When I was a kid, I received a Bible that had belonged to my father’s uncle, John Davis Bedingfield, who died 12 days after I was born, and whose name I carry. It was a leather-bound, King James Version, with our name embossed on the cover. In between the Old Testament and the New Testament, it has a bunch of prints of paintings, the origins of which are unknown to me. Along with such pictures as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Noah loading animals on the Ark, there was a picture that really stuck out to me.
The picture I remember so vividly was of Christ Cleansing the Temple. In it, there are birds flying around; men who are ducking or recoiling;Temple authorities who are talking about what is going on; men who are chasing their coins across the floor; and in the midst of it all, Jesus, with whip-like cords held above his head, as he prepares to swing them — again — at the merchants in the Court of the Gentiles, in the outer part of the Temple. What struck about the picture, at least as a child, was Jesus’ face.
Like most children, I was pretty familiar with the story of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, you know, carrying a lamb on his shoulders, to make sure that this lost creature got back to its mother. In pictures of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is kind, caring, serene, and exuding absolute love. Laying aside the fact that most of the artistic renderings of Jesus are blond haired, blue-eyed, white guys — which is most certainly not how Jesus looked — the pictures that I had seen of Him, up to that time, were always of a smiling man, who cared for everyone around Him. But this Jesus, the one in the cleansing the Temple picture, this was an angry guy, and it made quite an impression on me.
From all that I have learned in the intervening fifty-plus years, Jesus was indeed very angry when he cleansed the Temple. He made a whip out of cords, and was using that whip. No one fashions a homemade whip in order to have a calm conversation with those who disagree with him. Yeah, Jesus was teed off that day.
When we think about this story, we should keep in mind that Jesus was a faithful, observant Jew. He read, taught and preached in synagogues. He fasted on fast days and feasted on feast days. He made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to the Temple, when the Jewish calendar said to. That is important because, although some have taught it this way, this story is not about Christianity being more pleasing to God, than Judaism. In Jesus’ day, there was no such religion as Christianity. No, this story is not about Judaism. It is about Temple worship and the way it had slowly disintegrated into a corrupt and misguided system in need not only of reform, but of dissolution.
Jesus came onto the scene, “as one with authority.” He preached and taught with an authenticity and a truth that the religious leaders of His day lacked. The Pharisees, the Scribes, the Sanhedrin, had all come into being to guard the Jewish faith from those who might either try to pervert it, or otherwise change its worship into something God never intended. Unfortunately, over the centuries, these faithful men gave way to those who were more interested in gaining, consolidating and keeping power than they were in insuring that the worship of the One True God was pure.
And so, instead of having a humble place where faithful Jews exchanged Roman currency for Temple coins — which was necessary to pay your Temple tax — what Jesus found in the outer realms of the Temple was a bunch of people who were little more than ancient loan sharks, constantly cheating those who came to them, just to increase their profit margin. And instead of having a convenient place where people who traveled long distances to make an offering at the Temple could buy whatever animal was needed for their sacrificial worship, Jesus found overpriced livestock whose owners hid the animals’ blemishes and treated pilgrims as a constituency to be gouged, cheated, and otherwise taken advantage of. In other words, Jesus found that the evils of the commerce-based world outside had infiltrated the Temple in very deep and pervasive ways.
By his actions that day, Jesus held a mirror up to the merchants, the bankers, and the Temple authorities. He showed them how far they had strayed from what Temple worship was supposed to be. And that truthful and critical look at “the Church” of the day, was something that was desperately needed, even if it meant that Jesus was hated by those whom He exposed.
That is the thing about Jesus. He is always ready, willing, and able to hold a mirror in front of our faces and to show us exactly where we have wandered off the path that God laid out for us. And that is true whether we are talking about us as individuals, or us as the Church. Jesus is the corrective to whatever is harming us.
If there is one thing that I have preached more than anything else in my career, it is that Jesus calls us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That seems so deceptively simple that one wonders, “How can we need a corrective when the rule is so easy to understand?” And yet, somehow we do.
In America today, the economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor is even greater than it was before the Great Depression. That means that the very wealthy have gotten much richer, as the number of people who are truly poor has continued to increase at an alarming rate. According to a recent survey, conducted by the Federal Reserve, between 42% and 48% of American have no money in savings, and between 50 and 60% of people have only the minimum to keep a savings account open. That means that many people — over half of our population — are theoretically one paycheck away from homelessness. One big car repair, hospitalization (with a large deductible to meet), layoff, or other economic change, could push any of those households into a debt spiral that could quickly put their home and transportation in grave jeopardy.
And an amazing thing about how all of the working poor people in this country live, is that while they struggle to just stay alive — hoping someday to reach what they call “even” — their creditors lobby Congress and get bills passed that allow them to charge ever-increasing interest on the debts of people who will be paying that interest until they die, or beyond, without ever touching the principle. And most of the working poor in this country have, from time to time, had one of those unexpected car repairs or other catastrophic expenses, that has caused them to get a “payday loan.”
Did you know that anyone, no matter how bad their credit rating might be, can borrow between $100 and $1,000 from a payday loan store. And the interest that they pay on these short-term loans (usually two weeks is the term of the loan) is 30% or more. So, if I have to take my child to the emergency room and need to borrow $1,000, I would either give the payday lender access to my bank account, or sign a post-dated check for $1,300. I then would have two weeks to come up with the money, at which time, the lender would cash my check or draft my account; or the loan would kick over into a long-term note, with equally high interest, and the $300 that I owed in interest, would now be tacked on to the principle. So I would now owe $1,300 with an annual percentage rate of 400. And if the loan were to kick over that way, my car and household furnishings would become collateral.
The way things are in America today, makes what Jesus discovered in the Temple seem tame by comparison. Perhaps it is time for us to start seriously loving our neighbors as ourselves, and to stop demonizing the poor in this country. If we stop using rhetoric like “welfare queens” and start thinking of the 50%+ of our brothers and sisters who are struggling, as beloved children of God; then we might become part of a system that works to close the wealth gap. And we might cleanse our own Temple to protect those who literally cannot protect themselves.
In the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
[Lent 3B Sermon 030721, Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22]
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