Listen, it can’t be the same as it ever was (continued)

JOHN: HEARING IS BELIEVING

Gospel of John, Chapter 2

Just before the great Passover celebration, Jesus went to Jerusalem. He entered the Temple court. Various animals were being sold for sacrificing in the Temple. Moneychangers were taking foreign currencies in exchange for local money which could be used to purchase the sacrificial animals. In the Temple, Jesus picked up some cords, fashioned them into a whip, and chased the businessmen out of the temple. Picture it: swinging the whip at the men, driving the animals, scattering the money, knocking over tables and chairs, and yelling, “Get out! You can’t turn the house of God into a marketplace!” Ah yes, gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

The authorities did not just let this pass. They would have confronted anyone who disrupted the Temple commerce. And so, they demanded that Jesus give them a “sign” that he had the right to do what he was doing.

He answered, “Okay, tear down this Temple and I’ll raise it back up in three days.”

“What?” responded the authorities, “Why, it’s taken forty-six years to build it and you think you can rebuild it in three days?” (Actually the Temple had not even been completed at this time; work would continue for another thirty-seven years!)

John did not tell whether the conversation continued from there. He did give us an inside track, however, to understand what Jesus was getting at. He wrote that Jesus was actually speaking about his body instead of the Temple building and that after Jesus was resurrected, his followers remembered him saying, “Tear down this temple and I’ll raise it back in three days.”

It would soon be Passover (Pesach) when Jesus cleared out the Temple. Passover was a supercharged time for the Jews. They were celebrating the most significant event in their history – the exodus of their ancestors from Egypt (some 12 – 14 centuries before this time). Passover was about victory over their enemies, starting with the defeat of the Egyptian Pharaoh. It was about liberation for the people, starting with leaving slavery in Egypt. It was about taking up a completely new lifestyle, starting with making their home in Canaan, the Promised Land. It was about being in right standing with God through faith expressed in animal sacrifices, starting with the lambs’ blood painted on the doorways of their Egyptian houses (see Exodus 12:12-13). And most of all Passover was about the presence of God, Yahweh, the great I AM, living with his people, starting with the pillar of cloud and fire and with the Tabernacle (see Exodus 40:34-38). The center of Passover celebration and of the whole religious/cultural system of the Jews was the great Temple in Jerusalem. Think of it as the nuclear reactor that powered their whole way of life.

With everyone preparing for that celebration, Jesus went into the Temple and forcefully put a stop to the buying and selling of the animals. If you stop the buying and selling of the animals, then you stop the making of sacrifices on the Temple altar.¹ If you stop the sacrifices, then you slam the brakes on the Temple itself. You are saying, “The Temple and everything it powers, the whole system, is no longer needed.” Yikes!

Jesus was not saying that the Temple and the sacrifices and the law were bad. They were not bad; they just were never intended to be the way for all people to find God. They could not be that. They were intended as the way to prepare for the way people can find God. Their purpose was to get ready for the arrival and work of Jesus the Messiah. The Temple was the precursor of Jesus being the presence of God in the flesh in the world. The time was coming for it to be set aside, once Jesus had completed his mission.

The Temple was under the authority of the King of Israel. It was kings who planned it, built it, refurbished it, defended it, and rebuilt it. The Jews looked to the king to be empowered by God to run the Temple. That is why they wanted Jesus to prove his authority to do what he was doing. He was acting like he was in charge of things. In essence, Jesus was declaring that he is the true King of Israel and therefore the true King of the World – the one in charge. “Prove it!” they demand, “Show us that you have the power and authority of God to stop the Temple!”

His answer was, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Of course they thought he was talking about the massive building in Jerusalem. No one, including the men who had joined him, understood what he was really talking about… until after… “After he was raised from the dead.” Then his followers understood and believed that the Temple in Jerusalem was fulfilled by the temple of Jesus’ own body. The Temple was replaced by Jesus himself as the dwelling of God on earth, the house of God, God in the flesh, God with us. The sacrifices done in the Temple were replaced by Jesus’ sacrifice of his body as the way for all people to be freed from slavery and reconciled to God. The Law that managed behavior was replaced by the Holy Spirit given by Jesus as the way to know and live in relationship with God. He was raised from the dead – that is the sign that he has the power and authority of God (to drive the moneymakers out of the Temple and anything else he needs to do). He was raised from the dead – that proves he is the true King of the World.

When Jesus was raised from the dead, he launched his Kingdom. His Kingdom is the new system that replaced the old system of Temple and sacrifices and Law and every other system humanity comes up with to try to make life work. It’s not merely a heavenly home we go to when we die. His Kingdom is the new environment in which we have hope for new life and for experiencing the lasting changes we need.

The larger environment in which people live is called culture. Everyone is part of a specific culture. Culture is the massive, complex set of beliefs, customs, and social behaviors that influence your attitudes, values, priorities, and practices. You do what you do largely because of the culture in which you are embedded.

