Third Sunday of Lent

Is this the same Jesus who said, ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth’, who told his followers, ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also’, not very gentle Jesus meek and mild is it? The tables used by the money changers overturned, coins flying everywhere, the animals being sold for sacrifice driven out of the Temple.  Jesus is clearly very angry with what he has seen taking place in the Temple in Jerusalem.

This isn’t just a church on some street corner, this is the beating heart of Judaism throughout the world.  The focal point and centre of Jewish worship, music, politics and society.  The place for national celebration and mourning.  It was also the place where you would find more animals, dead and alive, than anywhere else in Palestine.  But more importantly than any of these, it was the place where Israel’s God, YHWH, had promised to live in the midst of His people.

Perhaps today we find it difficult to understand exactly what the Temple in Jerusalem meant, and still does mean, to the Jewish people, and what went on there because we really don’t have any parallel.  Don’t think in terms of St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or any other Christian Church, or indeed secular place. But to fully understand the Gospel reading we need to have some understanding of the Temple and why some of the activities went on there. First century Jerusalem may have been the centre of Judaism, but it was under Roman occupation and rule. Jewish religious laws and the Temple, were controlled by the Chief Priests and the Sanhedrin Council, which was a puppet organisation, set up to keep the ruling classes of the Scribes and the Pharisees on the side of the Romans, and King Herod. Normally a city of over 100,000 people, but on Passover and other major Jewish festivals the population swelled to about 1 million, with Jews travelling from all over the then known world to be in Jerusalem.  Even today Jewish people say, ‘next year in Jerusalem’, as a promise that they will return.

Just think of a town the size of Stafford increasing in population up to 10 times its usual number, the problems of finding lodgings, additional food, water and wine, ritual bathing facilities, the need to acquire additional sacrificial animals for the Temple rituals.  An increase in commercial activity for the city and the Temple, but added problems for the Roman occupying force.  It must have been very tense few days trying to keep the lid on it all during Passover and a huge sigh of relief when the pilgrims went home. The Temple itself is a vast complex, which took six decades to re-build.  A large open space with a central building, the Temple itself adorned with gold and marble.  The origins of which go back to the Exodus, when the Jewish nation was led out of Egypt by Moses and travelled for 40 years to find the land promised to them by God.  God had told them through Moses to create a tent as a sanctuary so that God could dwell among them.  In Exodus we read the lengthy details of how the sanctuary, the tabernacle and all the furniture in the sanctuary was to be made, and what precious materials they were to use.  The centre of all this was the mercy seat, made out of pure gold where God would deliver all His commands for the Israelites. This portable sanctuary went with the Israelites as they travelled those 40 years to the promised land, and whenever they stopped the sanctuary was erected so that God could be amongst His people, and they could worship him there.

When God created the covenant with the Israelites, making them His special people, He warned them not to make treaties with the people living on the land which they were to occupy, or it would become a trap against the nation.  And yet, time and time again that’s what the Israelites do, enter into treaties with foreign nations who occupy Israel and Judah, that’s what has happened in Jesus’ time, the Jewish religious leaders have entered into agreements with the Romans, and are given a certain amount of authority over the people, especially in the collection of Temple taxes and animal sacrifices.  As long as everyone plays their part it all muddles along without too many problems.  Occasionally there is a rebellion and the Romans deal very strictly with it, crucify them and it settles down again.

Let's get back to the Temple complex and see what is happening.  Upon entering the outer porch, there are scribes holding classes and debates, as well as merchants selling animals for sacrifice, and money changers in their stalls, the people who change ordinary money brought from various lands by the pilgrims into Jewish coins to pay the Temple tax.  These have been allowed to operate inside the Temple by the Chief Priest, Caiaphas. Both these activities, the Temple tax and animal sacrifices are symbolic to the Jewish nation of the covenant relationship between God and His people.  Sticking to these laws is considered an act of obedience, a way of marking the Jews as belonging to God. This temple tax is a half shekel. It’s the same tax for everyone, rich or poor, it’s a sign of atonement and equality, indicating that all Jews are the same worth in the sight of God.  Jewish pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem had to exchange their local money into Temple money to pay the tax and so make an offering. In overturning the money changers tables, Jesus was offering himself as the perfect ransom paid once for all, and an end to the unfaithful ways.

