This sermon was preached for the third Sunday in Lent at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Exodus 20:1-17, John 2:13-22, and Psalm 19.
Parishioner Bruce Rockwell told me once that one of the monks of Society of St. John the Evangelist believes we should pray the contemporary version of the Lord’s prayer a little differently. Instead of “save us from the time of trial,” that brother prays “save us in the time of trial.” The small change in preposition reminds him that times of trial are inevitable and not inflicted on us by God. And yet God is with us in our trials all the same, already transforming them and us into something beautiful, holy, whole.
There are so many layers in our Gospel passage from John today. The text quite literally jumps around in time. First, there’s the actual moment the passage is about: Jesus driving the money changers from the temple. As the disciples watch him flip over tables and pour out coins, they remember a passage of scripture, from the psalms, written long ago - so there’s that moment, too, brought into the scene. Then, again, at the end of the story, we are transported with the disciples to a later moment, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, when the disciples are looking back and remembering the incident, and understanding it fully for the first time.
But even there’s more moments, too, just out of sight. There’s the community that remembered both these moments and wrote them down into the Gospel of John decades after Jesus’ life, and passed them from community to community, until they became scripture, too, like the psalm. And there’s us, here and now, we’re part of this story, too - and all the Christians who have read this passage in all their times and places.
Each one of these communities lived through their own collective trials, trials that they were trying to make sense of and find God in. Jesus’ disciples lived through the trial of Jesus’ actual trial, his horrific execution, and his mystifying resurrection and departure into the heavens. As we read in the passage, those cataclysmic events helped them understand what Jesus meant by his confusing words in the temple about raising it up again. Turns out he was trying to say that they can meet and know God not just in a particular building or city or even specific acts of worship - but through relationship with the Son.
What we don’t see in the text, but is there anyway, are the trials that the community that wrote down the Gospel of John were living through. First, the actual tearing down of the second temple in 70 CE. The horror of the violent destruction of the center of Jewish life and worship by outside forces cannot be overstated. And in its wake, the rendering of the Jewish communities was its own trauma, too, as different faith groups came to their own answer for how to go forward from here. Answers to the question: where can we find God now?
The community of the Gospel of John looked to this passage and said: we find him here, in the body of Jesus, in what was becoming the Eucharist and Christian community. They did so knowing that other Jews - their neighbors, their family members, their friends, were coming to different answers. They were finding God in synagogues and home rituals and Torah study. And so the argument between the communities that would become Christianity and the communities that would become rabbinical Judaism is written back into this passage, too, in the doubting quotes said by “the Jews.”
And, and, to honestly come to this passage, we must also glimpse the conflicts between Christians and Jews still to come: the theologians of later centuries who would erroneously put anti-Jewish sentiments in Jesus’ mouth, who would claim Jesus means here that Judaism has been replaced, that the covenant with Abraham and his descendants forever is dead, that Jews are outside God’s love. All the centuries of evil persecution this Gospel passage would be twisted to justify: those lies and that history is there, too, and will always be with us.
Even though human society is filled with violence, the violence of this passage is so startling because the whip is in Jesus’ hand. Is that where God is in all of these trials? Brandishing the instrument of pain? Is this Jesus an out-of-control, enraged God, bent on destruction? Consumed by zeal. Or as the King James Version of the Bible puts it: zeal hath eaten me up.
Consider, though, that Jesus stopped to take the time to braid the whip himself. Consider that this could be a moment of performance art, put on by the same dramatic Messiah who rides in a donkey, raises the dead, and turns water into wine. It’s eye-opening, heart-stopping, memorable theater that underlines his words and exposes the frustrating limitations temple leadership have imposed on a God who expands beyond its walls and into all people’s hearts. And in Jesus’ symbolic acts, we see a foreshadowing of the cross, and the coming destruction of the temple, and maybe, too, all the anger and violence that ever was and ever shall be. And into the midst of violence and chaos, Jesus speaks the Good News of Easter: this body will be raised again. The skeptical spectators give words to the secret doubts of our own hearts in response. “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”
How can you have hope in the midst of all of this conflict and terror and destruction? How can you declare the broken body will be whole again?
The aspect of loneliness we’re focusing on this week in Lent is rupture: how hurtful words and actions can magnify loneliness. The object we chose for this week is a nail. On Good Friday, nails were instruments of pain and cruelty, driven through our savior’s palms. But nails can also be instruments of repair, and rebuilding. A nail can be the small, strong something that holds it all together.
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When we look back at the crucifixion with Easter eyes, we see that in God, even those crucifixion nails were instruments of repair. God repairing the world.
The great theologian Soren Kierkegaard once observed that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. When we are in moments of pain and panic and overturned tables, it may not be possible to feel hope or to see how anything could ever be okay again. That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s part of being human. And it doesn’t make you a bad Christian.
Time is different for God, though. In each rupture the seeds of repair have already been planted. In each death, there is already rebirth. Every violent death, every broken body, every severed bond hangs on Jesus’ cross. But so does the wholeness, the wideness of God’s loving embrace.
During our Wednesday Lenten discussion this past week, we shared stories of lost objects - crosses, vases, earrings, earbuds, stolen bikes. We discovered that the loss of each object contained within it the loss of or longing for something more profound: a connection to a sorely missed loved one, a sense of independence and control, a sacred time gone by. And yet, in each story, we marveled at how love was already at work: the partner who went on the hunt and found the missing prayer rope, the husband who purchased an even better replacement gift, the mother who offered her late husband’s wedding ring to the son who lost his own.
Of course, it will always be easier to see the love on the outside looking in and from the future looking back. Yet there is power in sharing those stories now, anyway, in the midst of this trial right here. To say to each other: look, remember, see? That time we thought the world was ending - God was already at work in a way we couldn’t yet understand. And when we tell and retell and remember together, somehow we strengthen the voice of hope that speaks into this moment of chaos right now. We hear again the voice that says to us: God can rebuild.
This time of trial you are in right now is not the end of your story. And it will not define your story either, I promise you. Love will. The destruction of the temple, the murder of a son, persecution, exile, and war; none of these things define the story of God’s people. God’s enduring covenants do.
There will come a time, a time beyond time, when we will see our whole lives through Easter eyes. When we will witness God take every nail that has ever caused hurt and use every last one to repair the world. We may never understand this fully in this life, but in the end, when love is all in all, we will look back and know that God was, is, will be saving us in our times of trial, until there are no trials anymore.
Until your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Amen.
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