John 2:13-22

The gospel lesson for this third Sunday in Lent tells a story of institutional religion that has lost its way, and Jesus’ strong anger in response. The evangelist John tells this story early in his gospel. In the first chapter of his gospel, John focuses on the promise of a coming Messiah and then on Jesus’ baptism and calling of his disciples. The second chapter of John’s gospel begins with a story of a miracle: Jesus’ turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana. The story in today’s gospel immediately follows these stories of promise, call, and celebration. The difference in tone is striking. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus makes a whip and uses it to drive people out of the temple in Jerusalem. He emphatically tells them to get out of the temple and take their things with them. When challenged, Jesus responds with what to his listeners may well have sounded like a taunt: "’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’" (2:19).

Jesus’ anger is provoked by what he sees happening in the temple. Bringing sacrifice to God—meant to be a sign of humility and gratitude—had become a large-scale commercial operation. Jesus’ purging of the temple created havoc for the buyers, sellers, and moneychangers at the temple that day. Jesus herded all the animals out of the temple, ending business for that day for the animal sellers. He "poured out the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables" (2:15). Their tables upended and their coins scattered across the temple floor, the moneychangers most likely spent the hours after Jesus left trying to gather their assets and their records.

The cost of cleansing the temple was immediate and significant for the commercial operators. There was a cost to Jesus, too, one that John explains at the end of today’s reading. Jesus’ challenge to destroy the temple and let him re-build it in just three days points, John says, to Jesus’ death and resurrection. Baffled at this statement the day that Jesus purged the temple, Jesus’ disciples later understood his challenge to be a metaphor. The temple that Jesus referred to, John says, was the "temple of his body" (2:21). The three days referred to the time between Good Friday and Easter. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ purging of the temple is his first step on the journey to the cross. His challenge to institutional religion to stay true to its mission comes with a cost to the moneychangers, and it also comes with a cost to Jesus. This story of Jesus’ anger—so different from the first stories John included in his gospel—tells of Jesus’ challenge to institutional religion to look to its mission, a challenge as forceful now as it was the day Jesus went to Jerusalem, made a whip, and drove business dealers out of the temple.

In her novel The Distinguished Guest (1995), the contemporary American novelist Sue Miller explores the challenges and the costs of reforming religious institutions in 20th century America. The daughter of a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Miller grew up on Chicago’s south side as the Civil Rights movement began to challenge Christian churches in the United States to be the catalyst of social change, to reform both themselves and the society at large. The central character in Miller’s novel—the "distinguished guest"—is a woman named Lily Maynard who had been married to a minister serving a parish on Chicago’s south side in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Now elderly and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Lily comes east to stay with her son, Alan, and his wife while she waits for a place in an assisted care center to open. Some years earlier, when she was seventy-two years old, Lily published a memoir that met with significant and unexpected success. Her account of religious and social turmoil in Chicago in the 1950’s and 1960’s found a large audience in 1982, when Lily’s memoir was published. Lily’s publisher sent her on book tours and lecture circuits, and interviews with Lily appeared in print media and on radio and television.

Lily’s children responded to the success of their mother’s memoir with decidedly mixed emotions. Their family had dissolved as their parents disagreed about how best to combat racism in their city and their church. Lily and her husband, Paul, divorced after Paul adopted more aggressive tactics in challenging the status quo, and Lily judged these tactics to be counterproductive, tearing apart the very community that they relied upon to bring change. Their eldest child, Rebecca, became involved with an underground revolutionary movement and fled to Central America after a bomb she was helping to build detonated and killed two of her friends. No one in the family has seen her since, and only the second child, Clara, has just once heard from her. Clara herself moved far away from the family as soon as she could and has spent years in California embracing one self-help movement after another. Alan, the youngest child, went east to school, became an architect, married a French woman, and established a successful practice as an architect in New England. An atheist, Alan turned away from his parents’ religious faith when he was a teenager, and the ardent commitment his parents had to their beliefs and their church is baffling and painful for him to recall. Lily’s memoir about the tumultuous years in Chicago presented their family’s story for all to read and discuss, and Lily’s children, particularly Alan, struggle with that exposure.

While Lily stays at Alan’s home, waiting to enter the assisted living facility, three young women care for her in different ways. Because both Alan and his wife work outside their home, they hire a caretaker for Lily. A second woman spends many hours with Lily, interviewing her for a magazine article. A third woman arrives to talk with Lily as part of a doctoral research project. The different views of his mother that these young women give Alan causes him to think again about his childhood and his parents’ devotion to fostering the change they believed God willed for the church and society. The cost of discipleship can be high. The way of the cross can be hard. Although Alan continues to feel the pain that his parents’ struggle caused him, he comes to value what his parents tried in their admittedly imperfect ways to do. The weeks that Alan once again lives with his mother, now near the end of her life, change his judgment of how their religious conviction shaped his parents’ lives.

This Sunday’s gospel lesson vividly portrays Jesus’ anger at institutional religion for losing its ways. Having drifted into convenient practices and profitable ventures, the temple in first-century Jerusalem could no longer be the house of worship that God had called it to be. Jesus’ anger at this is swift and strong. His taunt—"Destroy this temple"—suggests that only an entirely new building could remedy the flaw. John’s gloss on this taunt provides a basis for hope, not only for Jesus’ disciples in the first century, but for people like Sue Miller’s fictional characters in The Distinguished Guest, both people who are part of contemporary religious institutions and people who are not. Jesus’ radical cleansing of the temple is necessary, and this purging is painful. But although "the temple" will be destroyed, it will rise up again in the person of the risen Christ. John tells us that long after Jesus purged the temple that day, Jesus’ "disciples remembered that he had said" he would destroy the temple but then build it up again in three days (2:22). Holding on to Jesus’ promise and living in this hope sustained Jesus’ disciples as they walked the sometimes very hard way of the cross. In this Lenten season, we too may hold to this promise and this hope as we, like Lily and Paul Maynard, struggle to see and live God’s will for us in our time and place.

(from www.goodpreacher.com/blog/)