Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent Year B

Hi all,

Here is the sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, 3-15-09. This is the stampede sermon. I might post a few notes about this episode in the Gospels later this week if I get time. Meanwhile, peace be with you,

Pr. J


3-15-2009, Lent 3B
Salem-Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, Tennessee
John 2:13-22; Romans 4:13-25
Stampede!


It was the month of Nisan. Late March on our calendar. The flax harvest was about to begin. The late rains watered Judea and Galilee all month long with spring showers. Dirt roads turned to mud churned up by hoof and foot and cart wheel, but that did not stop the many thousands of pilgrims from making their journey from as far away as Gibraltar in the west and Jewish colonies in India to the east. Sometimes starting out months in advance and many times traveling on foot they flocked by the thousands and the tens of thousands to the Holy City, Jerusalem, the City of David where they converged on one of the wonders of the world, King Herod’s Temple.

The Passover was very close. On the 15th day of Nisan the Hebrew people across the Known World would celebrate and remember the one event that made the Hebrew people into a nation, their freedom from slavery in Egypt. For those who spent Passover in Jerusalem and had come to make their sacrifices in the Temple, it was as if they had come into the very presence of God, close enough to see and feel and even smell the presence of God in the constantly rising smoke of sacrifices, the electric atmosphere of the city, and the never ending all pervasive odors of burnt offerings and incense that drifted down from the Temple and blanketed the whole city. The spring rains would clear the air everyday, but the sacrifices would go on and on and on and in no time the smokey haze and smell of burning sacrifices would descend upon the crowded city once again. People were taught that the sacrifices were the only way they could approach God, the only way they could have forgiveness of sins, the only way they could have salvation, and the only way they could enter God‘s kingdom. Jesus came to change all that.

Jesus went up to Jerusalem during that time before Passover. We will come back to that part of the story when Jesus enters the city during our Passion Sunday readings. For today the Gospel of John is concerned what happens after Jesus led his disciples through the city gates. Like many thousands of other Hebrew people from near and far Jesus entered the Temple. His expectations were probably much like those of many other people. He expected to enter a place set aside as the House of God, a special, sacred, holy place where one might be able to experience the presence of God in some small way, through sacrifice, prayer, or listening to the teaching of the many rabbis and Pharisees who held their own private classes and forums in the wide-open courts and columned proches of the Temple. One does have certain expectations for a place like a temple, especially if it is The Temple in Jerusalem.

Fr. Bruce Chilton, who teaches at Bard College in Dutchess County, New York, made a compelling case in his Lenten lectures a few years back and in his book Rabbi Jesus that Jesus and his disciples came to make their own Passover sacrifice at the Temple. That would easily explain what happens next in the Gospel, but even if Jesus didn’t come like many others to make a sacrifice he would still have been very surprised at what he found. In the Court of the Gentiles and in the rooms formerly occupied by the schools of the Pharisees he found stables and pens and cages for animals and tables for money changers.

Ooops! Not what one expects to find in a temple of any religion.

Only a few years before, while Jesus was in Galilee, the High Priest Joseph Caiaphas finally had enough of the nit picky Pharisees. He was tired of the Pharisees constantly watching priests perform the rituals and the prayers and the sacrifices day in and day out. The Pharisees were the worst possible critics. They would find a fault with a prayer, a flaw in the liturgy, a miniscule mistake in a sacrifice, and they let the priests know it with a vengeance. Finally Caiaphas said enough is enough! All this petty complaining is interfering with the work of his priests! So he booted the Pharisees out of the Temple. He threw their offices and their schools out on their rump. He brought the Temple stockyards and animal handlers from the Mt. of Olives into the Temple, into the spaces formerly occupied by the Pharisees, and he told the Pharisees they could have the old Temple barns for their offices and schools - and good riddance!

