Toppling Tables

(Scriptures: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25,John 2:13-22)

When I go traveling in urban areas, I often like to visit the large churches and cathedrals in the city. For example, in New York City, St Patrick’s Cathedral is a most impressive place to visit. On a trip to Quebec, I traveled to a small town a short drive from Quebec to visit St. Anne’s cathedral, reputed to be the site of many healings – as you walk in the church, around the entrance are numerous canes and crutches and leg braces left behind by those healed of their infirmities. In these and other cathedrals, the art and architecture are breathtaking, a testament to the faith and sacrifice of those whose humble offerings paid for these wonders – as well as the excellent taste of those who commissioned them to be created. Of course, at many of these houses of worship, on the way out you encounter…..the gift shop. The nature of the items for sale is variable – often, a few are truly beautiful, unique, while most are mass-produced and dreadfully tacky. It’s understandable, especially if one is awed by one’s experience in the cathedral, to want to take along a reminder of that experience. And maintaining these monuments to faith isn’t cheap – it’s not cheap just to maintain our modest house of worship - and the gift shop helps generate funds for maintenance. However, I’ve always found it a little deflating, even a little jarring, to make the transition from the hushed, sacred silence of the Cathedral sanctuary to the bustle of fellow tourists and the ring of the cash register inside the gift shop – and I suspect I’m not alone in this. I can’t help thinking of the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the other; one of these things just doesn’t belong….”

This week’s Gospel readings begin a detour from Mark’s Gospel, which we have been studying, into John’s Gospel, where we will remain for the rest of March. John’s Gospel is very different from the other three Gospels. In the other three Gospels, Jesus is known by his teachings, healings, and other miracles, and – especially in Mark’s Gospel – orders those whom he helps to keep Jesus’ acts a secret. From these actions, the reader is invited to come to their point of belief that Jesus is the Messiah. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is endlessly talking about himself and his relationship to the Father. In a series of “I am” statements – “I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the good shepherd; I am the true vine; I am the way, the truth, and the life….”- Jesus uses a variety of metaphors to explain his identity and to invite those around him to belief. John’s Gospel also has a very noticeable “us and them” outlook on the world. John is thought to have been the latest of the four Gospels to have been written, and it appears that by the time John’s Gospel was written, the early followers of Jesus had been expelled from the synagogues. John’s Gospel reflects this mutual hostility, often referring to the religious leaders with the loaded phrase, “the Jews”. Given this highly charged language, it’s especially important to keep in mind that the disagreements between Jesus and the Temple leaders was essentially a kind of family feud within Judaism – and we all know how unattractive family feuds can become.

The account of the Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the Temple occurs in all four Gospels. In the other three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – it occurs near the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, just after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, right after Palm Sunday, helping to set into motion the plot to have Jesus arrested. In John’s Gospel, it occurs near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, setting the tone for hostile relations between Jesus and the Temple religious establishment that carry through for the rest of the book.

Why were there moneychangers and sellers of animals in the temple in the first place? Our cathedral gift shops sell trinkets for tourists to take home, but in our Gospel reading, the coins and animals were for worshippers to bring into the Temple as they entered, not to carry home as they left. Of course, we know that at that time, the ceremonies of worship held at the Temple involved animal sacrifice. People came for long distances, often on foot, to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem – and it would have been quite an ordeal to bring their sacrificial animals along with them. And since the sacrificial animals had to be of the highest quality – God demands our best - you wouldn’t want to drag along one of your own, only to find out at the end of your long journey that it didn’t pass muster. So, as a service to worshippers traveling long distances, the Temple offered animals deemed fitting for sacrifice – for a price, of course. The moneychangers were needed because one had to pay a temple tax of half a shekel. Given that Roman and Greek coins had imagery depicting the emperor as a god, those coins were not acceptable for use in paying the Temple tax – so these were exchanged for the Jewish half-shekel coin that everyone had to pay in support of the Temple.

So there were good, defensible reasons why moneychangers and vendors of animals were part of the Temple economy. Perhaps Jesus’ objection was, in part, that they were actually within the outer courts of the Temple. Previously, they would have been outside the Temple – nearby, but still outside. According to one tradition, it was Caiaphas himself – yes, that Caiaphas – who allowed the merchants to set up shop inside the Temple. It certainly must have been deflating for pious pilgrims who had walked long distances to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem to come all that long, weary, sweaty distance, only to have to run a gauntlet of vendors on the way into the house of the Lord. One would readily sense not only crass commercialism, but more than a whiff of corruption – these folks, along with the Temple establishment, were profiting from the humble piety of peasants who wanted only to worship the God of their fathers. So Jesus toppled the tables of the vendors and drove them out, saying, stop making my Father’s house a house of commerce, a marketplace. We’re told that the disciples recalled a phrase from Psalm 69, “Zeal for your – that is, God’s - house will consume me.” As I thought about our Gospel reading, it struck me that, in a sense, both Jesus and the vendors were, in different ways, zealous for God’s house. The vendors were zealous to raise funds for the maintenance of the Temple and its hierarchy – and perhaps were a bit overzealous in profiting personally from their location within God’s house. And of course, Jesus was zealous that God’s holiness and the sanctity of God’s house be upheld.

The intersection between faith and commerce has always been problematic. In the words of the Sesame Street song, indeed, one of these things is not like the other. Faith, at its best, leads to generosity and openness of spirit, while commerce often promotes a spirit of greed. In both faith and commerce, our hands are extended – in one case, to give; in the other, perhaps to grab. Several years before composing his 95 theses, while he was still a zealous Roman Catholic, in an attempt to rekindle his faith and get relief for his guilty conscience, Luther made a pilgrimage to Rome. Far from restoring his faith, his experiences in Rome nearly destroyed it. Watching Pope Julius II behaving more like a patron of the arts than like a priest, watching priests living like princes on the offerings of the faithful, seeing the splendor of St Peter’s and knowing it was paid for by the tithes of the pious poor – all this turned Luther’s stomach. And of course, as we know, the sale of indulgences – spiritual tickets out of purgatory, sold to the faithful in order to raise money for St. Peter’s, just sent Luther right over the edge, eventually prompting his break with Rome.

Our Old Testament reading from Exodus gave us the Ten Commandments – and it strikes us as very legalistic, an oppressive list of “thou shalt nots” to be rebelled against. But in reality, the Ten Commandments were given by God to define and safeguard the kind of community his chosen people would be, over and against the surrounding nations. God was defining his chosen people as a community where God would always have first place, whose name would be held sacred and who was beyond the ability of man to capture in graven images. The chosen people, having escaped slavery in Egypt would be a community in which a day of rest was not only permitted, but commanded. The chosen people would be a community in which parents and by extension the elderly would be honored and cared for; where murder, marital infidelity, theft, dishonesty, and envy would be unknown. Of course, we know it didn’t work out quite that way – not for them, not for us – but it’s a vision of how God would have us live together.

Likewise, we are called to be, not just any community, but God’s community, a community in which we seek neither wisdom nor signs, but Christ crucified, still a scandal to the worldly wisdom of our day; in which we have systems and boundaries set in place to define how we are organized and to defend from abuse. May we at Emanuel Church continue to live into God’s vision of what our community of faith will be. Amen.