Cleaning House

Mark 11:15-18

March 5, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

[SLIDE] When I was a kid, I knew when spring had arrived not by a date on the calendar—although that date was important because it’s my brother’s birthday. But I always knew when spring had arrived because my parents strongly believed in spring cleaning. I knew it was spring when I could no longer find my way around the family room because one of our rituals in the Ticen home was to move all the furniture around every few months. You had to clean around it, so why not try a new configuration, right? Anyone resonate with this experience? How many of you still engage in official spring cleaning? There’s just something about this time of year, when you can start to open up the house after winter. It inspires us to clean stuff up, straighten things around and maybe even throw some things out. (Of course, before you throw things in the garbage, remember that Missions has a yard sale in July and they want all of your treasures!)

So it’s spring in Jerusalem when Jesus arrives for the final time. Last Sunday we looked at his entrance into the city on the day that’s come to be known as Palm Sunday. And while the Gospels aren’t always clear on the exact chronology of the early part of that final week, Mark (the earliest Gospel written) says that when Jesus entered the city and the Temple Courts on Sunday evening, he “looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve” (11:11). That always seemed rather anticlimactic to me. He enters the city with a parade, with people waving palm branches and singing, and then he just…looks around at stuff and leaves the city again. But Palm Sunday was just a prelude, setting the scene for all that was to come. The next day, Monday, Jesus began his work in earnest and he began with some spring cleaning.

During this Lenten season, we are walking very slowly through the final week of Jesus’ earthly life, basically taking one day each week, and we’re doing it in the context of the prayer Jesus prayed over the city of Jerusalem at the beginning of that week. The prayer went like this: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace…” (Luke 19:42). We’ve been looking at what Jesus did, then, to demonstrate and to wage peace in that city during that week. We’ve called this series “Fight Like Jesus,” because so much of what he does between Palm Sunday and Good Friday is to fight for peace, to fight for a different way of life for the people. He came to bring them life (cf. John 10:10), but not life like the world knows. He came to bring shalom, God’s peace, wholeness, well-being. And so on Monday, he goes back to the Temple to fight once again for shalom.

So let’s walk through what happens here, and we’re going to actually start back on Sunday evening because, as I mentioned, the first thing Jesus does is to look around. You might say he does reconnaissance on the evening before. He wants to understand what is going on, so Mark says “he looked around at everything” (11:11). I don’t think it took Jesus too long to figure out something was wrong here. After all, it’s possible he’s been in this exact situation before. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this incident in the Temple happens at the beginning of the final week. But in John, we’re told it happened very early in Jesus’ ministry. A lot of scholars think John just has it misplaced, but I’m not convinced. If John was an eyewitness, which I believe he was, then why would he get it so wrong? John was the last of the Gospels written, and he mainly focuses on things we don’t already know (92% of his Gospel is unique to him). While there are similarities, there are also some significant differences between John and the rest. I think it’s possible and probable that Jesus did this twice, once near the beginning of his ministry and again at the end. So when he looks around on Sunday evening this time, I imagine him shaking his head because everything he tried to tell them the first time and everything he corrected the first time has reset. They learned nothing. And so he goes out to Bethany, where he’s staying, in order to decide what to do the next day. Because he knows he has to do something (cf. Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 52 and Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 139; Porterfield, Fight Like Jesus, pg. 45).

Our temptation and our tendency when we see something wrong is to do something, right away. Fix it. At least that’s my tendency. Churches tend to have that tendency as well—we “rush in where angels fear to tread,” as the saying goes. Or we rush in before we take time to assess, before we take time to ask the question, “What will bring shalom to this place?” We tend to think we have all the answers already, or we just do what we always have done. Jason Porterfield tells about a church in a large city that would bring a van downtown, set up and hand out free meals while someone played a guitar and sang praise songs nearby. In fifteen minutes or so, the food was gone and the van packed up and left. Porterfield said he began to ask questions, specifically of the homeless population, and he discovered there twenty-three different groups doing the same thing every day. Nobody was starving for food. What they actually needed was assistance in getting out of homelessness. But the groups serving food never stopped to ask what was actually needed (46). They just did what they knew how to do and what was, honestly, easy. In contrast, Jesus takes time to assess the situation.

The next day, and this is the heart of today’s story, Jesus returns to the Temple courts. The Temple was the only truly Jewish place in the whole country; Rome had taken over pretty much every aspect of life except what happened at the Temple. In this place, the emperor allowed the Jews “to practice their religion unhindered by the politics of Rome” (Kernaghan, Mark [IVPNTC], pg. 216). Inside the Temple grounds, it was a hierarchical structure in the way it was all laid out. The innermost part was where only the priests could go, and the next area out from that was for Israelite men. Next out was the “Court of the Women,” but it wasn’t for all women. Just Israelite women. They weren’t actually all that close to the Temple. And then all of that  was all surrounded by a low wall, outside of which was “The Court of the Gentiles.” This was where those who wanted to worship God but weren’t willing to go the whole way to becoming a Jew—because it involved circumcision—this is where they would come to worship. And there were apparently signs posted all around the low wall reminding Gentiles that they weren’t welcome any further. If they did try to come further in, the punishment could be death.