And so when Jesus entered the Temple on this occasion he found not the clean and stately courts of a magnificent wonder of the world filled with devout worshippers of God but something more like the old Chicago stockyards filled with cattle, sheep, lambs, pigeons, birds of all kinds, and plenty of stinking manure to boot, not to mention scads of people tending the animals, shoveling manure, hauling feed, and a battalion of priests more than willing to take your good Roman or Greek coin and turn it into official Temple shekels, for a fee of course, so that you could then turn around and give those shekels to yet another priest so you could buy your sacrificial lamb in the very shadow of the altar. The priests had a real racket going.

Even Jesus can be surprised. And he was.

Many years ago when I was still very little, before I started school, I used to sit up late into the night with my mother’s step-father watching westerns on TV. He was addicted to westerns and he watched every single western there was to watch on TV back in 1959: Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Bat Masterson, Wagon Train, Rawhide, and more. As a result I learned long before I started school about things like stampedes. But it took me many years to realize that the classic image of the stampede from Wagon Train and Rawhide can be applied to today’s reading from John.

The impression we get from the Gospel of John is that Jesus intentionally, deliberately, with some planning and preparation forcefully drove the sheep and cattle out of the Temple. That’s a stampede in any 1950’s western. There is no other way to look at it. There was no peaceful, magical leading of the animals out the gate of the Temple, through the city streets and into the countryside beyond. It was a dirty, messy, loud, business that probably involved the disciples and others helping Jesus against the priests who were trying to stop him. We are forced by the Gospel to imagine a great uproar in this great wonder of the world. There is a confrontation between Jesus and his disciples and the priests. There’s the scuffling and shouting of many, probably thousands of people. And although I do not believe that Jesus himself would have encourage the harm of other people - it absolutely goes against what he had been teaching and practicing up to this point - still, other people probably found here the occasion to do harm. This is probably where Barabbas found the opportunity to commit murder and the reason why he was arrested and sentenced to be crucified. And then there were the animals. Hundreds of them. A stampede of sheep and cattle surged out of the Court of the Gentiles, through the Eastern Gate of the Temple, and down into Kidron Valley, back toward the Mount of Olives where they came from.

“You have turned my Father’s house into a market place!” Jesus shouts as he chases the animal handlers and sellers out of their stalls, overturns the tables of the money changers and scatters their glittering coins across the stone pavement. Going back to the Greek text in the Gospel of Matthew one finds even more colorful wording used. Jesus shouts at these people that they have turned his Father’s house into a “cave of thieves.”

You know the priests would be none too happy about all this. The entire Temple has been disrupted at the worst possible time - Passover is nearly upon them! I think Caiaphas himself faced off with Jesus for the moment and demanded to know his reason for doing this. “What sign can you show us for doing this?” At least he gave Jesus benefit of a doubt.

Here the Gospel of John comes to the whole point of telling us this story: Jesus answered them: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

“It’s taken us 46 years to build this Temple and it’s not done yet!” came the angry, skeptical response. “Will you raise it up in three days?” Clearly the priests did not understand Jesus the way the Gospel of John understands him.

The Gospel goes on to tell us that later, after the empty tomb and the events of Easter, the disciples would understand Jesus' words in terms of the temple of his body, which would be crucified, buried, and then raised from the tomb, not the great stone wonder of the world where Jesus had just caused a major uproar.

The Apostle Paul tells us that we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, those who seek signs of power, and foolishness to Gentiles, those who seek wisdom; but to those who are called to follow Christ, both Jews and Gentiles, he is the power of God and the wisdom of God who cleanses us of our sin even as he once cleansed the Temple.

During Lent we are called, those of us who seek signs and those of us who seek wisdom, to follow the Lord who cleanses us and makes us acceptable before God. He was not daunted by what he found in a great stone wonder of the world. Neither is he daunted by what he finds in the human heart, and with the compassion of God he confronts the sins of the heart and sets them right. Let him into your hearts and minds and souls this Lent, that he may cleanse us of our sins this day and every day.

Peace be with you