Sunday, March 3, Third Sunday in Lent

“For He Knew What Was In a Man”

Psalm 19; Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 2:13-25

Divine Service III with Holy Communion

Hymns: #560 “Drawn to the Cross” ; #611 “Chief of Sinners Though I Be”; #530 “No Temple Now, No Gift of Price”

 

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.

“Jesus knew what was in a man,” our Gospel says. There’s a phrase in Hebrew where God calls Himself “the heart-knower.” Jesus, being the Son of God, walked the earth with what must have been the terrible burden of knowing the thoughts and hearts and intentions of everyone around Him. Is that a gift you’d like to have? Not me! No way! I’m afraid I’d get my feelings hurt a lot. There’s things I’d rather just not know.

“It was almost time for the Jewish Passover,” says our Gospel. The Passover was the holiest festival on the Hebrew calendar. Jews from everywhere were required to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to be there. Visitors and foreigners would come to Jerusalem from all over to celebrate the Feast. The Passover was supposed to be a religious festival, a time for Israel to remember how the Lord had saved them from slavery in Egypt, and how God had them paint their doorposts with the blood of innocent lambs, and how the angel of death had passed them by.

But it had also become a time for the merchants and salesmen of Jerusalem to make a lot of money on the tourist trade. Jesus knew what was in a man. He knew who’d come to the Temple for the right reasons, and He knew whose hearts were wrong. In fact, Jesus knew the names and hearts and personal stories of every pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem. He knew their hopes and their needs and what they were hoping to find. He knew every soul who was coming to that place looking for help and looking for God, just as He knows what you came here looking for this morning.

The Temple in Jerusalem was set up as a series of inner rooms and courtyards. At the center of everything was the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, where a priest chosen by lot was allowed to enter only once a year. Outside of that was the Holy Place, where only the priests and Levites were allowed to enter to carry out their work. Outside of that was the Court of the Men, where only Hebrew

males in good standing were allowed in. (They’d kill you if they found you in there and you didn’t belong). Outside of that was the Court of the Women, for Hebrews ladies ceremonially clean and in good standing. And on the very outside was the Court of the Gentiles, the place where pilgrims and visitors and foreigners were supposed to be able to come and pray and learn about Israel’s God. “A house of prayer for all nations,” God called it.

When Jesus walked into the Temple courtyard, He found anything but a place of prayer. The place had been turned into an emporium, a flea market, a circus carnival, a Seven Mile Fair. There were lowing oxen and baaing sheep and cooing doves, for sale, to those who wished to offer a sacrifice. But your foreign money was no good in that place. It had to be exchanged for the Temple currency, which is where the money-changers, the kermatistas, came in, sitting at their tables, trading coins, usually at a less-than-fair rate of exchange.

Jesus could hear the thoughts of the salesmen and the moneychangers, chuckling gleefully to themselves as the coins piled up. And He could also hear the complaints of the pilgrims all around Him. He knew how disappointed some of them were to come to a holy place looking for comfort and peace, and find instead an open-air tourist trap so noisy you couldn’t hear yourself think, let alone pray. Just mooing cows, baaing sheep, and shouting salesmen, drowning out the voice of God.

Jesus didn’t want then, and He doesn’t want now, for people He loves to come looking for God, and be turned away by the way some of God’s people choose to behave. Anger isn’t always a sin, you know. There are some things that really ought to make us angry, especially if it’s something that’s destroying faith and hurting people and keeping them away from God. Sometimes a little righteous anger is a good and necessary thing. There was a story in the news feeds a few weeks ago about a church on the west coast (Lutheran in name only), who hold an annual Super Bowl Sunday service every year. This year, they had their stage set up as a football field, with white lines, green turf, and goalposts. A skit they did called for the pastor to kick a field goal – and she used a Holy Bible as a football! That makes me mad, sad, and depressed, all at the same time.

