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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps you have had experiences in your church past similar to those I have had in my church past, where someone argued against bake sales, rummage sales, and other such dealings on the basis of either this morning’s Gospel Reading from St. John’s account or the other Gospel accounts’ similar reports of Jesus’s cleansing the Temple. The three-year cycle of appointed readings that we are following gives us only this Third Sunday in Lent in the second year to consider Jesus’s deeds and words in cleansing the Temple, and so today we do so under the theme “House of Forgiveness”.
Where Jesus’s cleansing the Temple belongs on the chronology of His three-year ministry is much debated, but, in St. John’s account before us, the event is described after we are told that Jesus and His disciples stayed for a few days in Capernaum with His extended family. Just before that visit, Jesus had changed water into wine, the first of His signs at Cana in Galilee, and He thereby showed forth His glory, and His disciples believed in Him. Later, when Jesus was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many also believed in Him when they saw the signs He was doing. So, in between those two statements about people believing in Jesus on the basis of His signs, we have the Gospel Reading’s account of Jesus’s cleansing the Temple, the Jews’ asking Him for a sign of His authority to do such things, and Jesus’s giving them the sign of their destroying the temple of His body and of His raising Himself back to life.
We might say that the real matter at stake in the Gospel Reading is the significance of the Temple and Who has authority over it. As we usually understand from the Reading, the Jews of Jesus’s day, who thought they had authority over the Temple, at a minimum were permitting, if not also profiting from, the Court of the Gentiles’ being used both for the sale of sacrificial animals and for the exchange of currency, from secular coins, with their images in some cases of Roman gods, to special Temple coins, without such blasphemous images. The Old Testament called for such a sale of the sacrificial animals for those who had to come a great distance to Jerusalem, and the exchange of currency was similarly a convenience for the Passover pilgrims. But, locating the sale and the exchange in the Court of Gentiles really desecrated the Court of the Gentiles and so kept that area from being used as it was intended, as a place where non-Jews could seek and receive the forgiveness of their sins, in other words, as a “House of Forgiveness”. When Jesus claims authority over the Temple and with a whip drives out both those who were selling sheep, oxen, and pigeons and those who were exchanging money, St. John reports Jesus saying to stop making His Father’s house a house of trade, an emporium, as it were, a mall. Jesus’s similar statement recorded in the other Gospel accounts recalls both prophecy through Isaiah of God making the Temple a house of prayer for all nations and prophecy through Jeremiah of God condemning the Jews of that day for making the Temple a den of robbers. And, we know from the Temple’s dedication that prayers offered there were to be prayers for forgiveness. So, with His words and deeds, Jesus essentially says the significance of the Temple is that the Temple is to be a “House of Forgiveness”, and He Himself claims to have authority over the Temple. The very Jews who had desecrated the Court of the Gentiles ask Him for a sign of His authority and Jesus gives them the sign of their destroying the temple of His body and of His raising Himself back to life.
Now, so far here at Pilgrim, neither here in the sanctuary nor outside of it, have I seen a bake sale, rummage sale, or other such dealing that has desecrated the church and kept it from being used as it is intended, as a place where people can seek and receive the forgiveness of their sins, in other words, as a “House of Forgiveness”. But, consider with me other ways that we might keep the church from being used as it is intended, as a “House of Forgiveness”, or other ways that we might be like the Jews of our Gospel Reading. Might our primary purpose for coming to church on Sunday morning be something other than seeking and receiving the forgiveness of our sins? Might we seek signs other than those by which God gives us the forgiveness of our sins? Might we at times want authority to change what happens here to better suit our tastes or preferences? Even if we do not sin in those ways, we sin in other ways. The Holy Spirit can use today’s Old Testament Reading with its listing of the Ten Commandments as a mirror to show us our sin, the countless ways that we fail to live as God would have us live.
Because St. John’s Gospel account so often targets the unbelieving Jews, critics sometimes claim that it is anti-Semitic, that it hates the Jews and discriminates against them on account of their race. St. John’s Gospel account does not hate the Jews and discriminate against them on account of their race. Rather, God through St. John’s Gospel account calls the unbelieving Jews to repent and believe, lest they perish eternally. Similarly, God through our Gospel Reading this day calls you and me to repent and believe, lest we perish eternally. God calls us to repent: of our sins of coming to church for the wrong reasons, of our sins of seeking signs other than those by which He gives us the forgiveness of sins, of our sins of wanting authority to change what happens here to better suit our tastes and preferences—God calls us to repent of, to turn in sorrow from, all of our sins and to believe that He forgives those sins for Jesus’s sake. When we so repent and believe, God truly does forgive our sin, whatever our sin might be.
