“Who Does He Think He Is?!!”

(sermon 3/7/21 – Third Sunday in Lent)

John 2:13-22  

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.

When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

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When you think about all the various art forms – painting, sculpture, music, dance – it might sound funny, but I think that the art of storytelling is one of the highest and most important of art forms in any culture. The fact that a gifted storyteller can come from any social level within that culture, and have any level of education or even no formal education at all, seems to make the art of weaving an intriguing, meaningful, powerful art form.

When we read the scriptures, we benefit from many gifted storytellers, originating in many different settings and scattered across more than a thousand years, and the author of John, the Fourth Gospel, is maybe one of the most gifted of them all. This author sets out to tell the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and his meaning, just as the other three gospel writers did, but John does it in a very different way, and he means to convey a very different, even cosmic, message than the others set out to do. This is the case even when John is weaving, crafting, composing his story using the same building blocks, the same stories coming out of the life of Jesus that those others used.

Today’s gospel text is a case in point. This is a story we’re all familiar with – this story of Jesus entering the Temple courtyards and driving out the animals and the people selling them; and turning over the tables of the money changers. It’s the only story in any of the gospels where Jesus, in a state of anger, a state of righteous wrath, commits any kind of vandalism, and even violence, against anyone.

And that’s exactly where the story gets so much of its appeal, its attraction, to such a broad range of people, because it describes Jesus engaging in these kinds of acts that so many of us, at one point or another, and truth be told, more than just once, have felt like engaging in in similar times of anger. This story has been held up by followers of Jesus across virtually the entire spectrum of Christian belief, except for absolute pacifists, I suppose; they get a pass on this – but virtually every other type of Christian since the beginning of the faith itself, as a justification for them at least occasionally engaging in the same kind of destruction and violence, in the name of God and whatever they believe was God’s will in some instance. Christians, from the most conservative to the most progressive, and everywhere in between, have held up this story as an argument to justify their own actions.

And it isn’t just individuals, but larger groups, too, even entire peoples. In Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, one of the most important speeches in U.S. history, Lincoln points out the irony, and the oddity, seen in the people on both sides of the ongoing Civil War – that “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”  It wasn’t the first time that had happened in history, and it certainly wasn’t the last. We human beings have claimed God’s approval of our own supposedly righteous use of violence, and often cited this story from Jesus’ life, to justify everything from the Crusades; to Nazis with their belt buckles that stated Gott Mit Uns/”God with Us”; to our use of the atomic bomb; to the bombing of black churches, “liberal” churches, and abortion clinics; to left-wing extremists approving of the use of violence during anti-racism protests; to right-wing extremists driving vehicles through Black Lives Matter protestors or shooting at them. 9/11 was justified as being righteous vengeance in the name of God; and yes, recent domestic terror attack in Washington DC, a number of people who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6 and caused the deaths of several people were marching behind a big wooden cross and chanting White Christian Nationalist calls to violence, all in the name of Jesus.

It’s here where I think John’s mastery as a storyteller is so important. We often hear this story the way the other gospel writers place it in their stories and what meaning they give it – it’s told as happening the day after Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem  during the last week of his life, and his actions in the Temple become the last straw in the eyes of the religious and occupying powers that precipitates his arrest and execution on Good Friday. But John places the story in a different place in Jesus’ life, very near the beginning of his story – remember, this is in Chapter 2 – and in so doing, he masterfully casts the story as having a very different meaning.

John nests this story in between Jesus’ turning the water used for ritual handwashing into fine wine at the wedding in Cana; and Nicodemus’ stealthy night visit to Jesus, during which Jesus lays it all out – that he has come into the world as a sign from God of God’s love for the world and as God’s means of reconciling with it. Taking these three bits together, we see John pointing to Jesus as the one who is already ushering in the new era, the reign of God, the new age – the new eternal, great “wedding banquet,” here symbolized by the actual wedding in Cana, and the fine new wine replacing the former ritual water. We see at the wedding that Jesus has the power to perform miracles, but in his actions at the Temple, John emphasizes the authority by which Jesus does those miracles and that as such, he has the divine authority to implement righteous wrath in the world; all while, in the Nicodemus conversation, boldly proclaiming not wrath, but God’s love for this world and all within it. In these three short scenes that John weaves together early in Jesus’ story, he lays out precisely who and what Jesus is, and what authority he has. To John, this isn’t just a story about Jesus going off on a wild tear in the heat of the moment and doing something that gets him arrested. It’s a sign of his true identity that sets the stage, that lays the foundation, for all that will follow in his story.   

It’s also confirmation that God, in this case through Jesus, is indeed a God who has wrath. Conservative Christians often criticize progressive Christians, claiming they focus only on God’s love and mercy, while ignoring or soft-pedaling God’s wrath. It isn’t really true; progressives believe that God exhibits wrath just as much as conservatives do; they just believe God’s wrath is reserved for, and directed at, different things.

While this story confirms that God can definitely know wrath, it’s important to recognize that based on literally everything else Jesus ever said or did, if that divine wrath, that righteous anger, were ever to be expressed through destruction or violence, that destruction or violence would be left to God, and not us. Christ has called us to be and to do a lot of things, but physically, violently doling out God’s wrath is something that’s very much above our pay grade, no matter who we are, or how much we might want that to not be true sometimes. When Jesus overturned the tables and drove out the merchants, people indignantly asked, “Who does he think he is?!!” From our own vantage point, we know that Jesus is God, but we also know that we aren’t.

The answer to the question of whether God might ever consider it acceptable for us to resort to violence, especially when appealing to the name of God while doing so, has been debated practically since the beginning of the faith, and it will continue to be debated long after we’re all gone. I certainly don’t know the fullness of God’s mind regarding that question, although I’ll admit that Jesus’ words and the full breadth of scripture seem to point in a much more pacifistic direction than in my very human, very fallible bones, I’m sometimes comfortable with. But wherever that debate  might lead, I still think that it’s inappropriate for us to include within it any appeal to this particular story of a violent day at the Temple perpetrated by Jesus, the eternal Son of God, as an argument or justification for us behaving in the same way. I think that the more appropriate takeaway for us in this part of John’s story is both that it points to Jesus’ identity, as well as pointing out some of the kinds of things that actually do lead to God’s wrath – in this case, it’s the economic exploitation of people – bad enough anywhere and anytime, but made even worse here, because it’s being done right at the Temple, right under God’s nose as it were, giving it the apparent cover of it being acceptable and justified in the eyes of God. A big part of John’s message in this story is a reinforcement that in Christ, we’re shown that God loves all of us, beyond measure and to the end of the age – that God’s love for all of us is so great that one of the things that most inspires God’s wrath is when any of God’s people are used or exploited by others, economically or in any other way, for that matter.

 In fact, if we read John’s wonderful, masterful story about Jesus – his life, his identity, his meaning – in any way that gives us cover to engage in vandalism and violence against any other child of God, then what we’re getting out of that reading isn’t the Word of the Lord, but rather, as Shakespeare might say, a tale told by an idiot.

Thanks be to God.