And contrary to popular opinion, not every church is “only after your money”. Some of them are; watch any of the prosperity gospel shows on TV. “A dollar a day keeps the devil away,” I once heard one of those moneychangers say. “Write a check to this

program, make a donation on our hotline, and God will bless you sevenfold.” “Sow a gospel seed to this ministry, and God will surely multiply it.” Now that kind of thing makes me mad, because not only is it not true, but all us Christians get painted with the same broad brush, and people see that stuff and turn away.

But that isn’t us; we can never be like that. We’re not here to make money; in fact, just the opposite. We’re here to spend everything we have, give everything we have, to help people come to know Christ. We’re here to make sure our neighbors who are looking for hope and help will be able to find it, and that the wandering pilgrims will have a place to come and pray and hear the Good News.

Jesus, as He had every right to do, decided it was time to clean house. He made a whip out of cords and cleared the courtyard, and put the farm animals outside where they belonged. He turned over the moneychanger’s tables, and sent their coins flying everywhere. (Can’t you picture them diving after their coins?) And He yelled at the dove-sellers, for daring to turn God’s Holy House into a con man’s paradise, and for turning God’s gracious invitation to sinners into a shell game.

Jesus’ disciples, standing by and watching all this, must have been horrified. They knew that the people running things in the Temple weren’t going to like this at all. The men who ran the Temple had a good thing going, and this crazy man was interfering with their business as usual; and on one of the biggest money-making days of the year, no less. The disciples remembered the words of Psalm 69, “Zeal for Your House will consume me.” Do you know what that good old-fashioned word “zeal” means? It means “fire”; or in this case, “holy fire.” If you tie it in with righteous anger, it means that although we’d rather live in peace, there are some things we just can’t let go. Are there little things we can let go? Sure; you can’t be zealous about everything; you’d never have a moment’s peace that way. If you want to pick a fight about everything that irks you, you’ll be hard to live with and hard to be around. “Learn to pick your battles” is good advice.

But when it comes to the well-being of my family and my wife and my children; when it comes to the Church I love and the people who worship with me; when it comes to my neighborhood and my community and my country, and the things I see the devil is trying to do to ruin people I love and care about; when the Good News about Jesus is in danger of being drowned out or replaced by something else, some false teaching or heresy or outright lie - then it’s time to stand up and say something,

and do what I can to do something about it, even if my zeal for doing that should consume me. John the Baptist wasn’t afraid to look old King Herod in the eye and tell him he was wrong, even though it cost him his head. Jesus wasn’t afraid to pick up a whip to right a wrong. We shouldn’t be afraid to point out wrong when we see it, either (although I don’t recommend using a whip in most cases!)

Jesus, just as His disciples were afraid would happen, was consumed and devoured by what He did in the Temple that day. The leaders of the Jews would have tolerated Him as long as He stayed up in Galilee; but now He’d walked into their Temple, into their little kingdom, and dared to overturn things. What really made them mad was that He’d exposed their racket, and that was taking coins out of their greedy pockets. “If we let Him go on this way, the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation,” they complained. Judas sold Jesus to them for thirty pieces of silver. The Jews crucified Him for the sake of their stock portfolios and financial well-being. Jesus came to turn the whole rotten system on its ear, and that they wouldn’t tolerate.

The Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can You show us to prove Your authority to do all this?" That was a “who do You think You are?” question. Jesus, who put You in charge in this place? Who died and made You king? Show us one of Your mighty miracles, to prove You have a right to walk in here, into our Temple, and start throwing things around. Who are You to try and buck the status quo? (A status quo that was making them rich, by the way).

Jesus’ answer to them goes right to the very foundation of everything they hold dear. “Destroy this Temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” The Hebrew Temple of Jesus’ day was a pet project of King Herod the Great, the Herod of the Christmas story, who’d begun the project of having the old Temple rebuilt and greatly expanded around 20 BC. When Jesus walked in the place, the first King Herod was long gone, the project had been 46 years in the making, and the work still wasn’t finished and was still going on. The new Temple was enormous, built of white stone, tall as a Hilton Hotel, bright and white and shining in the sun, up on a hill and visible for miles.

