John 2:13-22
Lent 3 - Year B
Jesus wasn't about to "entrust" himself to religious ceremonialists.
Today's religious ceremonialists aren't about to let that stop them and to they co-opt Jesus - pass the ammunition in Jesus name!
A related article is Bush and God. [MISSING URL]
So how do we again disentangle Jesus in our time. Self-differentiation is a positive value, even in religion. Avoiding entanglement will help us hear a word of support and a word of correction, each in their appropriate time. Not working at this leads to more co-dependency and triangling.
To raise this issue leaves one open to being labeled a heretic. To avoid the issue puts us at risk for a theocracy that will authorize burning heretics. Can we be touched, changed, energized by Jesus without claiming Jesus as "our" authority?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/march2003.html
Can't you just hear the pulpits ring with connections between the money changers hold the people hostage to their demands and the Iraqi people blocked from God by Saddam Hussein? Thus the need for war to drive him out of power.
The dramatic imagery is very much in the tradition of the prophets who can marry harlots, walk naked, and make dumb purchases of property. We need to get beyond the fascination with a Rambo-like experience to see what lies beneath.
Whether this event comes early (John) or late (synoptics) it is significant enough to be used in different ways. At least one option for a larger picture is a very small item - Jesus made a whip.
Now consider making salt in India, making a seat on a bus in Montgomery. What "little" thing will you make to hallow creation? Will you limit your "making" to the religious realm or have it focus on political and cultural limitations. What would happen if you started making your own clothes?
Change what you have the power to change in the moment you have.
Make what you have the power to make in the moment you have.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/march2003.html
One of the best stewardship analysis tools is a record of spending -- checkbook registers (if anyone still uses them instead of a bank statement) and credit card bills. Here we begin to see what a person's priorities are. "Show me the money," is not just a cry for "more," but an admission of applied values.
Here we find money to also be an excellent gauge of one's sacrificial life. Where do you put down coins of the realm to assuage your guilt and shame? Compare that amount with a tithe of your income. How does that work for you?
One of the dynamics that can be at work here is a focus on the external behaviors and our willingness to own up to any number of peccadilloes to avoid awareness of an unmentionable/unforgivable sin.
Imagine, if you will, Jesus cleansing your checking account.
If you can so imagine, you may be up to being able to hear a bit more about a resurrection for your life in this world after conversion from the suffering (shame) and death (guilt) of your past/present.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/march2006.html
What is an acceptable sacrifice in an urban setting? From days of yore the standard was something of your livelihood - a sheaf of wheat, a lambkin. Tradition kept those items going as appropriate sacrifices even past the time when folks had a connection with them and their attachment to one's survival.
To keep an archaic system running it now takes the intermediary of money. Now urban folks could buy their farm produce and we could pretend all was still in balance. Sacrifice, however is never based on the externals, but the internal dynamic of friendship. One will lay dow their life for a friend. This is the covenant, our friendship with GOD. Buying a sacrifice is like getting your friend a gift certificate instead of paying attention to their likes and dislikes and gifting them with something that took thought and time.
It was the disciples who tried to do religious talk about this scene. They remembered language like, "zeal for God's house". Ahh, the assumptions and projections that remembrance conjures. The religious leaders at least asked "Why?" and expected an explanation.
Jesus' picture is his connection with life as it might be. This is a reconnection of sacrifice with lives, not money. This is a reconnection of my life with all the parts of meaning and a willingness to take on meaning through one's own life, not the structures that have been handed down. A challenge to us is to connect with the leaders and institutions of our day with this same sense of personal, even physical, identification and direct action to reset the agenda so our rituals reflect our experience, not the experience
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/march2006.html
You shall not make a marketplace of your life, this community, this creation, this religious perspective, this glorious commonwealth.
Those wonderful markers strewn around the country in 1956 to commemorate 10 arenas of life where things can go awry in were to help market a movie. Now they become traditions that must be held onto at all costs. Law has become law has become law, dividing the very communities once held together by what stood behind such law.
Somehow the glory of life keeps getting pared down enough to pass a legislature. The meaning of day and night cannot be put into words, and yet we latch onto one set of temporal propositions or another. Through proliferating law is glory's silence broken and we finally settle for the law and not the glory.
