Flipping Tables

 A Sermon for the Commemoration of Benefactors Service

Robinson College, Cambridge: 3 March 2023

 

 
John 2.13-22
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.
 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.
 16 He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!"
 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me."
 18 The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us for doing this?"
 19 Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
 20 The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?"
 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body.
 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
 

 
A popular internet meme, in Christian circles at least,
            involves an artistic depiction of the cleansing of the Temple.
 
The text that accompanies it reads:
 
“The next time someone asks you ‘What Would Jesus Do?’
            Remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip
            is within the realm of possibilities.”
 
It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it nicely punctures the façade
            of Charles Wesley’s ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild’.
 
The subtext is clear:
            Christians might be all, ‘turn the other cheeky’…
                        but don’t count on it!
            Sometimes they can get shouty and punchy too.
 
But I have to say that I find this rather disturbing,
            and the reason it disturbs me,
            is to do with a podcast I’ve been listening to,
about the rise and fall of Mars Hill church in Seattle,
            whose pastor Mark Driscoll notoriously promoted
                        what he described as a more aggressive form of Christianity.
 
His critique of mainstream churches was that they promoted a weak, passive faith,
            and that if people who lived
                        in what he called the ‘real world’ were to experience God,
            then they needed to meet a Christ
                        who could hold his own under any circumstances.
 
In other words, they needed a Christ
            who could flip tables and chase people with a whip.
 
In support of this macho, cage-fighter Jesus,
            Driscoll turned to the book of Revelation,
            a text almost certainly known to the author of John’s gospel.
 
Driscoll says:
            ‘In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament),
                        Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg,
                        a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed.
            That is the guy I can worship.
                        I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ
                        because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.’
 
Similarly, in his sermon on the cleansing of the temple,
            delivered against a backdrop image of a large whip,
Driscoll says the following:
 
            “Here comes Jesus and he is furious, he is angry…
            Now some of you will be very surprised to hear that Jesus got angry
                        because you have wrongly perceived
                        that Christianity just means that you be nice.”
 
What may not surprise you, hearing this,
            is that his 15,000 strong church closed down in 2014,
over accusations that its pastor engaged in persistent bullying,
            both of staff members and of people from the congregation.
 
Now, I need to be careful here,
            because I am very aware that only one who is without sin
            should cast a stone at another for their sin,
and so I don’t want to get too drawn into a direct critique of Mark Driscoll,
            who I’m sure has many redeeming qualities.
 
Rather, my critique is of the attempt to shape Christianity,
            as a religion of hyper-masculine aggression;
because this is a project which, I think,
            fundamentally undermines the witness of Jesus,
            as the one who’s life, death, and resurrection bring an end to violence.
 
What is at stake here, as far as I’m concerned, is something that really matters,
            because it takes us right to the heart
            of what it means to be a Christian.
 
At my church in London we have long taken the view that we are a ‘peace church’:
            we have our peace candle lit each week,
            we sell white poppies in the run up to Remembrance Sunday,
            and we hear sermons on the importance of taking nonviolent direct action.
 
Of course, not all Christians agree with this stance,
            with many drawing on Augustine’s Just War Theory,
to argue that there are circumstances where it is entirely appropriate
            for a Christian to engage in violence and warfare.
 
Indeed, many of the early Baptists took this position,
            and fought on the side of Cromwell in the wars of the seventeenth century;
similarly many from our churches
            fought in the two world wars of the twentieth century,
and many of us will know, love, and respect people
            who serve in the armed forces today.
 
So, to suggest that we worship a nonviolent God,
            made known in the person of a nonviolent Jesus,
and that this means those who follow that revelation,
            should also be nonviolent people,
is not an uncontroversial statement.
 
And it strikes me that any attempt to argue for Christian nonviolence
            must grapple with what is going on
            in the cleansing of the temple,
which is the single event in the ministry of Jesus,
            where he gets anywhere near an act of violence.
 
So just what was it that got Jesus so worked up,
            that he took a whip in his hand, in the Temple courtyard in first century Jerusalem?
 
The Hebrew Bible was clear that the Temple
            should have been the place of divine encounter,
            it should have been the place where God’s blessing was made available for all,
and it should also have been the place that defended justice for the weak,
            the place where the vulnerable could come for sanctuary.
 
But the Temple had become a place where the wealthy could gain easy access to God,
            while the poor faced often insurmountable costs to purchase their sacrifices.
The Temple was not a place where God was available to all,
            it was a place of benefit for the few, not the many.
 
There is something important here that the author of the gospel wants us to grasp,
            about the revelation of God in the person, life, and ministry of Jesus:
and this is that God will not be contained or constrained
            within religious institutions;
the blessings of God are not to be the exclusive preserve of the elite.
 
It’s noteworthy that what Jesus said as he enacted this visual parable,
            is different in John’s account compared to the other three gospels.
 
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus declares,
            “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’;
            but you have made it a den of robbers." (Matt. 21.13; Mar. 11.17; Lk. 19.46)
 
In the fourth gospel, by contrast,
            Jesus makes no mention of either prayer or robbers.
Instead he cries:
            ‘Take these things out of here!
            Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!’ (Jn. 2:16)
 
John’s version of this story isn’t a critique of corrupt mismanagement,
            but rather a critique of the entire financial system
                        that had grown up around the presence of God;
it is a condemnation of the very principle
            of buying divine grace and favour.
 