The Temple was intended to be the heart of Israel, the center of Hebrew life. It was the pride and joy of the Sadducees and Scribes and Pharisees, the foundation of everything they thought they stood for, and also the source of their wealth and prestige and their claim to authority. And Jesus told them, since they’d asked Him for a sign, that He’d destroy the whole place and rebuild it again in three days. Can’t you just

see their jaws dropping? Their veins popping? The red faces, the self-righteous anger, the hate in their eyes? They spit and sputter… "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and You are going to raise it in three days?"

They didn’t understand; nobody there did at the time; not the scribes or the Pharisees or even Jesus’ own disciples. The Hebrew Temple, bright and beautiful and magnificent as it was, was irrelevant, only a footnote in history. In 37 more years, in 70 A.D., the Romans would at last grow tired of the troublesome Jews, and raze their Temple to the ground, “not a stone left upon a stone.” This building, as much as we love it, won’t be here forever either. Time turns everything to sand.

Jesus Himself is the Temple of God, the eternal one, the one not built by human hands, the place where the pilgrims and the lost and the seekers can come to find peace. His body would be broken on a cross, for your sins and my sins and the sins of the world, and three days later be raised up again, as a living temple, an Easter temple, a Holy Church. Jesus, says St. Paul, is the head of the Church, the head of the Body, and you and I are the members, the hands and feet and voice of it. We get to be the bricks in the blessed foundation of a temple being built brick by faithful brick by faithful brick; not a temple made of stones or bricks or wood (although we love this place), but a temple built on faith and love and fellowship. It took 46 years to build that temple in Jerusalem; but the temple called the Holy Christian Church has been an on-going building project for the last 2000 years and more, and we’re so blessed to be part of it.

“After He was raised from the dead, His disciples recalled what He had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” Hindsight is 20/20, so they say. After Jesus had been raised, the disciples remembered what He’d said, as He stood among the scattered tables and angry faces in the temple that day. And at last they understood that what He’d said was true.

While Jesus stayed in Jerusalem, says our Gospel, to celebrate and remember the Passover and take part in the holy Feast, “Many people saw the miraculous signs He was doing and believed in His name.” That tells us that while Jesus was there in Jerusalem, He kept on doing what He’d always done, even in the face of opposition, even with angry Pharisees watching His every move - healing the sick, raising the dead, driving our demons, healing people in mind, body, heart, and soul. Isn’t that, after all, what people hope to find when they come to God’s temple? But for everyone who came to embrace Him and love Him and believed in His name, there were others who

rejected Him and turned Him away. But that’s just the way it goes, and the way it always will be, until Jesus comes for us at last. Jesus, the heart-knower, knew who loved Him, and who didn’t. And even those who hated Him and wanted Him to die, He loved them anyway. “Father, please forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Jesus knew what was in a man. Jesus understands what we humans are made of. He knows what sinful human beings are capable of, all too well. And since God, because He loves us, has left us free to choose, some will hear God’s Word and call it foolishness, and turn away. But some of us – God willing, many, many of us – will be saved by the grace and power and Word and Spirit of God, and live in faith. Thanks be to God that Jesus has come to turn the whole world upside down; to knock down our little temples of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness and pride, until, as St. Paul says, “Christ is all, and Christ is in all,” and our lives are His alone.

Father in Heaven, Your servant St. Paul tells us, “If the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” Oh, thank You, Father, that we have a blessed eternity to look forward to, one that will last long after the things of this world are gone. St. Paul also confesses, “The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Help us to live for You, O Lord, no matter what people say or what this world may do. Help us to live peaceful and quiet lives when we are able, but also to be fiery and zealous for the things that matter most of all. We pray in Jesus’ name; Amen.