Leaving the Moneychangers' Tables and Entering the Generous Presence of God

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Lent, March 5, 2021, by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

Cleansing of the Temple

Today’s gospel is quite the scene. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem at the Passover and enters the temple. There he finds the moneychangers at their tables and the people selling cattle, sheep and doves for sacrifice. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” he says. And he makes a whip and begins to drive them out. You can almost see the dust kicked up as they go, hear the grunts of startled animals and the protests of vendors. Ruffled doves coo and flap against their cages, scattered coins clang as they glitter to the ground.  

I love the detail that Jesus pauses to make the whip he uses to drive the animals out. There is something more considered here than reactive anger, or a simple lashing out. The disciples tell us that he is driven by zeal for the sanctity of God’s house. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Jesus’s passion here is for proper worship of the living God, and he clears out the transactions that encroach on the place of honor and reverence that is to be reserved for God alone. God’s house has been distorted into a house of market, and he is zealous to set this right.

Of the Ten Commandments—which we’ve heard twice today!—the first three are about right worship of God: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them….” “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God.” 

Yet we make idols and worship them all the time. We are not talking about objects of brass or wood but whatever has first place in our hearts—that is what we worship. And anything that displaces God from the center of our lives or distorts the living God, trims God down to manageable size, is an idol. Fixed, static, inanimate, these projections of our can’t respond. Relationship is replaced by certainty and God is now an object we can manipulate. 

Spiritual Moneychangers

And perhaps nowhere are we more susceptible to idolatry than in the realm of spirituality and religion. It is very easy to become a spiritual moneychanger, ostensibly in the temple, but experiencing it as a marketplace. It’s practically the American default: We are individual consumers, competing to acquire scarce resources. There is never enough, so you must hurry. Get there before someone else does. The world is measured by what is produced and what is consumed. Merit is determined by achievement. Self-sufficiency is the highest virtue. Our relationships to our would-be neighbors are mediated by an objectifying framework of exchange. What can you do for me? If you can’t help me get ahead, you’re just the competition in a continual quest to acquire more and more and more—and anything less than constant progress is failure. 

This miserly frame of the marketplace is poisonous, death-dealing. It’s exhausting even to rehearse. If you live by it, it will kill you. It is already killing us, eating away at our humanity. Literally killing some of us—just look at the tragic effects of a response to a pandemic that has prioritized economic “health” over the lives the vulnerable.

And we bring this ideology to religion, too. We approach God through this idolatrous framework of the marketplace. Prayer is reduced to technique, measured in success and failure. Our charity is self-concerned, loveless, and a means to establish our goodness and merit. Righteousness and holiness are distorted into an ideal of self-sufficiency, fundamentally pride and separation from God. We are proud of the “wisdom” we have acquired, our spiritual accomplishments, our contemplative resume. Spirituality is a race, and we just might be winning! And we think this makes us wise.

Wisdom of the Cross

Into our spiritual-capitalist fusion of delusion come the words of the Apostle Paul, who tells us that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world. And even God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. The logic of the world is turned upside down, and the tables of the marketplace are turned over. God in Christ has come into the world and is cleaning house: a strange radical inbreaking overthrowing the culture of death that frames and consumes to much of our lives. The kingdom of God has come near, and it is a kingdom of irrational grace, of reckless generosity and forgiveness. The foolishness of God throws out the accounting by which we measure our petty achievements and instead reintroduces an economy of gift, offered to all creation freely, unearned, unmerited. God is the reckless sower who scatters the seed gratuitously over the earth, whether the ground receives it or not. God sends rain on the just and the unjust. Reckless generosity. 

Jesus’ words in the temple—Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!—are definitively good news. “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Paul goes on to quote Isaiah about outer performances of the law without the corresponding inner disposition: “their lips draw near to me but their hearts are far from me.” The inner disposition we are called to is not perfect self-sufficiency but a disposition of humble dependence on God. A disposition of repentance, knowing ourselves as sinners who have missed the mark, graciously called back to God, to reorient our life around the living God at the center, assured of God’s forgiveness.  

So the cross sweeps our idols away, clearing space and making room for the living God who cannot be constrained by our attempts at mastery and control. 

The Pharisee and the Publican

What does it look like to leave our seats at the moneychangers tables? To leave the marketplace and enter the generous presence of God? I think it looks like the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Gospel of Luke: 

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 18:9-14)

The Pharisee prides himself in keeping the law. His religion is an achievement, and it isolates him from others as he exalts himself, saying, “Thank God I am not like other people!” The temple for him on this day is a marketplace, and he is sure of his own wisdom.

Meanwhile, the tax collector is repentant, humble and looks to God for justification rather than his own achievement. By trade he is a different sort of moneychanger, collecting taxes for the Roman occupiers and skimming his living off the top. But here he is in the temple, repentant, looking not to his own glittering achievements for salvation but asking for God’s mercy. He has a clear-eyed sense of his need for God. “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” And Jesus says he goes home justified. 

We all share this man’s need for mercy. We have all turned away from God trusting in our own strength. We need a reorientation of the heart, of what we most love and what we treasure. To be a repentant moneychanger: that’s our call today. Mercy is always on offer: we have only to ask.

And it is Jesus who will cleanse the temple of our hearts. This isn’t another task to succeed or fail in. You don’t have to fix yourself—you can’t, actually. None of us can. We are all in need of mercy. It is God’s work in us to cleanse us of our worldly pretensions that we are wise. Jesus sweeps out the marketplace and brings us to worship in spirit and truth. 

It is for us to welcome this cleansing, to put up with the dust kicked up by renovation and the braying of animals, and not to set the tables back up or start frantically restacking coins. It is for us to trust ourselves to the living God and allow this whirlwind to move through us. We practice this surrender in prayer, in worship as a church community, in reading scripture, in giving our lives away turned outward toward our neighbor as expressions of God’s love, trusting always that in loving them we love Christ.

In the marketplace, in that kingdom where competition reigns, love and forgiveness are folly. What could be more foolish, more irrational? Yet this is the merciful backbone of God’s alternate order of the world, the kingdom turned upside down where Christ reigns from the cross and where we are never stronger than when we confess our dependence, our need, and worship him— humbly trusting God’s generosity, the abundant, overflowing love that is given faster than we can receive it.

So let us be repentant moneychangers. Communion with God is not bought or sold, not earned or achieved: it is all a gift, recklessly poured out, flowing over. So come, buy milk and honey without price. 

Amen.