It was the Temple institution itself that came under Jesus’ condemnation,
            because the blessings of a restored relationship with God
                        had become contained and constrained within an economic system
                        which privileged the wealthy, and disadvantaged the vulnerable.
 
When Jesus says, ‘Stop making my Father's house a marketplace’,
            the Greek word used here is emporion,
                        from which we get our word ‘emporium’
                        meaning a ‘centre of commerce’ or a ‘place of trading’.
 
The trigger for Jesus’ action in flipping tables and grabbing a whip,
            was not sinful behaviour on the part of those trading in the temple,
                        but the very economic and religious system
                        that required their presence in the first place.
 
So when we look at who, or what, is under judgment here,
            we find that it’s not individual people being whipped for their corruption.
 
This wasn’t Jesus taking an action of anger
            against acts of personal sinfulness.
 
Rather, it was an act of condemnation against a societal system
            that had turned the free and abundant grace of God
            into an economic transaction that generated profit for the powerful,
                        advantage for the wealthy,
                        and which kept the poor far from God’s grace.
 
It would be very easy at this point
            to find ourselves making analogies with Martin Luther,
                        railing against the selling of indulgences;
            but where we need to depart from Luther,
                        is in the alignment he made between corrupt Catholicism
                        and what he regarded as Jewish legalism.
 
Jesus was not here condemning Judaism,
            he was restoring it,
bringing it back to what it was always supposed to be;
            which is a religion of grace,
            founded on the free gift of God’s presence.
 
What was judged was not Judaism,
            it was the religious system;
which had turned the gracious gift of the covenant
            into a transactional system for the benefit of the privileged.
 
This condemnation of the Temple becomes even clearer
            in the exchange which follows,
where Jesus makes a parallel between the Temple and his own body.
 
It’s important for us to realise
            that Jesus is not here casting himself as a temple-destroyer.
 
He does not say that he will violently destroy the temple.
            Rather, he says to the priests:
            ‘destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’;
and we are invited, as enlightened readers of this gospel,
            to realise that Jesus is speaking not about the Jerusalem Temple at all,
            but of his own body, the new revelation of God’s presence on earth.
 
The Temple had become a system of violence,
            a system of oppression,
and the original readers of John’s gospel would have known
            that the Jerusalem Temple was, in fact, destroyed by the Romans,
            some thirty years after the death of Jesus.
 
The author of this gospel, written towards the end of the first century
            is inviting his readers to make a comparison
between the violent end of the Temple,
            and the violent death of Jesus on the cross.
 
The oppressive system of religious exclusion
            that had grown up around the presence of God in the Temple
            met its end at the hands of the Romans in 70CE;
and although the body of Jesus,
            also had its moment of violence
            at the hands of the Romans on Good Friday,
the testimony of the faithful was that in this case,
            violence was not the end of the story
 
The cleansing of the temple is therefore to be understood
            as an enacted parable of the crucifixion,
            as a sign of the new way that God is present with people.
 
Jesus is the nonviolent revelation of God’s abundant grace for all,
 
No longer is God to be made known through exclusive institutions,
            no longer is God to be sold for profit,
            no longer will God be complicit in systems of exploitation
 
And the people of God, the church of Christ,
            continually need to re-hear and re-learn
                        the lesson of the cleansing of the Temple,
            if we are to remain faithful to the revelation of God in Jesus.
 
It is too easy, I think, for us to become focussed
            on the conservation of our institutions,
too easy for us to seek the preservation of our Temples,
            too easy for us to fall into the trap
            of monetising that which God would give freely to all.
 
And whilst I recognise that we are here today
            to mark the generous benefaction of Sir David Robinson,
            and the others who founded and funded this wonderful College,
 we must keep before us the profound truth
            that the wealthy do not get more privileged access
            to God than the less wealthy.
 
So as we consider Jesus’ enacted parable of judgment
            against the Temple in Jerusalem,
we need to ask ourselves honestly
            whether there are barriers of power and privilege
            that creep into our institutional life?
 
We need to keep ourselves honest about, for example,
            our attitudes towards wealth and educational opportunity,
particularly as these intersect with ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
 
This is an invitation for us to consider our own situation,
            and to identify those barriers
                        that we construct or perpetuate within our own communities;
            barriers of access which keep people from grace,
                        the negotiating of which turns places intended for the benefit for all,
                        into a free market economy of privileged access and powerful elitism.
 
And it is an invitation for us to think once again
            about what it means for us to be followers of Jesus,
the one who absorbs the violence of the cross
            turning the certainty of death into the possibility of new life for all.
 
It is an invitation for us to consider what it means for us to be a people of peace
            who nonetheless take nonviolent action
                        to challenge those systems of domination
            that embody oppression and exploitation
                        in our society and in our world.
 
If the blessing of life in all its fullness,
            is not experienced abundantly by all, without exception,
            (and I’m afraid it is not),
then, my friends, we still have a task before us
            as together we embody the good news of Jesus Christ
            in a world of inequality and injustice.
 
So, who’s up for overturning a few tables?