March 3, 2024 John 2:13-22 Series B
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loves you with his very life. Amen.
The Bible gives us a multitude of images throughout its many pages. God is trying to use lots of different ways to help us poor humans understand what he does for us, how he made us, sustains us, forgives us, redeems us, and so much more. Some of these images are used once or twice, for example Jesus being a door. But other images are used consistently throughout both old and new testaments, such as God being our shepherd.
One of those consistent images is the temple. The first images of the temple we see are of the tabernacle. God gave Moses some very specific instructions about how it was to be built. Not just built, but like decorations and such. God was also very concerned with how things would be done in the temple, like what a priest would do, how sacrifices would be offered, that kind of thing. I don’t have the time to go through all of the details about the tabernacle, but one that stands out to me is some of the decorations: the decorations were a garden, reminding the israelites, reminding us of the garden of Eden, of living in paradise with God.
The temple was then built off very similar plans, similar decorations as the tabernacle, just more permanent. King Solomon, the son of King David, would be the one to coordinate and build the temple. That temple would be destroyed by Babylon and a second temple would be built. This is the temple that Jesus saw when he walked the earth.
The temple was designed as a place where people could approach God and a place where God would restore his people. The temple was filled with incense, a reminder for the senses of prayers being offered to God. Prayers for healing, prayers for prosperity, prayers for protection, and most importantly, prayers offered for forgiveness. It was through the temple, through the priests that God established his relationship with his people. For the ancient people, if you wanted to know where God was, you went to the temple, as it was God’s physical house on earth.
But it wasn’t without problems. The ancient Israelites corrupted the temple, profaned the temple more than once, and in lots of different ways. Whether it’s denying people access to God or corruptly keeping offerings in order to line the pockets of the priests, the temple, being God’s house, was sometimes abused to take advantage of others.
In our Gospel reading today from John 2, Jesus takes the temple very seriously. And we see this moment of God’s righteous and terrifying wrath. Jesus sees the money changers there in the temple and he’s having none of it. He makes a whip, a scourge in the Roman tongue, and he drives the moneychangers out. He cleanses the temple from corruption.
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