The Temple in Jerusalem was the purest and most perfect example of the Jewish culture at the time Jesus declared his authority to bring it to a halt. The religious leaders taught the idea that they belonged to God meant that God belonged to them. It really did not matter what was in their hearts – enmity, hostility to all other peoples – they were inside the walls with God. They looked at the Gentiles (non-Jews) as outsiders and themselves as insiders. The Temple had an actual wall built around its court and no Gentile was allowed inside it. The heart of the Temple was the Holy of Holies, where God was supposed to live. In fact, it had been centuries since the Lord had made himself known there (See Ezekiel 10:18 and Ezekiel 11:23). He was not inside with the Jews. The walls of hostility and division and national pride in their hearts actually separated them from God as much as the Gentiles were separated from God.

When he drove out the moneychangers, halted the sacrificial system, and stopped the Temple proceedings, Jesus was showing that he was going to begin a new culture. A new set of beliefs, customs, attitudes, values, goals, and practices. The Christ culture. The Kingdom of God. In the new culture nobody is an insider or an outsider. All are united and the Lord God lives in all together. For followers of Jesus, our cultural characteristics come from that. Our beliefs and attitudes and goals come from the fact that God lives in us and he makes us into a new kind of people. Our customs, values, and behaviors are shaped more by God’s presence than by the human culture in which we grow up or in which we live. This new culture is centered in a real connection we have with God the Father, Son, and Spirit. God lives in us and we live in him. We are able to live as the people of God receiving, learning, and carrying out our way of life from that connection.

“After he was raised from the dead,” a new regime was begun. There is a new environment, a new culture which means there is a new way for people to live, a new way for relating to God and to each other and to the world. There is a new way for being God’s people and for living it out in the world. Because of Jesus’ new regime, we can find better ways of living. Better ways of making our marriages and families. Better ways for morals and ethics. Better ways of handling jobs and finances. Better ways to have relationships and friendships. Better ways to operate communities and societies. Better ways to deal with our problems and to enjoy life.

A new power has taken over. There’s a new energy operating which restores the broken, frees the addicted, heals the diseased, finds the lost, reconciles enemies, and drives out fear. John described it in a letter he wrote: “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him… We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:16,19). God-like love becomes the energy for how we live.

I once was leading a group session as a counselor at an adolescent treatment facility. There were about a dozen kids in the group. We were outside on a deck between two buildings. There were two brothers in the group – 16, 17 years old. One of them had been in the facility for several months, the other only a few days. They got into some kind of argument, and it escalated until it was disrupting the group. I went over to them and told them to cut it out. The newer one kept it going. I stepped up to him, face to face, and told him I needed him to settle down so we could continue the group. He went into an aggressive stance – clenched fists, staring me down. He was about my height but 20-30 pounds heavier, 20-30 pounds of muscle. I started thinking, “He’s going to hit me, and it’s going to hurt.” But he needed to know some things. He needed to know that he was not running things; he was not in charge and he was not going to be in charge and that was okay. He also needed to know that there was a better way to handle life than what he had learned – fighting, stealing, assaulting, vandalizing, running away. And he needed to know that I and the rest of the treatment program staff cared about him enough to respect him, to challenge him, and to help him. To my great relief, he did not hit me. He calmed down and after group apologized for his behavior. Several months later, when he was being moved to another facility, he hugged me, thanked me, and said he was scared. He would not have made that admission that day in group. I told him I understood how he felt but I knew he could make it because he had made changes and was headed in the right direction.

You need to understand those same things about Christ’s relationship with you. You are not in charge; you are not running life, yours or anyone else’s. When you have faith in Jesus the Messiah, you are embedded in his Kingdom living under his authority. He is in charge and that is okay; in fact, it is very, very good. And you need to understand that his way of living is better than your way of living. You can accept and follow new desires, new dreams, new priorities, new behaviors that come from Christ. And you need to understand that everything he wants for you and everything he does for you is because he loves you. He cares about you enough to challenge you and to carry you and enable you to love. His love is available to fill you and to overflow from you and energize all you do.

In the second chapter of John, we have heard two things from the Word about his work. These two things are inseparable. First, he works on the inside, like wine going into the stomach. Jesus goes into our hearts, minds, and spirits. There he forgives our sin and gives us a new way of being – new identity, new way of thinking, new values, new purposes, new future. On the inside he heals the damages we and others have done to our hearts – brings peace, hope, confidence, trust, direction, even joy.

Second, we have heard that Jesus was establishing on earth a Kingdom to be the environment for people to live in. The Kingdom has the ways of God and the people of God and the mission of God. That is our guidance system and support system. They are the things that explain and influence and motivate how we receive the life Christ gives us and then how we live it out.

The two events described in chapter 2 set the stage for all the events in the Gospel of John. Clearly hearing what the Word was saying at the wedding and in the Temple enables us to understand everything he did from that point onward.

Footnotes

1 This explanation of what Jesus was doing is based on N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus, HarperCollins, 2011, chapter 10.