If God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, were to show up today at St. Thomas, what tables would he turn? Would he approach the Altar to spill out the contents of our offering plates from their presumptuous perch next to his Body and Blood? Would he let Buck out of his crate to run loose in the Fellowship Hall, destroying coffee hour goodies right and left? Surely God wouldn’t find a cause for righteous anger with this House of God? Our nice little Christian family on Westport Road is certainly not a “marketplace.” We’re not breaking any big rules, like those corrupt and money-grubbing merchants in the Temple ….?
Before we let ourselves off of the hook so easily, let’s take a look at our Gospel lesson. First, the merchants in the Temple are not the bad guys that we usually imagine them to be in this story. They are merely doing the business that allows the system of Temple sacrifice—the worship ordained by God at that time—to run smoothly. Their job is to provide pilgrims with unblemished animals for sacrifice, as required by scripture, and to change coins tainted with the idolatrous image of pagan emperors for pure ones worthy of an offering to God. John, unlike the other Gospel writers, does not say that there is any corruption or sacrilege in these merchants’ dealings. As merchants and onlookers watch the pure coins mix with the impure coins on the floor, and the freed doves dirty the tables, and the loose cattle trample holy things, they must have been confused by Jesus’ zeal, wondering why on earth he is so disapproving of what he sees, why he wants to bring chaos into the midst of their safely ordered lives.
Secondly, we must notice that this is not just a story about Jesus’ human side losing his cool and justifying our own righteous anger. John carefully places this story at the beginning of his Gospel, rather than at the end, as do Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It follows closely upon John the Baptist’s testimony that he is the one who “prepares the way of the Lord,” and it therefore serves as a purposeful illustration of the words of the prophet Malachi: “See I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” John’s Jewish readers know, too, the words of the prophet Zecharia who cries out that, when the Day of Judgment comes, “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts.” With all of these Old Testament allusions, John is telling us that, in coming to set things right in the Temple, Jesus is appearing among us as God, the Lord of Hosts. His displeasure at what is going on in the Temple is not a display of human anger but is instead a sign of God’s mysterious judgment. God, present in Jesus, is here for change that we don’t comprehend, our story tells us. God is here to intervene, to turn tables, to shake up our human notions of holy and unholy, pure and impure, wise and foolish, abundant and scarce.
Like the Jews bringing their sacrifices to the Temple, we too long for the presence of God. We thirst for it; we plead for it. We search the heavens and the earth for a glimpse of it. We come to church in hopes of touching it, if only for a moment. But while God’s presence can soothe our hearts and center our souls, it sure can be a threat to our institutions and to any of our boxed-in thoughts and ways. When God meets up with rigid human customs of any kind, or with proud and certain human wisdom, the furniture starts to fly and the coins get thrown all over the floor. Paul reminds us in our Epistle today that it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” We ask God to show us the wise answers, and we get darkness and folly. We ask God to vindicate our cause, to shore up our cherished institutions, and we get a Cross.
In our churches, we ask for God’s presence, but do we realize what we are asking for? As Annie Dillard writes in her famous passage on encounters with God: “The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.”[1] When God arrives, we too should expect the kind of change and disruption that those merchants experienced in the courts of the Temple. We experience not an angry God, a God bent on punishment, but we experience a strange God, a God whose wisdom is not our own, a God whose light can appear as darkness. Jesus, writes Rowan Williams, “stands for [this] strangeness of God. He is the ‘ray of darkness’ in the world of our religious fantasy. He is that which interrupts and disturbs and remakes the world.”[2]
Interrupts, disturbs, and remakes. That is what Jesus does in the Temple. He interrupts the carefully regulated program; he disturbs the deeply held notions of God’s people; and he remakes the grand Temple built of human hands. Through the darkness of his suffering, crucifixion, and death, he replaces the Temple with his risen body, of which we are all a part and in which we are all made new. The problem is that, in this world, we are never finished with transformation. God must keep coming; the Spirit must keep molding us; Jesus must keep shaking us out of the ruts that we fall into so easily. I’m sure that each of us could think of many ways in which God molds and remakes our lives, but I was struck this week with Jesus’ presence turning over some tables in our Fellowship Hall…!
At our Lenten Book Study on Tuesday, we began with a discussion of the practice of Christian hospitality, as described in Diana Butler Bass’s book, Christianity for the Rest of Us. We started out, as you can imagine, congratulating ourselves. “Oh, hospitality is one of our strengths at St. Thomas,” we affirmed. We are friendly to newcomers; we organize a terrific coffee hour; new members tell us all the time that our friendliness is what made them stay among us. Hospitality, though, is defined by Bass as “the creation of a free space where strangers become friends.” It is a welcome that mirrors God’s open-armed acceptance of every human being, no matter how strange or unappealing they seem to us. “Who then are the strangers in, around, or near us?” we asked one another in our discussion. Let’s see … Surely they don’t include the homeless people who want to sleep in our field or Meditation Garden? Or the neighbors whose dogs use our grounds for a bathroom and whose cars sit for weeks in our parking lot? Or the preschool who rents our downstairs space and uses our Fellowship Hall and always seems to need something from us, without responding in kind? Wait--Do we really show God’s open-armed hospitality to all of them? Do we even want to do that? All of a sudden, we looked around, and low and behold, our metaphorical round white tables were lying askew; the plastic tablecloths were ripped in two, and the plates of cookies were scattered all over the floor. We gazed despondently at one another and felt judged and found wanting. I really didn’t know what to say.
After reading today’s Gospel, I better understood. I also checked out a chapter on hospitality in Scott Bader-Saye’s book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear. He explains that we experience Christian community as a safe, fenced-in area—as a family in whose presence we can relax the vigilance that we are forced to maintain in the rest of our lives in a big, scary world. He talks about a parish that described itself as very hospitable, but in which newcomers weren’t integrated into the life of the place until they took the time and initiative to “get to know us and how we do things.”[3] He describes church growth workshops in which “cost-effective strategies” are promoted, in which leaders look at those to be welcomed from the point of view of pledging units, rather than welcoming everyone, without an eye toward the return. In understanding our hospitality in this way, we are like the merchants blithely going about their business on the Temple grounds.
Real hospitality, however, can only be offered by unbounded communities centered around Jesus Christ, communities that are constantly being interrupted, disturbed, and remade. If we’re going to beg Jesus to come into our midst, we need to be ready for him to break up our cozy chatting and to mess up our safe circles, to introduce people that we don’t like or understand and to leave us feeling uncomfortable and unsafe. When God comes, in answer to our prayers, let’s not waste time cleaning up after him. Let’s give thanks for the divine interruption and turn our arms outward to welcome—to truly welcome—the changed life that he brings.
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