Sermon, The Third Sunday in Lent, Year B 2024
John 2:13-22, Exodus 20: 1-17
The temple in today’s scripture was the temple that Ezra built after the Jewish people returned from exile in Babylon. Six hundred years had passed and the temple had been central to Jewish worship all that time. King Herod, appointed by the Romans as the King of the Jews, had been renovating the temple for forty-six years, hoping to gain the favor of the people.
The Jewish people believed that the presence of God dwelt in the temple, in the Holy of Holies, that inner sanctum separated from the rest of this massive temple complex by an elaborately woven veil. God was off limits and transcendent, an invisible force to be revered and feared. So people came to this temple, God’s home, from all over Palestine to thank God, to bring God sacrifices, to pray, and to hope for God’s favor.
Jesus shook up the status quo when he interrupted the temple economy with his disruptive actions and his statement to stop making his Father’s house a marketplace. These actions were a direct challenge to the temple authorities about temple worship and the economics of that worship.
And when Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body, one of the most subversive and radical statements Jesus ever made about himself.
No one, not even the disciples, understood. It was only after his death and resurrection that the disciples remembered that he had said this about himself, and then they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Only after the resurrection did they understand what he had meant when he talked about the temple of his body.
God was no longer hidden behind a veil in the temple. Jesus, the Son of God, was standing in front of them in the flesh, a living, breathing person, a person who had just referred to his own body as a temple.
When Jesus talks about the temple of his body, he is describing that expansive mystery of love that cannot be grasped, and this is the body into which God wants to welcome us.
Even today, even with all our familiarity with the story of salvation, this phrase, “the temple of my body,” still gives us pause. With that definition of himself, Jesus makes us grapple with who Jesus really is. As John says in the prologue to his gospel, “The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made the Father known.”
Before his death, Jesus teaches the disciples more about the temple of his body. He invites the disciples to abide in him—that is, to abide in the temple of his body. And the mystical way in which he explains the meaning of abiding in him is this.
“Abide in me as I abide in you…as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
As observant Jews, the disciples may have been puzzled by what it meant to abide in Jesus, but they would have had had the rules for how to love one another, for living in love with God and with one another is at the heart of the Ten Commandments that God had given to Moses for the Israelites long ago as they wandered in the wilderness.
We just heard those commandments today. The first commandments are instructions about how to love God, by putting God first, before everything else. The rest of the commandments are about how to love one another.
Right in the center is the commandment to remember the sabbath day, and to keep it holy. Laying aside everything else going on in our lives to offer time to God is a necessity if we hope to abide in God.
Not to observe the Sabbath is like having a palace in which to dwell, with everything we’d ever need for a meaningful fulfilling life, but we leave home and forget to return because we’re too busy with the rest of our lives—much like the prodigal son, who leaves home to wander in a land of waste before he remembers the open door of home, and his father’s love, and his father’s welcome, the safety and comfort of abiding in his father’s house once more.
Jesus wanted the disciples to understand that abiding in him would take them beyond simply literally understanding and keeping the commandments—that abiding in him would lead the disciples ever more deeply into the mystery of love, as they grew into the holy people that Jesus calls all of us to be as his followers.
Jesus wanted the disciples to know that they would become people who would work for justice and mercy in this world for the least of these, because not only did the Ten Commandments tell them how to do that, but also God expected it. Jesus showed those present in the temple that day in person what working for justice and mercy was when he chased out the animals and their sellers, and threw over the tables of the money changers, for the people who suffered from this temple system were the poor people who could barely afford the financial demands of the temple worship. Both the law and the grace of God’s love for the least of these were at play in the actions of Jesus that day.
Jesus prayed for the disciples on the night he was arrested. And he prayed for us. Listen to the words of his prayer.
“I ask not only on behalf of these , (the disciples) but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us…so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one.”
Jesus knew that the disciples were getting ready to be cast into upheaval, distress, and terror, that their hopes would vanish like smoke when they saw him die. “As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us.” Jesus prays that we will dwell in the temple of his body, to become one with him and dwell in the expansive mystery of his love, the dwelling place that God desires for all of us. When we dwell in the temple of Jesus’ body, we know that even though suffering is inevitable, that death cannot ever prevail, because we are already dwelling in the everlasting living love of God.
In the 1800’s Hoaratius Bonar, a religious writer in the Church of Scotland, wrote the words to one of the hymns in our hymnal, “I heard the voice of Jesus say…” In this hymn, Jesus invites us to dwell in the temple of his body in an easy to grasp image.
“I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto me and rest;
and in your weariness lay down your head upon my breast.
I came to Jesus as I was, so weary, worn and sad;
I found in him a resting place and he has made me glad.”
When we dwell in the temple of God’s body, then we too become temples, little wayside chapels of love. As the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, “our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit within us, which we have from God, and we are not our own” –for we belong to Jesus, the one in whose body we dwell. So we glorify God in our bodies, and as Jesus has invited us in, we too open the doors of our hearts in love to those wayfarers who pass by and who need a resting place. Perhaps as they witness our love and our works of mercy and justice, they will come to know that our dwelling place is in God’s heart, and that they are welcome there too.