Part of the preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage that we do is this big inventory thing where the couple answer a bunch of questions individually, it generates feedback, and then we get together and go over it. One of the statements, presented as sort of a True/False item, is: “I know everything there is to know about my partner.” You wouldn’t believe how many engaged people agree. Well, I’m not allowed to slap people, but…
Truth is, of course we never know someone else completely; another person is always a mystery. But we do this thing where we fill in the blanks. Right? To take the most extreme example: how many times have you seen a young person fall madly in love, not with a real person, but with the ideal soulmate they’ve projected on to someone? Come to think of it, people fall madly in hate the same way. Let me propose a True/False question to you. True or False: every relationship - friend, family, spouse - involves a tug between who they really are and who we’ve imagined them to be. Isn’t that true? And it might sound unfortunate, negative, phrased that way. But I don’t think it is. Let me put it another way: no matter how well you know someone, he or she can always surprise you. Once in a while you have one of those moments with someone you thought you knew pretty well, and all of a sudden he or she says or does something that makes you think “Who is this? Where did that come from? I thought I knew this guy!”
For a lot of us, this scene in the Temple is just that kind of moment with Jesus. We walk around with a certain idea of Jesus in our heads. We might even be so bold as to claim to know “what would Jesus do” in a particular situation. It’s a great thing to consider, for sure, but always recognizing our limits. If we were all with Jesus’ disciples walking into the Temple area that day, and 30 seconds before our reading began I asked you “what would Jesus do here?”, not one of us would have guessed right! The joke’s been made many times since that WWJD thing became popular: “when considering what Jesus would do, always remember that a valid option is to flip tables and chase people around with a whip.”
And that will never not be funny. But there’s more to this than a joke, of course. It’s only funny because this scene is shocking, and the scene is shocking because Jesus behaves in a way we don’t expect, and just maybe that ought to suggest to us that we don’t know Him quite so well as we thought we did. Maybe we’ve spotted one of those breaches between who He really is, and who we’ve imagined Him to be.
I’m sort of fascinated with a project that I know is impossible: to read the Gospels as if for the first time, as if I’d never heard about Jesus of Nazareth. Stripping away a lifetime of preconceptions, just able to meet the man of the Gospels. If it were possible, if we could forget everything we think we know and everything we’ve imagined about Jesus and meet Him for the first time fresh in the words of the Gospels, I think we’d find that this table-flipping episode is not so out of character with that outrageous, subversive, passionate, astonishing man.
A while back up north, I once gave a little quiz to a Confirmation Class. Mostly out of curiosity and to provoke a discussion, I included this True/False quiz item… “True or False: Jesus was always nice to everyone no matter what.” Every single one of them got it wrong. At least I think they did; they all said ‘True.’ You read the Gospels and see what you think.
Now, rephrase my quiz item “Jesus always loved everyone no matter what” and now we’re talking. True, 100% true, truer than anything else you’ve ever said. And I think that’s the crux of our difficulty: if the world sometimes knows only a bland, tamed, undemanding parody of Jesus, it’s because the world sometimes knows only a bland, tamed, undemanding parody of love. His name still gets lip service, but the real Jesus has long ago given way to a Jesus of our own imagination, a Jesus we’ve created in our own spineless image, who never asks anything of us that feels like dying to self. Who affirms every single thing we think, say, and do, rather than calling us forward to grow in charity and holiness. Who doesn’t reveal eternal truth in the teaching of His Church, but would have us just go with whatever hunches seem approximately right to us. Whose demand on our lives pretty much boils down to the conviction that we ought to try to be nice, because it’s nice to be nice.
I’ll just speak for myself, for what it’s worth: there is a continual tension, sometimes conflict, between the Jesus of my imagination and the Jesus Who sits at the Father’s right hand calling me to His Kingdom. Can’t we all admit the same? Let none despair; that’s where grace comes in. The Son of God is continually reminding us of Who He really is, through prayer, through Scripture, through the living Church. Gently when He can, not-so-gently when that’s what we need.
Jesus, the real Jesus, will never stop surprising you. Not just in words written long ago by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but in your life today. If you are a friend and disciple of Jesus Christ, you will find that Temple-cleansing is something He does often.
“Zeal for your house will consume me,” says Psalm 69, and His disciples remembered that as they watched Him in the Temple courtyard that day. Is it too much to suggest that Jesus is just as consumed with zeal for you? Don’t we believe that we, the Church, are His Body? And didn’t He just say that His body was the true Temple? Okay, we have to be a little careful stacking up equivalences like that, but there’s something there.
If you read the commentaries and scholars on this story, some of them say that the merchants and money-changers were serving a really useful function, exchanging currency for travelers so they could make a lawful offering, and providing on-the-spot sacrificial animals for pilgrims who would have difficulty bringing them from home. In other words, they were doing the business that kept the system going smoothly. I don’t know to what extent that’s true, but I know it’s something we can relate to. It’s so, so easy for the Church to get stuck in the business of keeping the system running. Well, we have to keep the power bill paid and the thermostat batteries changed and the palms ordered for Palm Sunday and the volunteer lists done for Holy Week and figure out when in the world we can schedule a server training. I’m not saying any of that should be ignored. But it’s so easy to get lost in the business of keeping the system going, so easy to put our heads down to the minute task at hand and lose sight of the Kingdom we’re supposed to be about… know what I mean? I like to think of Jesus watching from the shadowy corner with a gleam in His eye, slowly reaching for some cords to make a whip.
That’s true for us as a worldwide Church, as a Parish, and it’s true in your own spiritual life as well. Perhaps you know what it is for the fire of true worship to give way to transactional complacency. Perhaps you know what it is for the marketplace (the routine, the maintenance, the keeping-things-running) to push its way into where only worship should be.
And perhaps like me, this Lent, you’ll be startled to find Jesus, ever-surprising, ever-astonishing, come through your Temple like a whirlwind, consumed with zeal, upending the tables and slinging a rope around and creating general havoc with clinking rolling coins and fluttering feathers and crashing tables. And really, you might as well join in. Sometimes a good Temple-cleansing is just exactly what we need.
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