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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.
As you heard in today’s Gospel Reading, when presumably the first of three Passovers of Jesus’s public ministry was at hand, Jesus went up to Jerusalem and found in the temple courts those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and those who were changing money. The Lord suddenly came to His Temple, and those sellers and money-changers did not endure the day of His coming (Malachi 3:1-2)! In what is said to be Jesus’s first public action in St. John’s Divinely-inspired Gospel account (Weinrich, ad loc John 2:12-22, p339), and a prophetic action at that, Jesus, after making a whip of cords, drove (or “cast”) them all out of the temple courts, with the sheep and the oxen, and He poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and He told those who sold the presumably-caged pigeons to take them away. God had made a provision for the sale of the things needed for sacrifices (Deuteronomy 14:24-26; Rock, CPR 25:2, 15), and the trade no doubt was a considerable convenience to those who came to the Temple from a great distance (Bruce, New Testament History, 189-190), but such trade did not belong in the temple courts, such as in the Court of the Gentiles, where in a sense it kept the Gentiles from coming to God and kept God from forgiving them. Jesus said to stop making His Father’s House a house characterized by trade. For, as expressed in Solomon’s lengthy prayer dedicating it, the Temple was supposed to be a place where people of all nations could come, seek and find there the presence of God, and so there receive the forgiveness of sins (1 Kings 8:22-53; confer Isaiah 56:7).
Characteristically, according to today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), the leaders of the Jews asked Jesus what sign He was showing them, presumably of His authority to do such things; in that way the Gospel Reading is arguably about Jesus’s authority, specifically that over the Temple (Ridderbos, ad loc John 2:14-16, p116). The leaders of the Jews apparently thought they had authority over the Temple and its courts, and they at least tolerated, if not arranged for and profited from, the trade that was taking place therein. In their asking Jesus for a sign, they essentially even try to exert authority over Him, trying to hold Him accountable to them, dictating to God what He may or may not do, in a sense setting themselves free from His judgment and acts, and showing themselves to be part of an evil and adulterous generation (Rengstorf, TDNT 7:203‑244).
In those ways, you and I are at times little better than they were. We may claim authority over God’s House that goes beyond what has been given to us according to our vocations. We may try to dictate to God what He may or may not do. We may try to set ourselves free from God’s judgment and acts, and so, in these or in other ways, we show ourselves to be part of an evil and adulterous generation. For, we all sin against God’s unchanging moral law! In today’s Old Testament Reading (Exodus 20:1-17), we again heard God say that He is a jealous God, thinking of Himself as married to the people of Israel, the Church, and not tolerating any third parties’ entering into and adulterating that relationship. That “righteous desire for His people to be faithful” (TLSB, ad loc Exodus 20:5, p128) is related to Jesus’s zeal for His Father’s House (TLSB, ad loc Jn 2:17, p1781). As prophesied by a psalmist (Psalm 69:9), Jesus’s zeal for His Father’s House consumed Him, leading to and culminating in His death on the cross and resurrection from the grave for the sins of the whole world, including your sins and my sins. By grace on account of that death on the cross, we can come to the Temple of Jesus’s Body, seek and find there the presence of God, and so there receive the forgiveness of our sins—our sins related to God’s authority, and all our other sins, whatever they may be.
Jesus’s finding and casting out traders from the Temple may itself fulfill prophecy God spoke through Zechariah (Zechariah 14:21; confer Morris, ad loc Jn 2:15-16, p171 n.74; Weinrich, ad loc John 2:14-22, p346; but compare Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Zechariah 14:20, 21, p415). Regardless, Jesus Himself is greater than the Old Testament Temple (Matthew 12:6), for in the flesh of the man Jesus dwells, as in the Tabernacle and Temple of old, the Word Who existed from eternity with God the Father and Who is Himself God, and from the flesh of the man Jesus His disciples saw the glory of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth, as that glory shown forth from the Tabernacle and Temple of old (John 1:1-2, 14). In the Gospel Reading, in His riddle-like answer to the Jewish leaders’ demand for a sign, Jesus claimed to be that Son of God, and Jesus claimed both to be human, in that the Jewish leaders could destroy (or kill) Him, and to be God, in that He could raise Himself from the dead three days later (confer Luther, ad loc John 2:20, AE 22:247). How much the Jewish leaders understood is debated, but Jesus’s claim was used in one fashion or another both as evidence at His trial and in mocking Him as He hung on the cross for you and for me (for example Matthew 26:61; 27:40). Ironically, the Jewish leaders asked for a sign but missed it when it came, and, ironically, the sign they wanted led to the one sacrifice that could truly make up for our sin and thus meant the end of the Old Testament Temple as a place for the meaningful offering of sacrifices for sin (Morris, ad loc John 2:19, p175). For, on the cross, Jesus sacrificed Himself for us, and there God made Jesus what St. Paul calls Him in the Epistle Reading: wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So, we can come to the Temple of Jesus’s Body, seek and find there the presence of God, and so there receive in faith the forgiveness of sins. The signs that God voluntarily gives us without our demand are intended to create and sustain that saving faith and so give us eternal life in His Name (John 2:23; 20:30-31).
Although perhaps Jesus’s disciples did not fully remember and understand the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken until after His resurrection, the Holy Spirit taught them all things and brought them to their remembrance (confer John 12:16; 14:26; 20:9). At least then, they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken, perhaps as the people of Israel after their rescue at the Red Sea believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses (Exodus 14:31). Today, the Lord’s servants read and preach God’s Word to us. The Lord’s servants put God’s Name upon us with water and the Spirit in Holy Baptism, and so there those who believe in His Name become children of God, born from above not by the will of the flesh but of God (John 1:12-13; 3:3, 5). The Lord’s servants forgive individually those who privately confess in order to receive Holy Absolution (John 20:22-23), and the Lord’s Servants cast out those who do not repent (John 6:37; 9:34-35; 12:31). And so, to the repentant, the Lord’s servants distribute with bread and wine Christ’s Body and Blood, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. The Lord’s original provision for the sale of things needed for sacrifices at the Temple was to lead to whole households partaking of their sacrifice for sin in the presence of the Lord and so also rejoicing (Deuteronomy 14:26). So also here, at this Rail, we come to the Temple of Jesus’s Body and Blood, seeking and finding the presence of God, and so receiving the forgiveness of sins and rejoicing.
Hymn-writer Thomas Kelly was a preacher at odds with the established church of his day, and so he was banned from its pulpits in Ireland, but thanks in part to his marrying a sympathetic woman of substantial means, he built chapels where he could preach, until he suffered a stroke that led to his death (Pollack, 529; Precht, 665). We do not have to agree with Kelly’s teaching in order to praise God for what we find in the Temple of Jesus’s Body and Blood, singing what Kelly wrote as we did in the Entrance Hymn the words with which we now conclude (Lutheran Service Book 429:6):
To Christ, Who won for sinners grace / By bitter grief and anguish sore,
Be praise from all the ransomed race / Forever and forevermore.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. + + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +