Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
March 15, 2009
John 2:13-22

What Consumes Us?

It’s the day everyone has been looking forward to for weeks.  Passover, the celebration of the exodus, liberation from captivity in Egypt, the foundational event in the imagination of all three western religions:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

Almost three million pilgrims have made the journey to Jerusalem, the geographical and spiritual center of the Jewish people.  They have come to satisfy their religious duty, to make new friends and reconnect with old ones, and, yes, to party.  Picture it with me:  Crowds descending on the temple, anxious to purchase their sacrifice.  Most have traveled long distances, so it had not been practical to bring a cow or carry a lamb or a dove with them.  They count on being able to buy one when they get there. 

I can imagine their haste to find just the right animal, the purest.  The first ones there would have their pick of the best.  Those who had trouble along the way were late to arrive – perhaps a woman in the late stages of pregnancy, or a child who demanded to be carried, or a relative who was lame held them up, slowed them down.  But now they have arrived in Jerusalem at long last, hungry and tired.

Picture it with me:  Finally here at the magnificent temple, for some, their first visit, perhaps the visit of a lifetime.  They enter the temple court – a large open area of about 24 acres surrounded by columns.  It must have looked something like the Springfield fairgrounds without the regulations of the Massachusetts Departments of Health and Safety, or Gaspee Days in Pawtuxet with livestock added and people filling all of Gaspee Plateau.  See the people of all shapes and sizes milling about.  Hear the cries of frightened cows.  See lambs tethered, pulling against their restraints and doves flapping in cages.  Everywhere, the smell of animals, sweat, fear – and blood as the sacrifices were made.  Imagine wide-eyed children from villages who had never seen anything like it.  Parents trying to keep track of the family.  Where are you?  Don’t get lost!  Hold my hand!  People pushing, tripping over bundles, jostling in lines, searching for coins in the folds of their robes. 

And, yes, there is the problem of the money.  The coins the pilgrims had brought with them could not be used because they carried the likeness of the emperor – so they had to convert them to plain coinage so as not to violate the commandment, “You shall not make for yourself an idol....”  The money had to be changed to a coin without this desolation.  So everyone was lining up before the money-changers’ tables to pay the temple tax.  And all this had to be done quickly, before sundown, when the Passover celebration would begin.    

The commotion begins.  Jesus – perhaps with some of his disciples – has caused a scene.  He was always doing this, wasn’t he?  This time he has fashioned himself a whip.  We can imagine it licking the back of the neck and shoulders of the farmers selling their wares, grazing their rumps and driving the sheep and the cattle out of the court.  He has turned over the tables of the money changers; tossed their coins into the air to land across the rough ground.  He has put a stop to the buying and selling, at least for the moment!   Temple leaders step forward to question this interruption, this attack on their business profits. 

Telling the story long after the resurrection, remembering that day in Jerusalem, the disciples recalled the words of the psalmist, “Zeal for your house will consume me” (Ps. 69:10).  His followers were aware of Jesus’ very human yearning and regret for true worship – something that consumed him. 

What does it all mean?  Why does Jesus object?  Probably not that animals were being sacrificed.  And probably not that money was being exchanged.  No, the issue is more fundamental than that!  More likely that this grandiose, superficial display of piety on this important feast day had been reduced to this:  a commercial spectacle, not a house of worship.  The temple authorities are not happy.  Who does this Jesus think he is!  What right does he have to do this?  Where is his authority?

Jesus challenges them:  “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”  They don’t understand the play on words, that he is speaking of the temple of his body, not the physical building that has been under construction for 46 years. 

And here is the radical shift:  For the Jewish nation, the temple is the locus, the place, of God’s presence.  The temple in all its magnificence and glory, and the religious leaders that maintain the temple, is where God can be found.  But for the emerging church after the resurrection, when the gospel writer John is telling his story toward the end of the first century, Jesus is the locus, the place, of God’s presence – God in the human one, not in the building. 

