+ + + 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 + + +