This is what Jesus saw the night before. It’s what he sees as he enters on Monday morning of this Passover week. But he doesn't just see people worshipping in their assigned areas. He would have heard sheep bleating and probably smelled them too. There would have been noise from the moneychangers’ tables, people negotiating or at least attempting to. When Jesus walked into the Court of the Gentiles, he did not find a place of prayer or worship. He found a marketplace, one that used to be across the valley on the Mount of Olives but at some point it had been moved into the Temple courts, undoubtedly “for convenience’s sake.” This “holy shopping mall” was not meant to be here, a point Jesus thought he had made a few years ago. But here it is anyway, again (cf. Card John 53; Wessel, “Mark,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 727).

The thing is, the sellers and moneychangers were actually providing a valuable service for the people who came a long distance to attend Passover. To offer the sacrifice for the festival required an animal without blemish, so the easy thing was to just buy one in the city rather than bring one from home and risk it being injured. And you could not pay your temple taxes with Roman money because it was decorated with Roman gods and goddesses. So you had to exchange your Roman money for the shekel and, of course, the moneychangers had to make a living so they collected a surcharge. Now, it’s been said (and I think I’ve even preached in the past) that what made Jesus mad was the exorbitant prices being charged in this place, but as more and more records from the first century have been discovered, it seems that wasn’t the case. The prices, with one exception, weren’t high. The one exception, though, was the price of doves, which apparently soared during this time (sort of like eggs in our time). Doves were the offering of the poor, those who couldn’t afford a sheep, and so high prices were hurting the ones who could afford it the least. I think that’s why Mark specifically points out that Jesus turned over the benches of those selling doves (11:15). After all, Jesus had come from poor family, too, and probably had offered many doves as a sacrifice in his time (cf. Card Mark 140; Kernaghan 217).

But what really gets Jesus’ goat (if you’ll pardon the pun) is where this is all taking place. They would never have dreamed of setting up such a marketplace in the place of worship for Israelite men, nor would they even do it in the Court of the Women. But the Court of the Gentiles? The place where foreigners come to worship? What’s the big deal? They can just deal with it. They’re not “one of us” anyway. By setting up this marketplace in the outer courts, the religious leaders are basically telling the Gentiles who are seeking God that they don’t matter. They are robbing the Gentiles of their rightful place to worship and they are robbing God of the worship the Gentiles would have given (cf. Kernaghan 217).

So Jesus drives out those who are “buying and selling” the sheep for the sacrifice. He turns over the benches of those who were selling doves. And he turns over the tables of the moneychangers (11:15). And, even more than that, he stops people who are using the Temple courts as a shortcut (11:16). Jesus took seriously the sanctity of a place set aside for worship. You didn’t just treat the Temple courts as another roadway or alleyway. In January, our Israel group got to go up on the Temple mount; it was the first time I had been up there since 2000. It’s been largely closed to anyone who isn’t Muslim because it is the third holiest site for Islam. There is no Temple there, of course, but the Dome of Rock is there, and still today they take the sanctity of this piece of real estate very seriously. There are strict regulations as to what you can and can’t bring up on the mount; we learned that a copy of The Upper Room is in the “don’t bring” category as one of our travelers had it in her pocket. It was confiscated. You don’t bring certain things and you don’t use the Temple Mount as a shortcut. It’s still a holy place, just as Jesus envisioned when he told the people (quoting Isaiah), [SLIDE] “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (11:17).

Do you notice that last part? “For all nations.” For the Gentiles. For everyone. You see, this is not a passage that prohibits the selling of things in the church building, as we often interpret it. I had a gentleman in one of my churches who wouldn’t come to church dinners because of this passage. He believed that selling chicken and noodles in the fellowship hall was banned by Jesus. But it’s not necessarily the buying and selling that upsets Jesus. It’s that the Temple, which God desired to be a house of prayer for all people, was leaving people out. The Gentiles could not pray because the religious leaders had set up a shopping mall there. They could not find shalom with God because religious authorities had put barriers and distractions in the way. And so Jesus didn’t sit around or form a committee. Once he prayerfully assessed the situation, he thoughtfully acted in a way as to make his point (cf. Porterfield 53). Shalom requires action, or we could say it this way: peace is not passive.

