Word of Salvation – Vol. 32 No. 07 – Feb 1987
Christ As Reformer
Sermon by Rev. A. I. de Graaf on Mark 11:15-17
Reading: Mal. 2:17-3:5; Mark 11:11-21; John 2:14-22
Singing: 284; 55; 140; 116; BoW.H.601; 280; BoW.H.901
The Christmas “season” is over again. Quite a few people, mostly retailers, are rubbing their hands: it has been a good time for raking in the cash; the turnover has never been so good. In the supermarkets and shops, the “houses of merchandise” people have done good business. At times one could have thought one was in church: those houses of merchandise have rung with hymns and carols: “O come let us adore Him”.
That may at times have sounded strange and offensive to Christian ears, but then, it is better than the thing we read about in our text: that the Temple, the CHURCH, would become a house of merchandise… or even a den of robbers!
When that happened it was one of the few occasions that we see our Lord Jesus (meek and mild?) really get upset and angry. We see Him act as REFORMER. This is what we want to think about today. This is – by the way – one of the few events from Jesus’ life that is recorded by all four gospel writers: so they reckon it is rather important. There is one difference, though: the Apostle John puts it at the beginning, the other three at the end of Jesus’ career. But then John is not all that interested in writing a chronological order of things: he puts the events in a way that stresses certain points: he had written in the beginning of the Gospel that the Lord Jesus came as the Only One of the Father, full of grace and truth. The Wedding at Cana was at the beginning – that much he does write, and that showed Jesus’ grace. Then he tells us about this event at the temple, and that underlines His TRUTH: Christ coming as REFORMER. It is obviously something that happened only once, and we can assume that the other three put it in the right historical spot: After he entered Jerusalem in triumph, and before he would have that talk with His disciples about the temple and what would happen to it. We see Jesus Christ AS REFORMER, and we see three things:
1. CHRIST AND THE (tottering!) TEMPLE
2. CHRIST AND THE (religious!?) ROBBERS
3. CHRIST AND THE (Warm?!) WELCOME
1. CHRIST AND THE (tottering!) TEMPLE.
more and
When Christ did this thing, cleansing the temple – that Temple just about had had its time! A few weeks more and the curtain that separated the Most Holy Place would be torn: no animal sacrifices would ever more be needed because the Lamb would have been sacrificed once and for all to cover all sins.
Jesus had already told the Samaritan Woman that from now on the Father could be prayed to from anywhere on earth!
It was the godless King Herod (the killer of the Bethlehem babies and would-be killer of Christ Himself!) who had given the money and taken the initiative for the building of it, and it never quite got finished! Ill-gotten gains had paid for it, and many unbiblical additions were incorporated in it, like a special “Court of Priests” (outside the actual temple building), then, away from that, a court for Jewish men, then – further out, a “Court of Women” and – way out, far from the actual sanctuary – a “Court for the Gentiles”.
Herod sought to please the Jews with this temple, maybe he also thought he could bribe God with it? It never got finished: the building was going on in Jesus’ day, and forty years after, in 70, the Romans would lay it in ruins. Jesus knew all that, so why bother about the thing at all? Why bother about a temple with all kinds of things wrong with it, a service that was going towards its end, a building that was soon going to get the wreckers in?
Jesus tells it: as a twelve-year old boy he had already seen it: It was until the Lord Himself would rule otherwise the HOUSE OF HIS FATHER, or, as Mark has it: THE HOUSE OF PRAYER.
Jesus came as Reformer, not as revolutionary. In His hand was a whip made of pieces of string, not a sledgehammer (let alone a submachine gun.) In the days of Martin Luther the Roman Church was in deep decay with terrible unscriptural things going on in it, yet Luther never started another church, but sought to lead it back to its Lord, back to the Word, and for all its criticism he loved it as the place where millions had found and worshipped the Lord Jesus.
When you would like to write off the church, maybe YOUR OWN church, even when you would have reason for good biblical criticism of it, that gives you no right to write it off: You are to treat with respect what to many people has been – and still is – “THE HOUSE OF PRAYER” the place, the place, the institution, the fellowship, that has given shape and still gives shape, for others at least, to the holiest thing man still can do: worship the God of life.
In our holy zeal starting new churches when things did not go our way quickly enough, we have – in our history – often been hastier than Jesus, and holier than our Lord. The temple tottered, in Jesus’ days… but He respected it. But let’s go on to point two: We saw: Jesus and the (tottering) temple – and now we see…
2. CHRIST AND THE (religious!) ROBBERS.
What was going on there in that temple was terrible all the same. There was this temple tax. Two days’ wages – payable by all Jewish men over 19 years of age – to keep the place going. But one was not allowed to pay that with the usual currency of Greek and Roman coins (fancy! with all those idols and emperors on them!). It had to be paid in Jewish money, temple shekels. And so, to help out these people coming from all over the world with their foreign currencies, there were the money changers. Not bad in itself, except that those characters charged exorbitant rates: what could one do about it? They had them over a barrel. Tricks galore: it always came down to the loss of at least another day’s wages! And the priests and temple rulers pocketed a lot of that, for they, in turn, charged rental fees for these changers’ booths!
