The Currency of Faith Text: Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22
By: Rev. Terry Carty
Date: 03-11-12
Place: Kingston Springs United Methodist Church
Season: Third Sunday in Lent
Main Point: We trivialize God as we reduce religion to a commodity that meets our need for God. Jesus calls us to approach God on God’s terms, not ours.
Read John 2:13-22
Synopsis: Jesus makes Temple worship impossible at the busiest time of the year — the Passover sacrifice. He confronts those who had turned the Temple courtyard into a marketplace, and they ask him what sign of authority he has for doing this. He tells them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
I thought that I was doing pretty well with my personal Lenten disciplines a couple of weeks ago. Since that time two things have happened: 1) the storm hit Kingston Springs and damaged our church, and 2) I read this scripture and began to really dig into its meaning.
At first glance we see this story of Jesus wreaking havoc in the Temple and we move on. Our assumption is that religion had slipped so far that the Temple was looking like a Walmart and the money changers were cheating people. We buy in to Jesus’ righteous indignation and we cheer him on.
On deeper examination, we might realize that this is one of the few stories that is in all 4 of the gospels. In the other 3 it comes late in Jesus’ ministry and it helps us understand why the scribes and the pharisees want to kill Jesus. But in John it comes in the 2nd chapter – this indicates that it may make a defining point about the message of Christ.
A look at the facts tells us that our assumptions have filled in details that may not be true at all. The first assumption is that the moneychangers and the sellers of livestock were taking advantage of the people and cheating them. Well, that would explain why Jesus got so agitated – right?
At the season of Passover many Jewish people made the journey from their villages, some very far away, to the one and only Temple to make their sacrificial offering. The offering required was an animal that had no blemishes, no broken bones, no scars. These were hard to come by – farm animals were most certainly scarred or blemished – if they weren’t before the journey, they would have been by the time they got to Jerusalem. So there were people who lived in and near Jerusalem who carefully raised the animals that would be suitable for sacrifice by the laws laid out in Leviticus.
There was a courtyard at the Temple that was called the Court of the Gentiles. It was an area where non-Jewish people could come without actually entering the holy parts of the Temple. The Temple officials allowed those who raised the livestock to sell to Jewish pilgrims there. And there is nothing to suggest that these sales were anything other than a true service to those who came to worship.
And the moneychangers: we are quick to assume that they were fleecing (cheating) the people. But there is no word of that in scripture. As people traveled to Jerusalem, in their pocket was their home currency. It would be the same if we had visitors in our worship from Canada and Mexico today. Their money would need to be converted to the local currency in order to be of worth. The moneychangers in the Temple were merchants who earned a living by exchanging foreign currency for the local currency, shekels, to buy animals for the sacrifice.
This whole operation was as normal to Temple worship as when our ushers go to the back, get offering plates, and move down the aisles to receive the Sunday offering. I asked myself, “how did this normal circumstance become a defining episode in the life of Christ?”
I worried over it. I obsessed. Well, I obsessed as much as I could when the business of storm damage began to demand a major part of my attention. And then Jesus’ point began to emerge in my mind. He was not angry. People were not being cheated. People were being denied the normal way they worshipped at the most holy of seasons. Jesus was disrupting the normalcy of the whole picture.
The God of Abraham and Jacob and Moses who spoke from burning bushes and caused mountains to shake and caused mortals to fall to the earth in fear – the God whose very name was too holy to say aloud – was being worshipped by standing in line to get currency changed and then going to a booth to buy a lamb that would be delivered on their behalf. Jesus upset the Temple to upset the normalcy.
Just as I was beginning to settle into a discipline for the Lenten season, the storm came along and I reverted to business as usual. I fell back into normalcy and I again put God into a conditional place in my life. Today’s scripture story awakened me to the fact that my temporary Lenten disciplines, so quickly abandoned, were the exchange of currency in a business-as-usual normalcy with God. I was buying a sacrifice that I hoped would fill a God-shaped void in my soul.
Jesus came to say that God wants all of us. God wants to shape us. God wants us to be so in awe that we live lives that are God-focused all the time. God wants our acts of worship to be acts of worship – not exchanging what is real to us for what we think might make God happy with us.
I am not sure what I am going to do different though. All I really know is what I have come to accept as orthodox Christianity. But I am going to take what is left of this season of Lent – the time leading to Easter – and I am going to try to do something different.
Each of us is on a journey from our assumed normalcy to discovering the reality that God has for us.
The journey is difficult and the path is not well marked. It is best traveled together with others who are on the journey. That is why our church is offering more small groups – the Women’s Lenten Study Group, the Wednesday night Bible Study, the emerging men’s group, the Senior High Comfort Zone, the Sunday School classes.
The currency of faith is not something that buys us something to make us OK with God. The currency of faith is our life, spent in growing relationship with God who is shaping us into God’s image.