As the Jewish Passover was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple precincts he came upon people engaged in selling oxen, sheep and doves, and others seated changing coins. He made a kind of whip of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, sheep and oxen alike, and knocked over the moneychangers' temples, spilling their coins. He told those who were selling doves: "Get them out of here! Stop turning my Father's house into a marketplace!" His disciples recalled the words of Scripture: "Zeal for your house consumes me."

At this the Jews responded, "What sign can you show us authorizing you to do these things?" "Destroy this temple," was Jesus' answer, "and in three days I will raise it up." They retorted, "This temple took forty-six years to build, and you are going to `raise it up in three days'!" Actually, he was talking about the temple of his body. Only after Jesus had been raised from the dead did his disciples recall that he had said this, and come to believe the Scripture and the word he had spoken.

While he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name, for they could see the signs he was performing. For his part, Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all. He needed no one to give him testimony about human nature. He was well aware of what was in man's heart. John 2:13-25

This is one of those passages of Scripture, The Cleansing of the Temple in John, that gives some Scripture scholars great delight. There is a great deal that can be done with it. For one thing, you can spend a great deal of time comparing and contrasting John's account of the cleansing of Temple with the cleansing of the Temple account in the Synoptic Gospels, where there is a different emphasis. And depending upon which Synoptic author you are reading, again you have a different nuance of meaning. But there has also a considerable amount of attention given to the position of the account in the Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels--Matthew, Mark and Luke--place the Cleansing of the Temple after Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, after that journey to Jerusalem, before his apprehension, his Passion, his death. John places the cleansing of the Temple account at the very beginning, so to speak, of Jesus' public life, at the very beginning of the Gospel. And this raises the question, why does John place the account here? What does John wish to emphasize?

Well, it's obvious when we look at the passage that there are two sections. There are two divisions; it's a kind of diptych. On the one hand, there is what happened in the Temple. And on the other hand, in the second part, there is the kind of theological reminiscence or reflection on what has happened. Or you can approach it in another way. On the one hand, there is a telling of Jesus' actions in the Temple. On the other hand, in the second part there is a kind of request by the Scribes, the pharisees, the chief priests, for Jesus to give an account, namely, "In what way can you legitimately do what you have done?"

Now one of the things that we always have to remember when we come to Scriptures, and sometimes we tend to forget this. IN our modern age where people run around with tape recorders and record things, either with a video camera or a tape recorder as they happen, we take that kind of an approach to the Gospel. And believe it or not, some people think that the disciples, the Evangelists were right there with Jesus videotaping and recording with tape recorder everything that Jesus did and everything that Jesus said. The gospels do not give us what happened as it happened. And John indicates this very well twice in this morning's passage. Jesus is always seen in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul, from a post-Resurrection perspective. And in the case of John, the picture we have of Jesus, the view of Jesus that is presented to us, is considerably after the Resurrection. IT's around the year 100, give or take five or ten years on either side. Most of us think it is written about the year 96, which is sixty-three years after Jesus' death, sixty-three years after the Resurrection. And that is indicated here by the disciple when John tells us twice, "His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, and it was only after He had been raised from the dead that his disciples recalled that he had said this and come to believe the Scripture and the word he had spoken."

So what we see in the Gospels then is a kind of distancing from Jesus, distancing from the actual life and sayings of Jesus, and what we see there is a kind of reflection that has taken place over many years, and a kind of putting down what their reflection was or is, their thought concerning after many years of what Jesus said and what He did. And John has arranged this passage in its particular position in the Gospel because one of the things that John wants to point out at the very beginning of Jesus' public work, or what today we call His ministry--one of the things John wants to point out is the fact that Jesus replaces everything in Jewish life and in Jewish worship.

And the great emphasis here is not so much on the cleansing of the Temple, but on the replacement of the Temple. In other words, with Jesus coming on the scene, the Temple is no longer important in Jewish life for John's view. The Temple ceases to be of a function. And another thing we always have to remember here is that John is written twenty-some years after the destruction of the Temple. And as anything that disappears from the scene, there is always a kind of nostalgic desire to have it back. If you want to know something very comparable about it, the nostalgic desire on the part of some to have the Tridentine mass. It's nostalgia. Years ago I was in Newark on Easter night. I was taking a bus from Kennedy Airport to the monastery in Newark, way back in the mid- 70's. And I sat down next to a young man who introduced himself, and he said, "Are you a Catholic priest?" "Yes, I am a Catholic priest." "Do you mind my asking where you are going?" "I'm going to the Abbey in Newark, up on High Street." "I was a Jesuit scholastic. I just came from Agena Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut, the Benedictine nuns, where they have everything in Latin. And as Jesuit scholastic,my whole field of study, I have a doctor's degree in Latin. And I couldn't wait to get there to have the liturgy in Latin once again. And within 15 minutes on Holy Thursday I shook my head and said to myself, `What am I doing here? This isn't for me.'" It was nostalgia. It was a kind of reminiscence of what was, and a kind of hankering to go back, but one can never go back. In the words of Thomas Wolfe's novel, "You Can't Go Home Again."

So what is happening in John, and in the early area of Christianity, especially among the Jerusalem Christians, is this desire that you have expressed in the Exodus when the Jews were saying, "Would that we were back in Egypt where we had leeks and garlic and onions to eat, instead of being out here in the desert." It's a kind of reminiscence, and they only remember the good, they never remember the inconvenient, they never remember that they were in slavery in Egypt. They only remember the security. So one of the things John is trying to say to those Jewish Christians is that Jesus has replaced the Temple. The Temple is absolutely of no significance and no value anymore.

How does John do that? By describing how Jesus said (which He did say), "Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will build it up again." It's an allusion to Jesus' death and resurrection very early in the Gospel. And of course, as always happens in the Gospel of John, Jesus is misunderstood. And those who are asking Him, "Justify on what authority you do something" understand Jesus to be talking about the Temple building. And looking at the wall, they say, "It took forty-something years to build this Temple of stone, and in three days?--gross misunderstanding.

Now what are we to make of this for ourselves? I think one of the things we are to make of it for ourselves is that we must do exactly what the evangelist did. There are two major questions that we always have to ponder in our faith. The first question is,"Who is Jesus? Who was this individual Jesus Christ?" All theology is built upon trying to answer that question. The Son of God--what does it mean, "The Son of God." Human/divine--what does that mean? Incarnate--what does that mean? You see, all of theology is built upon this person of Jesus Christ, and the significance, the understanding of Jesus Christ. So, like the Evangelist, we have to ponder that same question. We have to think about that question, and we have to ever grow in our understanding of who Jesus is.

And the second question which the disciples and the Evangelists themselves had to ponder, was, "What difference does it make in my life? What significance is it to me that Jesus is the Incarnate Son of God? How is it going to change my life? How am I going to live differently? How is the world living differently?" Within a very short time, the young children of the parish will gather for religious education, and in a way, that's exactly what our religious education teachers, who dedicate so much of their time to our children, that's exactly what they're trying to help these children come to realize: Who is Jesus, and what is His importance in our life? How significant is Jesus in my life? How does Jesus change my life? How has He changed the world? Those are probably the two important questions that humanity has to ask and humanity has to answer. How I live my life depends on my answers,and how I live in eternity depends on my answers.