We even market our religion as though it were the only possible revelation of an expansive love that pushes past every one of our sacred moments - even that of resurrection. No matter how broad even we progressive religionists envision life, we are too pale for the colorful dance that will raise all enemies to friends.
Indeed, zeal for someone else's vision consumes us. Evidence America's preemptive entry into Iraq. For whatever good may have once been possible, we have devolved. Zeal, all by itself, becomes marketed as righteousness. Even action against marketing, becomes marketing. What a dizzying, disorienting flurry.
- - -
a medium is a message
it lops off the ends
one size fits all
average is good enough
a medium whispers
stories behind stories
believable and not
what you see is not all
a medium well
is recommended
to burn out illness
and blood guilt
a medium nurtures
biologic experiments
testing theories
confirming evidence
a medium colors
pale lives
with pigments
life experienced
a medium law
keeps us from
in medias res
and attendant glory
a medium life
bounded by rules
binding with same
unconscious errors
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html
John's scene in the temple takes place early in Jesus' ministry (note the difference between the length of his life and ministry as, believe it or not, there is life beyond officially demarcated ministry). Imagine how your interaction with the world would have been different if you had prayerfully taken on the economic/religious powers early in your career.
I expect that you and I would have come closer to living with Joe Hill and Mother Jones, with Paul Robeson and César Chávez, with Dorothy Day and Clarence Jordan. While unrecognized at the time, our life would live on (Joe Hill: "I never died," said he, "Good luck to all of you.")[MISSING URL].
Even with an earlier intentionality, I expect we would have come to the same economic impasse as our current situation – eternal vigilance does wane, temptation is persistent – but we would be in a better position to deal with disappointment in our magical thinking regarding invisible hands.
The extended three verses remind us not to entrust ourselves to the prevailing ethos. When you stop to think about it, you, too, know what is at stake and how far officialdom falls from that. Make what you can better without an illusion of getting some fame or benefit accrued to you.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html
Market presumes a transactional valuing of life. When that is certified by religion it begins to mark the beginning of what will ultimately move from being an incipient to a full-blown idolatry.
For 13 years the Wisconsin United Methodist Federation for Social Action has read a book for Lent. This year it is Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Streetby Jim Wallis. You can follow along with the reading or review other books at their Lenten website.
Jim Wallis has this to say about this passage:
A few points about context. This passage is often misunderstood. Jesus’ indignation and anger were not fueled by the buying and selling of goods in the temple. In others words, this passage is not an indictment against church bake sales, and I’m pretty sure even a gift shop in a cathedral is still okay! The passage is about greed, not commerce.As always prophets are questioned by the establishment for whom all things are working out well. What would be your response if you were caught being a mini-prophet? Might it be similar to Martin Luther who was channelling Jesus when he was questioned - “Here I stand I can do no other”. Somewhere along the way your body will have to come into a conversation about life.
The story is set during the time of Passover, when pilgrims traveling from distant countries came to worship at the temple in Jerusalem. When they arrived, they were supposed to offer sacrifices, but it would have been impossible for these travelers to bring livestock with them on their long journeys. The merchants and money changers conveniently set up shop in the temple’s outer court to provide these pilgrims with the scripturally mandated animal sacrifies. However, the worshippers were frequently cheated in this marketplace. Greedy money changers inflated the currency rate (only a certain type of coin could be used in the temple), and the merchants had a monopoly on the sacrifice market.
Interestingly, in his turning over of tables, Jesus specifically targeted the merchants who were selling doves. Doves were the least expensive sacrifice permitted to be offered in the temple and, therefore, were often bought by the poorest of the pilgrims.
It was a marketplace that took advantage of the poor, who had little other choice. It was a “subprime” marketplace in which a few accumulated great wealth for themselves at the expense of those who could least afford to pay. The money changers had taken a place reserved for the values of God, and used it to put their profits first. No doubt these money changers would have argued that they were only responding to a demand of the market, but Jesus didn’t seem to see it that way. What was happening in the marketplace was a spiritual and moral problem, not just an economic one.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/03/john-213-22.html