The author of the Sermon Hymn we sang today, “Glory Be to Jesus” is unknown, but one of its translators, F-W Faber, an Anglican priest who turned Roman Catholic, claimed in his translation that, to any of the faithful who said or sang the hymn, the pope would give an indulgence of 100 days applicable to souls in purgatory. Of course, we Lutherans rightly reject the practice of indulgences and the teaching of purgatory, even as the hymn rightly confesses that grace and life eternal are to be found in the blood of Jesus, poured from His sacred veins, which blood cries for our pardon, our forgiveness. So, in some sense, we should expect a connection between at least Jesus’s blood and the “House of Forgiveness”, and that connection is exactly what we find.
In our Gospel Reading, Jesus’s deeds and words rightly claim that He is divine, and, when the Jews ask Him to back up His claims with a sign, He essentially dares them to destroy the temple of His body and promises in three days to raise it up, which resurrection after three days itself was a sign prophesied by God through Hosea. At His trial, the Jews deliberately distorted Jesus’s dare and sentenced Him to death, a sentence the Romans carried out on the cross. The Holy Spirit well reminded the disciples of the Psalm verse in our Introit that prophesied of Jesus’s zeal for His Father’s house consuming Him, as His zeal for that “House of Forgiveness” brought about His opponents’ deadly hostility. For them to have been able to destroy His body, Jesus had to be human, but He demonstrated Himself also to be divine by raising Himself up. There was a resurrection of the body for Jesus, and there will be one for all who have died or will die in this world. As St. Paul writes by divine inspiration in today’s Epistle Reading, God the Father made His Son Jesus our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption. He is our “House of Forgiveness”. As the disciples, after Jesus was raised, believed the Scripture and the Word that Jesus has spoken, so we believe, and, by grace through that faith, we are saved by the forgiveness of our sins.
The Jerusalem Temple was a “House of Forgiveness”, but it is no longer there. In our Gospel Reading, Jesus makes clear that His body is also a temple, which, because of His death and resurrection for us makes it for us a “House of Forgiveness”. And, since we find Jesus bodily present here, this church is also for us a “House of Forgiveness”. Well did our Opening Hymn confess that “This earth has no better place / [for] Here [we] see [our] Savior’s Face.” In His courts here, as the hymn puts it, we trace His love, from the forgiving waters of the Baptismal Font to the bread and wine that is Christ’s body and blood present on the Altar, distributed, and received by you and me for the forgiveness of our sins. The hymn rightly prays that while the minister here proclaims “Peace and pardon in [God’s] name, / Through their voice, by faith” we might “Hear [God] speaking from the sky.” Here, and nowhere else, do we in these ways, as the hymn puts it, “walk with God”.
God Himself is present here, and, through those same miraculous signs, the Sacraments, by which He is present here, He also comes to be present in us, both as a body of believers and also as individuals. Together as the body of believers in the Church, St. Paul writes to the Ephesians that we all grow “into a holy temple in the Lord”, that in Him we all “are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit”. And, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that each person’s body, apparently even individually, is a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are not our own, St. Paul goes on to write, since we were bought with a price, and so we are to glorify God in our bodies. The context of those comments to the Corinthians is that of sexual relations, but we can think of all aspects of our lives. As in our Old Testament Reading with the people of Israel delivered from the slavery of Egypt, so with us delivered from the slavery of sin, the indicative statements of what we call “the Ten Commandments” describe us. They provide a rule, or guide, for our redeemed nature to live by as it struggles against our sinful nature still clinging to us. When the redeemed nature loses, as it will lose, and we sin, we again flee to the “House of Forgiveness”.
There are various arguments to be made for and against congregations having bake sales, rummage sales, and other such dealings, and I am not sure that today’s Gospel Reading says much, if anything, about having them, beyond not letting them get in the way of the congregation being used as it is intended, as a place where people can seek and receive the forgiveness of their sins, in other words, as a “House of Forgiveness”. We have considered how Jesus’s zeal for the Jerusalem Temple consumed Him and made both His body and thus also this church a “House of Forgiveness”, one to which we turn in repentance and faith and thereby ourselves become temples of God. One last thing that we have not yet considered is the second half of the Psalm verse in our Introit, of which the Holy Spirit reminded the disciples. “Zeal for Your house has consumed Me”, it begins, continuing “and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on Me”. Jesus Himself suffers the accusations and blame that others bring against God the Father. As followers of Jesus and thus of the Father, the same is true for us. The reproaches of those who reproach Jesus fall on us. Yet, even in the midst of such suffering and affliction we do not despair. In such circumstances, our Closing Hymn well puts these words on God’s lips (with what might be a play on the word “temple”):
When through fiery trials your pathway will lie,
My grace, all sufficient, will be your supply.
The flames will not hurt you; I only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.
Throughout all their lifetime My people will prove
My sov’reign, eternal, unchangeable love;
And then, when grey hairs will their temples adorn,
Like lambs they will still in My bosom be borne.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +