a field full of flowers or maybe just in a quiet place somewhere just for us, we can sometimes feel that quickening that comes only from God, and we know. John tells us in the book of Revelation that the city of God will have no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the lamb” (Jn. 21: 22). That Holy City will have no need of sun or moon, for “the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (v.23).

Live in the light of His presence, and your light will shine brightly into the lives of others. 1  Let all the earth keep silence before Him. God is in His holy temple, and that temple is in our hearts. 

1 Sarah Young, Jesus Calling, Thomas Nelson Inc. Nashville, Tenn. 2004, p.72