One Man, One Whip, and Everything Changes

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!"

It is am amazing image, isn’t it? Jesus enters the temple in Jerusalem and there he finds the moneychangers, the caged animals, the tables stacked with coins, everything an observant Jew would need in order to make one’s sacrifice at God’s altar was right there before him. Jesus does not make his way to one of the vendors and piously and quietly procure the necessary sacrifice. We might expect that. After all, that is what we are told elsewhere in scripture, isn’t it? Somewhere in the back of our minds might be the story of the man who made his way to the temple and prayed loudly and thanked God that he was not like his neighbor – the one who prayed quietly and plainly, without great fanfare. Remember what happened to him? He was rebuked and told to pray in secret – not to make a scene.

Rather than choosing to be quiet – to proceed business as usual as it where,
Jesus does what was unthinkable.

He made a whip and drove the moneychangers from the temple. He overturned their tables and sent their money rolling across the Court of the Gentiles. He released the animals freeing them from their impending deaths. Animals roamed the temple and doves circled looking for safe perches.

One man. One whip. And the whole way of being in the temple changed.

It is an enticing image of Jesus for some of us. This is, after all, what we have been praying to happen. Jesus comes into a situation and his righteous anger flows.

As Ellen says: Yay, God!

Jesus seems to have two different images: the calmly pastoral Jesus who says let the children come, or come unto me all ye who are heaving laden and I will give you rest. The Jesus who prays and heals, and sits teaching with Mary at his feet.

And then there is the image of Jesus that some of us cling to in prayer. This is the Jesus that stands up to injustice, and the Jesus that rights wrongs and brings about change for a world in dire need of reform and a different way of being. This Jesus blesses the weak and the poor in spirit. He protects and defends the widow and the orphan.

We may want to be with and be like this Jesus too. To take up our own whips and to strike out at those we perceive as being unjust or unrighteous, or even evil. We are God’s people, on God’s team, after all.

When we hear that all this happened at the Passover of the Jews, we might be tempted to think of Jesus cleansing of the temple as a rebuke of the Jews, but that wouldn’t be honest, would it?

When Jesus says, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" he is talking to us too. We are the people who gather in the church and go about the business and busyness of being the temple. We are the ones who make sure that the bulletins are printed and handed out to everyone. We are the ones who distribute numbered envelopes and take up the offerings that allow the doors to remain open and alms to be collected for the poor. We are the ones who have set up the tables that Jesus was so quickly and passionately to overturn.

The Jesus with the whip in this story is coming for us too.

The Jesus who takes on powers and principalities is the Jesus who take us on too.

The moneychangers in the temple, before we forget, were doing what was necessary for the functioning of the temple. People needed coins without Cesar’s image and they needed unblemished animals for sacrifice. What started out as necessary and good had become institutionalized in a way that emphasized the institution rather that the prophetic messaged that called God to come again into right relationship with God.

Those folks who came to the temple that day to offer sacrifice where there to get right with God or to help others get right with God, even if they were distracted by other concerns. Jesus was reminding them what was important.

They needed to stop thinking about the temple as a gathering place or marketplace.

They needed to learn again, that it wasn’t their place, but rather God’s house.
Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!"
Reminded them of the OT prophesy that “Zeal for your house will consume me."
But he was also teaching them something that was new:
That temple what not merely God’s house, but my Father’s house – that he was the son of God.
And that the temple as they had come to know it would need to be changed. Changed so drastically that they themselves might not recognize it. That it would cease to exist in Jerusalem and become the temple of his body.
And that this temple of his body would be destroyed and them raised up again in three days.
It is a wildly discomforting thought that the temple, the church, that we have come to know, to love, to gather at Sunday by Sunday, might be visited by a Jesus with a whip, who overturns what we have built up and who calls for a new and different way of being.
Look around. That is what is happening, isn’t it?
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.
The Good News for us is that yes, the temple was destroyed, but it was built up in three days, just as Jesus promised. Just like the disciples, we too remember what Jesus said. We have the scripture before us and we too know that Jesus has spoken to us and continues to speak to and through us.
We too know the worlds that Jesus said: Fear not, for I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.
Amen.