Jesus is the Temple

From The Gospel of John, New Testament for Everyday Bible Study. This new book of mine will be available next week, November 8. Cool cover at the bottom, right?

John 2:12-25

12      After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

13      The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

18      So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore 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.

23      Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. 24 But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people 25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.

         I know, and perhaps you do too, people who at one time were “on fire” or “aglow” for Jesus and then, suddenly or slowly, the fire faded and the glow dulled and I wonder now if they lost their faith or never had faith to begin with. When Billy Graham got off the ground as America’s evangelist, he had more than a rival in Canada. His name was Chuck Templeton. The two of them were friends. At one point Chuck, whose glow was beginning to dull, tried to dissuade Billy from his evangelical faith. Billy dug in and Chuck walked away from the faith, eventually to become a leading journalist in Canada. There are at least two stories in the faith journey: one that begins and grows over time, not always consistently of course, and another that seems to begin and over time the person falls away. Jesus knows this kind of response, and so does John’s Gospel.

         Jesus, late in chapter six, will say, “Yet there are some of you who do not believe” (6:64). Jesus, John tells us then, “had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him.” The saddest words about faith then appear in John 6: “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (6:66 [what an ominous chapter and verse]). Peter’s words lift our spirits: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God” (6:68-69). Willa Cather, in her wonderful Death Comes for the Archbishop, spoke of faith like Peter: “They believed they were on the right trail, for they had seen no other” (65). Two stories of faith. Always lurking in John and in the church.

         John does not write about this theme to scare believers but to instruct all of us that faith is a journey, not a sip of water or wine before the journey begins.

Trouble at Passover

         Speaking of journeys. How about Jesus’s? From a small wedding in the backwoods of Galilee to the temple of all temples in Jerusalem – at least according to Josephus. From the sign of water into wine to turning tables topsy-turvy in the temple. These shifts in Jesus’s own journey themselves are signs of bigger events to come!

Passover was one of three major events on the Jewish calendar. At Passover Jerusalem flooded with people, more even than the abundance of wine at Cana. Inside the temple courts, under the stoa that ran along the perimeter of the temple edifice, one could purchase what was needed for sacrifices, which was a lot more convenient than walking or carrying farm animals on a long three-day walk from the Galilee or farther (can you say Rome or Alexandria or Babylon?). Jesus discovers, and surely he had noticed this since he was a little boy, the temple had become a bazaar for trade. When I was a child our church did not permit traveling speakers to sell books or products inside the walls of our church on Sundays. Perhaps it was a bit legalistic for some but it was an expression of sacredness. What we have encountered in our world is that the whole world, to adapt a poet, is not a stage but a marketplace for consumers. Some call it “mammonolatry,” the worship of money and things.

Jesus is about to call the temple “my Father’s house” (2:16) because he “is in closest relationship with the Father” (1:18). So he goes all-protest on the situation. He makes a “whip out of cords” to drive out the animals from sacred space (2:15). He flips the tables and the coins spin away in all directions. He stiff-armed those selling doves in the temple courts. Quite the impression. The disciples saw in Jesus’ behavior the “zeal” Jesus had for temple purity, which was temple for his Father (2:17).

         Passover was policed because the festival celebrated liberation from Egypt’s pharaoh, and thus provoked Jewish enthusiasts to ponder and act for liberation from Rome. Small riots broke out that were dealt with brutality.  Tense enough that for Passover the Roman prefect, who lived on the coast at Caesarea, would come to Jerusalem to maintain order. So everyone was on edge. Jesus led the edge.

         So they ask him “what sign” he could do or “show” that “prove” his “authority” (2:18). Ever ready for an iconic moment, Jesus’ response is classic: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (2:19). There is no way they had the faith to see the sign-ificance of those words. They take them literally and wonder how anyone could destroy and rebuild what took 46 years in three days (2:20).

Sign-faiths at Passover

         Faith, as we have said, works wonders at times. Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote of what I would call positive sign-faith, saying, “It is a full-bodied relationship in which mind and heart, spirit and flesh, are converted to a new way of experiencing and responding to the world. It is the surrender of one set of images and the acceptance of another. It is a matter of learning to see the world, each other, and ourselves as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered” (Taylor, The Preaching Life, 44).

His words are a sign. John explains them: “But the temple he had spoken of was his body” (2:21). It would be nice if the disciples could have perceived the sign-ificance of his words. They did, but not until “after he was raised” (2:22), at which time “they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” Above we observed that Jesus called the temple “my Father’s house” and that he was in close relationship with the Father, but now that relationship is so close Jesus is himself the temple! David Ford gives a list that shows how prominent this “Jesus is” theme. “John suggests figural interpretations of Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the exodus, Elijah, Isaiah, David in many psalms, Israel’s festivals, many titles of Jesus, several symbols for Israel, and more” (Ford, John, 75). He’s right. If we ponder the words of John we will discover that his words have sign-ificance too!

         The impact of signs, which is what chapter two of John is about, leads both to believing (2:11, 22) as well as to sign-faith or sign-believing that was inadequate (2:23-24). The words need to be read carefully. There is a seeming affirmation of the response of some people in verse twenty-three: “many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name.” That seems positive, but verse twenty-four suggests sign-faith is not enough: “But Jesus would not entrust [same word as “believe”] himself to them.” True faith forms an intimate bond of trust between a disciple and the Messiah. In that bond each commits to the other in a way that they abide in each other. The apostle Paul will speak of being “in Christ” and Christ “in us.” John’s language here is like Paul’s.

Why did Jesus refuse to commit himself to these people? Because he perceived like no other what was in humans (2:25). His signs divide the audiences (9:16; 11:45-48; 12:37). Some surrender to him because of signs (2:11; 3:2; 6:2; 20:30-31); others accept the reality of the miracle but do not see through it to the identity of Jesus; yet others repudiate him completely. To see his miracles as signs one must perceive the identity of Jesus beyond the material miracle itself. One could say then that sign-faith is a first but not final step in the journey of true faith (Thompson, John, 67-68). True faith abides over time in trusting Jesus who abides over time in nurturing the believer.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Everyman’s Library; New York: A.A. Knopf, 1992).

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Lanham, Md.: Cowley, 1993).