Moneychangers

I once heard a great teacher of biblical literature say that it’s hard to teach the Gospels because they are so familiar.  In fact, what he said was, “It’s hard to teach the Gospels because everyone already knows what Jesus said, just as we all know what Jesus looked like.”  And it’s true.  Most of us, I think, when we think about Jesus, get a visual image, and even if it’s not exactly the blond Jesus of popular American Christianity, even if the eyes aren’t blue, it’s some version of that well-known look that we conjure up.  If we want to approach what Jesus says and who Jesus is we have to make our way through a vast network of assumptions and impressions and seemingly indelible images.  

Now I don’t know whether this scene we hear about today, in which Jesus drives the moneychangers from the temple, is quite as indelible as the blue-eyed Jesus, but it’s hard for me to picture this incident without remembering what seems like a hundred cartoonish images from childhood.  Jesus brandishing a whip, overturning tables, scattering coins.  It’s an instant image of the defeat of religious corruption.  It’s an instant, unthinking, image of the triumph of Christianity over sin.  But speaking as a Christian, I think it’s a shame that I have a cartoonish image in my head of what it means for religion to be done wrong, and what it looks like for Jesus to set it right.  I think there is a danger in having a cartoonish image of sin and righteous zeal.  Because if there is a sure way to end up failing at religion it’s probably just that: the sense that we know exactly what it looks like to fail at religion and exactly what the answer to that failure would be.  

I’d like to say up front that I don’t perceive this story in John—or in the other Gospels—as cartoonish in and of itself.  If you look around at the commentary on this story you’ll see that it’s not actually that clear.  It seems that scholarly readers are unsure of almost everything about this story.  Is it really wrong for moneychangers and vendors to be on the temple grounds, or are they serving a necessary function?  Travelers from all over the Jewish world come to the temple to offer a required sacrifice, and the vendors make it possible for them to present the correct animals.  The moneychangers make it possible for them to pay a required tax in the required currency.

Are they maybe charging an exorbitant price?  Are the merchants not supposed to be in the Court of the Gentiles because that’s meant to be reserved for Gentiles? The Court of the Gentiles is an area outside the temple proper but still on temple grounds.  Should they be outside the temple altogether? If Jesus is specifically upset that they are occupying the court of the Gentiles, that may mean that Jesus is restoring the function of the Temple as a house of prayer for all.  In that reading, Jesus is kicking the merchants out of the court of the Gentiles so that there will be room for God-fearing gentiles to pray in the area reserved for them.  I like that reading.  None of this is absolutely clear in the story as John tells it, though.

John does give us the detail that Jesus made a whip out of some cords, and used it.  In our childish illustrated Bible vision of this story we may see Jesus driving the moneychangers themselves out of the Temple.  But John’s Gospel says no such thing: “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.”  He drives the animals out.  He pours the coins on the ground and turns the tables over.  He tells those who are selling doves to take the doves away. But it’s worth noting that he does not use a whip against a human being, just in case those cartoonish images have embellished our collective memory a little. This story does get used to justify religious violence, and John’s gospel is difficult enough on the subject of those he calls “the Jews” that we need to work hard to keep from slipping into violent imaginings here.  As far as the words of this story go, Jesus just uses the cords to drive the animals out.  

Did Jesus drive the animals out of the temple and pour out the coins because he was concerned about the impurity of financial transactions in a place of prayer?  Yes.  He does accuse the vendors of making his Father’s house a marketplace. And yes, we all have that problem.  Every time I think the answer to my spiritual needs is another book instead of an hour of prayer, I’m probably making God’s home in my heart into a marketplace.  And of course we are tempted on all levels these days to monetize and publicize and count our “likes” on social media.  The church is complicit in turning God’s house into a marketplace, and the more anxious we get about our place in the modern world, the more we forfeit our authority by succumbing to the marketplace.  

But we haven’t begun to exhaust the possibilities here for interpreting the story of Jesus in the temple as John tells it.  Because John makes the action of driving the merchants out of the temple into a kind of setup for a larger issue about Jesus’s authority, and that’s where a story about reform of religion—already full of questions—becomes even more mysterious.

One way to think about the action of driving the animals from the temple is to say that Jesus is establishing himself as the one true sacrifice, and announcing the end of the practice of sacrificing animals altogether, at least for Christians.  Take those animals out, he would be saying, because I am the one who will die for your sins.  

Another key topic in this story: Jesus is establishing himself as the location of God for us.  He speaks of his own body as the temple that will be destroyed and rebuilt, when he is crucified, risen, and ascended into heaven.  In speaking of his own body as the new temple, he seems to announce that the temple in Jerusalem is not where God dwells.  We have to ask, though, if Jesus is proclaiming that the temple is no longer the house of his Father, why does he refer to it as “my Father’s house?”  And why is he full of zeal for it?  Why reform the practices of the temple if he considers himself to be rendering the temple obsolete?  Did he overturn the tables and drive out the animals just to show that he had the authority to do so?

I think maybe he did, or at least I think John’s overwhelming project here is to show that Jesus has authority over all things, including the temple.  For John, Jesus is not the product of a religious system, or a compelling part of some larger story about God.  Jesus is the story.  Jesus is the Word of God made flesh.

Hearing this story in Lent, we are not being asked to adjust our practices or reform our ways.  Yes, our ways need reform.  But the fundamental call John passes on to us is the call to know Jesus.  And Jesus isn’t making it that easy.  He is scary and mysterious here.  

I can scarcely tell you what it means for you to encounter Jesus in your own life, to let him overturn the tables and drive out the animals of sacrifice and establish himself as the heart of all things for you.  Or for me.  I can’t tell you in neat words what it means that his body, the temple, the very dwelling place of God, ends up in our hands this morning as bread that we eat.  I can remind all of us to be careful about our arrogance and the awful violence of our assumptions about who we are as Christians and what our claims about Jesus mean for Jews and for the rest of the world.  But when it comes to telling you about this Jesus who is the location of God, I have to trust him and pray for the grace to be faithful.  

He asked us to place our faith in him, in his own body, the incarnate word.  “Destroy this temple,” he says, “and in three days I will raise it up.”  Later the disciples remembered and understood.  His body was the temple.  

Jesus shows us how to practice religion and then shows us that all our practices fall away in his presence.  We see him doing things we don’t fully understand, and then gradually like the disciples we remember bits of what he has taught us and bits of what we’ve read in the scriptures, and we begin to approach the mystery of his presence in our lives.

What I take from this story, what I take now when we are scarcely able to pray in our own temple, when so many of us are unable to receive the body of Christ in our hands, when we are unsure how our practices might need to change from one day to the next, is that Jesus is unmistakably the Lord of everything we do, here or elsewhere, and that’s what he most wants us to remember.  Let me put it this way: there is no point being here, doing anything here, if Jesus is not the location of God for us.   Our childish images of triumph and righteousness are designed to lead us to change as he pictures it, not to quick victory.  I’m troubled by this story, a little bit scared of it, confused about the way it keeps changing as I ponder it.  And that’s what I think Jesus is offering us for the present moment.  Turbulence.  As a sign.  And it will take us time to understand.  And we get there by trusting him.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
March 7, 2021
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Posted on March 11, 2021 .