When we hear this “cleansing of the temple story,” found in all four gospels, we would do well to remind ourselves that our faith is founded on the life and ministry of Jesus – not on the bricks and mortar of our institutional churches, or on their Books of Worship.  Our buildings and policies are simply assets that are available for mission and ministry – but they are not the ministry itself. 

A number of years ago, a friend of mine was teaching a Women’s Studies class at URI downtown, and she invited me in for a morning to talk about Jesus and his relationship with women.  Annie was Irish, a former nun who had left her order because, she said, there was no love there.  She had been on a long journey to reconcile her spiritual self with her institutional history.  Annie and I had gone to divinity school together, and she was one of those people who went through life with the Bible in one hand The New York Times in the other. 

Many of her students in this class were older; some had grown up in a church but long since left for one reason or another.  Some simply thought religion was outmoded, irrelevant, a waste of time.  Some had been divorced and refused communion or not allowed to remarry in their church, so they had wandered away, angry and hurt.  I had them bring their Bibles, and together we looked up text after text where Jesus talked with women, healed women, respected women, counted on women.  They had thought their churches had taken Jesus away from them, that their churches and Jesus were synonymous. The Jesus that we studied that morning was the Jesus that challenged every ruling system that cannot see a fresh revelation.

And here in our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus is consumed with his mission to bring the Jewish religious practices back to basics, back to the prophetic call of love of God and love of neighbor.   

Was this out of keeping for Jesus?  I don’t think so:  he seemed consumed by his mission all along.  He was consumed by God, with the truth, with the poor and the hungry and the sick.

And what of us?  What consumes us?  Is it religious zeal for our church?  World peace?  Justice for all?    What consumes us?  What is our passion?

Writing this sermon, I was reminded of author Alex Haley who spent 10 years researching and writing his best selling novel, “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which traced his ancestor Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped in Africa and brought to American as a slave two centuries and six generations earlier.  I remembered a documentary about Haley who was so consumed by uncovering his past that he would forget to go home, to sleep, to eat, to attend to his wife and children.

We benefit from others’ passions:  We are grateful for the consuming zeal of the medical researcher who is working day in and day out for a cure for cancer.  We value the consuming zeal of the artist who creates a painting of great beauty, or a piece of music of great soul, or an enduring work of poetry or fiction.  We respect the consuming zeal of a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, or a Mother Theresa who work for peace and justice and mercy.  Great souls who are consumed can bring about great good in our world. 

And, of course, the opposite is also true.  Tortured souls who are consumed with power – or the lack of it – bring about much suffering and evil with bombings and boycotts, assassinations and ethnic cleansings, with hatred and lies.     

More likely, you and I are consumed by things not worthy of our energy:  shopping for things we don’t need, preoccupation with food and diets, dependence on alcohol and drugs, escaping into work and making money – if we have a job – until we drop from exhaustion.

What consumes us?  The “what” that consumes us is important – distinguishing between godly zeal like that of Jesus and sinful zeal like that of a Hitler or a Mexican warlord intent on keeping his drug cartel going. 

My concern is that too often we live ho-hum lives of comfort and indifference to those around us – that we are not consumed enough about the poor and the hungry and the homeless; about those who cannot find work, whose retirement savings are gone, who languish forgotten in foster care and nursing homes; about those dying of hunger in Zimbabwe, of rape in Congo, and violence in Providence.  Probably no society before ours has ever spent so much time worrying about its happiness, its quality of life, and the personal satisfaction of its members as our American society.  We can be too-much consumed with ourselves.

When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, he replied, “You shall love your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.”  And the second?  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  So we can be consumed with ourselves – as long as we balance that with being consumed with God and each other.

Jesus, our teacher and role model, was consumed – perhaps it’s even fair to say he was tormented – with a zeal for God.  This zeal for God’s truth brought him to the cross.  Do you suppose he knew that was where he was headed?   I wonder if he was heartbroken by the lack of responsiveness and understanding of his ministry.

And what of us?  What consumes you and me this week, when we are smack in the middle of Lent, half-way to the cross? 

Amen.