In a divided world such as we live in these days, one radical act of shalom is welcoming others, especially those with whom we disagree, and there’s no place that ought to be more welcoming than the church. Jesus said, “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” All nations. The word there is the root for our word “ethnic,” so what he’s really saying is that the place of prayer is open to all groups, all peoples, everyone. It doesn’t matter what you look like. It doesn’t matter how much you earn. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is or what your accent sounds like. It doesn’t matter if you walk in here or roll in here. Jesus’ house will be a house of prayer for all nations, and all people should be provided a place to worship, space to get to know God, and a chance to hear God telling them they are loved. That’s part of what shalom looks like, according to this passage. Which brings me to some questions: who do we exclude today, either intentionally or, more likely, unintentionally? What barriers do we not even realize are there? It might be a physical barrier of some sort. Some of you remember that a few years after we had reopened this sanctuary, we realized that our friends in wheelchairs had no access to the stage, and we began to try to figure out how to rectify that. Someone finally came up with the idea of a ramp along the side of the stage, and someone else donated to make sure that happened. So it might be something like that, or the barrier might be an attitude that we aren’t even really aware of, a fear that keeps us from including someone in our lives, welcoming them to a place of worship. How do we exclude? How do we get in the way of people being able to worship? Peace is not passive, so let me ask it this way: what tables and benches would Jesus overturn in this place or even in your life today? What barriers would he break down (cf. Ephesians 2:14)? How does he want to clean house?

Now, let me ask this: why is this so important? Why is it such a tragedy that Sunday mornings remain the most segregated time in America (and not just racially)? Why is this so important to Jesus? It’s because the Temple was said to be the place where God dwells. Still today, even though the Muslims control the Temple Mount, there is still a small portico off to the side where, it is believed, the Holy of Holies used to be, and it’s marked off to keep people from accidentally stepping into the place where, it was believed, God lived. Still today, people like to talk about the church as “God’s house,” though we don’t think he actually lives in this place. As Solomon said when he prayed to dedicate the first Temple, “The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27). But people do understand that what happens here, just like what happened at the Temple in Jesus’ time, reflects the heart of God. Whether it actually does or not, that’s what people think. We represent God. Jason Porterfield explains it this way: “When religion legitimizes injustice, it communicates to the world that God wills such evil. It makes God appear wicked…Jesus refused to let this corrupt portrayal of God go unchallenged” (59-60). So should we, by offering God’s shalom to “the nations,” by which I mean everyone.

When Matthew tells this story, he includes a detail that Mark for whatever reason left out. Maybe it’s because Matthew is writing to a largely Jewish audience, and he has a particular point he wants to make. Here’s what Matthew says happens after Jesus cleans God’s house: “The blind and the lame came to him [Jesus] at the temple, and he healed them” (21:14). Now, we read that and usually think, “Well, of course he did. That’s what Jesus did. He healed people.” But the emphasis here is not on the healing. It’s on who he is healing and where they are. The Law, all the way back to Moses, prohibited those with what were considered “physical defects” from offering sacrifices (Leviticus 21:16-23). They weren’t allowed in the Temple courts; a few centuries after Moses, King David had banned them from every entering his palace (2 Samuel 5:8). The “blind and the lame” were excluded from much of life; they were second-class citizens. But not to Jesus. Nor were the children. “Children had always been excluded from the temple.” There was no children’s choir, like we heard here last Sunday, and there was no “children’s church” when they gathered. Any religious instruction they received was to be done at home, not in the Temple or the Temple courts. They were below second-class citizens. But not to Jesus because Matthew tells us children were also there after the house cleaning, singing, “Hosanna to the Son of David” (21:15). The blind, the lame, the children—their presence here, all of them for the first time, was maybe even more miraculous than Jesus clearing out the Temple in the first place. Jesus had made way for true shalom—wholeness, a place where everyone is welcome and everyone is equal (cf. Porterfield 59).

But what Jesus does on this Holy Monday is a step too far for the religious leaders. His teaching had already upset them for the last three years, but now he’s threatening their power base. Now he’s upsetting the status quo, the balance of power they have with Rome. And, maybe worst of all, he’s welcoming in all the people they have tried to keep out, the ones they believe God wants to keep out. He’s opening the doors they’ve tried to keep closed. So, Mark says, they “began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him” (11:18). The contrast could not be more obvious than at this very moment between those who want to hold onto power and those who want to pursue the shalom of Jesus. This kind of peace is constructive, not destructive. It lifts people up rather than tearing them down (cf. Porterfield 61). It heals, restores, and gives of itself. Jesus’ peace brings more peace. Jesus’ peace brings peace with God and peace with each other for all. Jesus’ peace is the only hope for us and the only hope for our world. Let’s pray.