The Scripture Readings this week are:
- Psalm 48:1-3, 9-14
- John 2:14-22
The Sermon title is He Did What?!?!
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| By Reinhardhauke - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Early Thoughts: "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild", so goes the old hymn. Turns out maybe he wasn't so meek or mild, and not always gentle.
I mean I don't see anything in those verses about making a whip of cords, overturning tables, pouring money on the ground in a fit of zealous, righteous anger.
This is a story many people love to tell. This is a story many people find challenging. It can be hard to remember that living by Jesus' base principles does not always mean going along with the flow, that sometimes those principles require one to take a stand. Sometimes they even lead us to cause a fuss.
In 1st Century Judaism the temple was the center of the faith. It was the dwelling of God on earth. Only after the sacking of Jerusalem in 70CE did Judaism start to re-imagine itself without that center (largely because they had too since the temple had been destroyed). For Jesus to suggest he would destroy it and rebuild it in 3 days would have sounded ridiculous. For Jesus to cause such a ruckus in the temple precinct was probably pretty scandalous.
Jesus saw injustice in action in the courts of the temple itself. He saw profiteering. He saw people being taken advantage of. Or something like that. Scholars are a bit divided what the clearing of the temple was really all about. The fact that John puts the event at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry (the other Gospels have it happen right after the Palm Sunday parade) suggests to me that John saw it as a statement about Jesus' priorities. Jesus' priorities are not so much on doing the rituals 'right' (the business occurring in that space appears to have largely been about ways of getting proper animals and coinage for temple worship) as they are about inviting folk to come into God's presence. Setting up barriers to that is a problem.
So where do we need to cause a ruckus today? Where do we let focus on getting the outward stuff right interrupt our search for the really important stuff? Where do we need to rage like Jesus? What parts of our life of faith might lead Jesus to rage at us?
Jesus calls us to love our neighbours as we love ourselves and as we have been loved. Jesus calls us to live as people of God's Reign. Jesus calls us to be people of hope. Sometimes we get there by being nice and meek and mild. Sometimes the gloves have to come off and it is time to braid a whip and get down to brass tacks.
Which will we do?
--Gord
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