March 15, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Following Christ’s Way

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18–25
John 2:13–22

God asks us in Jesus to share his anger when in his name people’s dignity is diminished,
or love is abused, or the poor are exploited, or when he himself is neglected
This is true religion: to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God.

Donal Neary SJ
Communion Reflections Year B

This story takes me back to the days I spent as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in the country of Mali, in Africa, to the marketplace near the village in which I lived. Although it’s nearly ten years ago now, I can still see the vivid colors of the fabrics stacked one on top of another, the vendor eager to barter, to sell a bolt of fabric, which then her partner to the left would make into a long-flowing bubu or a Western shirt for you at a bargain price. And next to that vendor were thirty others down the whole row offering the same barter and bargain. I can remember in the next section the selling of doves, yes, and hides and, in a good week, cattle parts—the smell of uncured beef, flies everywhere, donkeys hee-hawing and chickens running around aimlessly pecking for scraps of food. In the next section were the fonctionnaires, who would be the ones exchanging money—the educated professionals dressed in lavish textiles and cloths. Beyond them would be the farmers selling their crops, rice, maize, millet, soy, and the vegetables—a tiny green pepper or carrot that had somehow made it through the growing season, against all odds. All the tigis—the vendors—would have their shortwave radios playing, all to a different tune, a rhythmic West African singer like Salif Keita or Ali Farka Toure.

The cacophony of the marketplace in Mali, Africa, with all the colorful sights, lyrical sounds, and pungent odors of rawhide, is what I imagine when I think of the scene that confronted Jesus in Jerusalem that day. Imagine all this going on in the very real heat of the day, on the steps of the temple, a place intended to welcome all people to worship God.

Our present day marketplace is not so different from the ones we experience in developing countries or even the one we can imagine Jesus knew in first-century Palestine. Just beyond our steps here on Michigan Avenue is the marketplace of the world—storefronts, restaurants, and shops for everything from clothing to clocks, from fashion to food, real estate to spa retreats. These are not so different at all from the wares being sold in Jesus’ day on the steps of the temple.

The story of the cleansing of the temple appears in all four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, which alerts us to its importance. Here in John, it is located at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, unlike in the Synoptic Gospels, where this story is located toward the end and precipitates Jesus’ condemnation to death on the cross.

That it is located toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry here in the Gospel of John helps us to identify in this story the core theology: that the relationship with God that we dearly desire eludes us not by God’s doing, but by our own. We come so close to real relationship, right relationship with our creator, and yet we have made idols of the elements of our lives: what we eat, what we wear, what we do, what we have, what we pursue. It is our human condition, and it is hard to rise beyond that.

And this apparently makes Jesus angry. Although the text does not tell us how Jesus feels, we can discern that he is mad, because he makes a whip, like that used for driving cattle, and he drives the merchants and money changers away. He scatters the coins and overturns the tables. Then he says, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

Some call this anger a righteous anger. We can learn a lot from this moment, from what makes Jesus mad. Jerusalem was the religious and political center of Palestine and the place where the messiah was expected to arrive. The temple was located there, and many families from all over would travel to Jerusalem during the religious feasts. (As we know from the text, this story takes place during the Passover celebration, a weeklong festival. The Passover was one day, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread lasted the rest of the week. The entire week celebrated the freeing of Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.) This temple has a long history. Solomon had built the temple on this same site nearly 1,000 years prior, but his temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians and was rebuilt and dedicated in 515 B.C. Now it was undergoing the renovations and rebuilding that Herod had ordered. People from all over the world and from many different faith backgrounds were coming to worship there, and yet upon their arrival, they were distracted and lured to worship something powerful other than God.

In this story there is a conflict of values. And it is painfully clear that what Jesus has come to proclaim about laying down his own life for the people eludes them altogether. This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, they say; it must be this actual temple you refer to, yes?

The old way of doing this was being overturned. Offering sacrifices was no longer necessary, for in Christ, there was a new way to access God; God in Christ would be present with people in a new way. This was Jesus’ good news, the news that we long to hear but find it challenging to remember. Jesus knows that some people who were following him devotedly would also be the ones to later yell “Crucify him.” The old temple was to be replaced by a new temple, which was Christ himself. God was now to be present among people in a new way, which was open to all.

We know what those who heard Jesus could not know until after the resurrection—that the temple to which he refers is his very own body. The temple that was built to bring people closer to God had become an end in and of itself and therefore lost its purpose.

“Justice,” Walter Brueggemann says, “is sorting out what belongs to whom and giving it back to them.” And in this action in the marketplace, Jesus is returning to the core values of what belongs at the temple: clear access to God.

William Sloane Coffin spoke about Jesus’ efforts in his ministry to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Perhaps that is precisely the aim of this story at this place in John’s Gospel at this time in the liturgical season of the church.

We can learn a lot from what makes us angry. It shows what we really care about. In the healthy human heart there is a built-in value system that condemns injustice and pursues righteousness.

At the opening inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., this January, the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, prayed for anger, tears, and discomfort—not in and of themselves, of course, but for what they would teach us about where God is calling us to be: to overturn a wrong, to sort something out, to make something right or whole again. Robinson said,

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will . . .

Bless us with tears—for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger—at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort—at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience—and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility—open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance—replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity—remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

Which brings us to today’s reading from 1 Corinthians—that we proclaim Christ crucified, that Christ came into the world and became deeply involved in our humanity, only to lay down his life in suffering love for us.

This is not the symbol of power we come to expect—this cross. It is a stumbling block, indeed, for it is not controlling or dominating; it does not coerce. The power of the cross is that even the most violent and humiliating acts that aim at controlling, dominating, claiming life—even there God has the power, God has the authority, God has the glory. And where we would expect to find the ultimate in weakness, instead we find the ultimate triumph and life.

So our own value systems are overturned in this new reality of Christ crucified. And we are invited to reclaim those values again today—to overturn the tables of our own self-righteousness, our own complacency, our own conceptions of what it means to be doing our part as religious people and to devote ourselves to the thoughts and practices that lead us to God and do away with everything else.

Once we have found a steady place, we tend to cling to it, to want to stay there, but that is not Christ’s way. Christ says, Follow me. Keep following me. Reach out to the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed, the downtrodden. When you see injustices of the world that make you angry, take that energy and dedicate your life to doing something about it.

For Christ came to stand with people who are being diminished, to acknowledge and embrace dignity for all God’s people, to comfort the abused, to defend the poor, to reach out to the exploited. So we ask ourselves where in our own lives we have neglected Christ.

Above the anger about the idols at the temple, out in the distance, as the heat rises in the late afternoon sun, there stands the place where Christ will eventually go to offer for the world the ultimate gift: his love that knows us intimately, knows what is in us, in all our limitations, and who loves us still and beckons us to follow him—to the cross and beyond the cross, to all the promises of heaven. We proclaim Christ crucified, which is a stumbling block to many, but to those who are called, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Amen.