If the trade of the money changers had been straightforward they would have been fulfilling an honest and necessary purpose.  But what they did was to charge a commission for every half shekel they changed, and made a second charge on every half shekel of change they had to give if a larger coin was tendered.  So if someone came to the temple with a two shekel coin, he had to pay to get it changed, and again to get his change back.  On a transaction like that the money changers charged the equivalent of one day’s wages. What enraged Jesus was that pilgrims to the Passover, who could ill afford it, were being fleeced at an exorbitant rate by the money changers.  It was a rampant and shameless social injustice, and what was worse, it was being done in the name of religion, and with the connivance of the Chief Priest and the Temple authorities. Then when we look at the merchants who sold the oxen, sheep and doves for the sacrifices, it was a racket as well. It seems sensible to buy your animal for sacrifice in the Temple area, but the law required that animals offered for sacrifice must be perfect and unblemished, and to make sure they had to be inspected by a ‘Mumcheh’, an inspector, who you paid to do it.  If you bought an animal outside the chances are the ‘Mumcheh’ would turned it down and you had to buy another from the merchants inside the Temple, and when you consider that a pair of doves cost up to 15 times the real price inside the Temple, it really was a rip off, a bare faced extortion at the expense of the poor and humble pilgrims who effectively were blackmailed into buying the more expensive animals. These are the things that drove Jesus to act in the way he did, the arrogance of the temple authorities who had substituted true worship of God for pagan rituals. Micah, a prophet 400 years before Christ, warned the Israelites about the use of burnt offerings to try and appease God, and told them, and us what God requires us to do, ‘And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God’. There is no place in our religion for burnt offerings in an attempt to appease God. Our covenant is based on a personal relationship with God, not sacrifices. Our sacrifice was made once and for all on that Cross on Good Friday.

The irony of this Gospel story is that ordinary people, realizing that they couldn’t keep God’s law in the way that God wanted them to do, sought to approach and appease God with a sacrifice instead.  They were actually being cheated when they should have been nurtured, and instead of trying to reform the system, Jesus called down judgement on them.  A new Temple would be raised in place of this corrupt place of worship, a temple not made of stone, but of human beings, a temple open to all and for all.

When Jesus ate with sinners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Gentiles, those who the Jews regarded as unclean, he wasn’t only acting out of Grace. He didn’t become a sinner or unclean, but the sinners were forgiven and made clean by God’s Grace. He was symbolically stating that Israel should be a welcoming community to everyone, Jews and Gentiles, because everyone is equal in the sight of God, rather than an exclusive sect, who protected themselves and their way of life from others.   

Several decades after Jesus’ death on the Cross and His resurrection, the Romans obliterated the Temple in a war against the Jewish rebellion, and all the Jews were turned out of Jerusalem.  The misery on that day was never quenched, and is still the driving force for the Jews in Israel, to have the Temple re-built again.  What stood as the magnificent house of God failed to be the place where God dwelled among the Israelites, rather God chose to dwell in the fragile body of our saviour Jesus Christ, who was the unblemished sacrifice, the ransom for all people, the fulfilment of the covenant, the Messiah.

In this season of Lent it is a timely reminder that our obedience to God is always threatened by rituals devoid of truth and Grace, that our religious observance can be  tarnished by our worldly obsessions with power, greed and intolerance.  When we proclaim Jesus as the Risen Lord, we proclaim His kingdom rises victorious against these threats, the very threats that overtook the intentions of the Temple in Jesus’ time, and reflect on what is the true character of God’s house.  For that we have to go to another mountain top with no marble walls or gold fitments, and listen to a new Kingdom proclaimed that begins, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven’.  Amen.