The Abrupt and Penetrating Zeal of Christ
It was the springtime, and the time for the celebration of the Passover was at hand. Jesus went up to Jerusalem to keep this holy day, indeed to remember and worship God for his redemption of the people of Israel from the house of bondage in Egypt. He traveled a three days’ journey, entered that great walled city through massive stone gates, he walked the well-trod streets and alleyways making his way to the navel of the universe, the center of all religious life, the house of God on earth, the great Jewish temple; and on this—the greatest day of the year, when all should be celebrating and thanking and praising God for the great things he has done—he arrives at the goal of his journey, the center of all meaning, the location on earth towards which all piety stretches, all hearts yearn, and what does he find but a raucous market packed with cattle and sheep! Dung is everywhere underfoot, voices are raised, not in praise, but in arguments about the validity of scales, and merchants are stacking their coins high to measure and appreciate their profit. Those whose hearts draw them in for worship are being shaken from their rapture by the need to find some animal without blemish. Some would like to make financial offerings, but they are shut down in their hearts because they are told that their money is not good enough, they must step aside and trade their coinage—for a fee, of course. The doves are cooing in their cages and barkers are drawing as many people to their wares as possible, animals are milling, grain and spit are underfoot. And this is supposed to be the spiritual capital of the world…
Any deeply faithful person would be offended, would become angry at the imposition, the unseemliness of the whole affair, but in Jesus a cascade of emotion tears through him as though a dozen fireworks had been timed to simultaneously explode within him.
Jesus wasn’t angry.
In Matthew 5:22 Jesus teaches that we should guard our hearts from becoming angry, so we can’t call what happens in this passage today the “anger of Jesus”. Anger comes from feeling robbed of something. It responds to absence and seeks to make it up. Zeal is an emotion that is purely positive. Zeal does not pull back from or argue from loss, it always presses forward towards a new and passionately believed-in end. Anger focuses on that which is wrong. Zeal mobilizes all available resources towards making things right.
John the Evangelist tells us that Jesus was consumed by zeal for his Father’s house. On seeing this scene before him, Jesus was in motion without pause or thought. He was animated so totally by passion that in that moment he scarcely could conceive of any reality but one: That his Father’s house would be cleansed of this rank growth of wickedness and returned to a state of quiet sanctity.
Why should this have affected Jesus so? We can see in his own words why…
A famous woman once passed away, and when camera crews and reporters arrived at the door of the home where she lay they pushed past her elderly husband into that home where they set up their tripods and put their feet on the tables, ate food from the fridge and put sattelite dishes on the antique end tables pointing outward past the windows toward the sky where their prying images were received and displayed around the world to please the morbid appetites of the masses.
When her son arrived at that house, what did he do, but go suddenly into a blind tare driving out those vermin with fierce cries and cracks and emotional words of every kind.
So Jesus cleansed his Father’s house of vermin with zeal available only perhaps to a child whose parents are being deeply wronged, or to a devotee whose God is being terribly debased.
The significance of this event this morning—this cleansing of the temple—is well-explained by Jesus’ perception that this isn’t just some institution gone awry, but it is personal. For Jesus, this is his Father’s house. Yet the significance goes even beyond this realization, for this temple that Jesus cleanses and cares so deeply about is not simply the great religious center, and not even totally his Father’s house, for the temple that lay desecrated before hi was also that which was destined to be replaced by his own body tomorrow before long.
The temple sacrifice for redemption, the temple sacrifice for spiritual renewal, the temple sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin, was, as we know, to be recapitulated in Jesus’ own body, as he, the Son of God became at the crucifixion the perfect priest, the perfect sacrifice, and in his body the perfect temple.
At seeing the temple yard profaned, Jesus’ zeal is multi-form and layered, for he, at once demands peity for the faith, respect for his Father’s house and indeed, respect and honor for that which he, himself, will become.
This is where this becomes personal for ourselves. Look at your hands. Feel the life in yourself, and love and creative power. Believe it or not, you too, have been made a temple of God through baptism. In the deepest, most veiled inner sanctuary of your soul you carry the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And therefore you have become a living vessel of the Holy Spirit. in what shape do you find the outer courts of your temple? Are they filled with noise and confusion, inappropriate thoughts and transgressions? Let them be swept clean! This church is a house of worship, yet you are a house of God, and the temple of God that you are is no less deserving than that great temple of old to be cleansed and made sacred as God’s own. If anything you are even more deserving than that temple, considering that it was created by human hands and you were created by the hand of God.
For the love of God, sweep your outer courts clean and make right the habitation of the Most High. This is Lent! And this is our holy work. For the sake of Christ Jesus our Lord,
Amen.
Year B — Lent III (RCL)
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“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!" 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..”
Sunday, March 19, 2006