When in the year 70 the Romans conquered the place, there was 5 million dollars at least in the temple treasury! One of those changers made $18,000 a year profit, and that I read in a book printed in 1970 so with present day values you could add a zero to that! Daylight robbery from poor people… in the name of religion! The same with the beasts for the offerings. Take the doves, the pigeons for instance, which the poor could offer. O.K. – again it was fair enough that people did not have to drag those animals all over the land, but while you could buy a pair of pigeons outside on the market for 90¢, with the sure risk that priests would find fault with those for sacrifices (they were in on that plot!) they came to $20 if bought from these “holy salesmen!” The priests knew all this and made a packet with this. That is what had become of God’s law where the people had to look after the priests! Now it had come SO far that these guys were looking after themselves, thank you very much!
I am afraid that Christian churches in later centuries did the same thing at times. Think of the sale of indulgences in Luther’s days, or in the country where many of us came from – the rental of seats in the church: nice ones for the rich… not so nice ones for the poor…! When we forget who God is, then His holy service can become a “business”, and it is still done today: Television preachers raking in the cash; worship becoming a booming money-spinner. Then injustice and disregard for God’s little people can get a seat of power in the holy place. But Jesus is very angry at that kind of thing! Because when He calls the weary and heavily laden, He wants to GIVE His grace… not sell it. And the maintenance of the service of God has to come from willing and joyful hearts, not from extortion.
Grace is free even for robbers! Just as that robber found out who prayed for it from a cross! What we give to the Lord… is only valuable if given from the heart! As an answer to the great Gift we received from God. Temples, churches, Christian people doing work for God… they all should help people to see how holy… and how gracious God is. WE are now the temples of God. His Spirit dwells in you, says Paul. What do they see of HIM… when they see us? And that gets me to my last point…
3. CHRIST AND THE (warm!?) WELCOME.
My House – says Jesus – shall be a house of prayer “FOR ALL NATIONS”. Yes, because where was all this buying and selling, where was all this noisy business going on? IN THE COURT OF THE GENTILES!
It was bad enough that those not of Jewish blood who came to seek and worship the God of Israel had to do so from afar, from the foyer so to speak. That already was insulting enough. But then the Jews added insult to injury by making that faraway place, the only one where a Gentile was allowed, the place of lowing cows, bleating sheep, cooing pigeons, shouting salesmen and quarrelling money-makers. How could anyone pray there?
So really, the message was: Outsiders, you Are Not Wanted Here! We Want Our Religion For Ourselves. Like as if a church would use its missions money to buy its minister a new Mercedes, or its evangelism budget for a picnic for the Old Faithfuls. As far as those rulers of the temple were concerned all outsiders could go to hell. They were NOT welcome. But why had God called Israel? Why had He made them His special people? TO BE A LIGHT TO THE GENTILES AND TO BE THE GIVERS OF GRACE TO A NEEDY WORLD! And now it is clear why – in Mark – this story is wedged in between the two halves of that strange episode of the fig tree: the only destructive act we see Jesus do in all the Gospel.
The fig tree – called to bear fruit of love joy and peace, of patience, goodness and kindness, of faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, of winning others and snatching them from the fire! Instead, there were only leaves: Leaves of rules and regulations, laws and rituals, organisation and organisation and institutions… but that same organisation that had set up a market in the place where the guests were to get to know God, was to throw out the Christ and have Him nailed to a cross! A religion, a church, that becomes an end in itself will welcome neither strangers nor its King! But that is not the end of the story. Because this Jesus, who went to town on his temple with a little whip of cords in His hand (he really did not need that, His authority was great enough without it) was going to have Himself whipped with real whips, and was going to become an Outcast Himself, an Unwanted stranger staked out between heaven and earth… while the animals in the temple were sold dearly, He was going to be sold cheaply. The Victim to die for our sins going for thirty pieces of silver, dirt cheap…!
And that – yet – would become the payment in blood for all the ways in which we insulted God and hurt His people so that by His sacrifice we might become temples ourselves, temples of the Holy Spirit. That Spirit driving out of us the hard commercial selfishness and the cold calculating callousness that can enjoy a fat belly in a starving world. Jesus still drives out from His temples, now with the powerful whip of His Word and Spirit the unwelcoming and unloving self-service that needs to be driven out if there is to be true Reformation. What Jesus did in that temple is a picture and promise of what He still does to His churches and: to His temples, that is: His Spirit-filled people in the world today.
It is not a comfortable thing to go through, as Christian churches are finding out in the world now but it results in us being clean and new and surrendered for service: with prayer back into our lives where there was too much busy-ness, too much bustle, too much bleating of sheep and lowing of cows… too much care about money and anxiety about making ends meet. My house shall be a house of prayer. Oh the wonder of it when a den of robbers is changed back into a house of prayer. When priorities are shifted back to where they belong, and the worship of the most high is more than something you go through on a Sunday morning because you want to get into heaven. That’s the talk of the house of merchandise, too, that’s market-talk: to be nice to God because YOU WANT SOMETHING OUT OF HIM. That’s not worship; that’s not what God wants in His temple. The good news is, that Jesus can reform His temple even today, and, having driven out the care and the scraping selfishness of the market place, puts in its place the sheer worship, the pure adoring prayer that says:
Majesty! Worship His majesty!
Unto Jesus be all glory, power and praise!
Majesty! Kingdom authority
Flow from His throne unto His own,
His anthem raise!
So exalt, lift up on high
The Name of Jesus.
Magnify, come, glorify Jesus, the King!
Majesty, worship His majesty,
Jesus Who died, now glorified,
King of all kings!
AMEN.