A Homily for the Third Sunday in Lent

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on February 3, 2024, the Third Sunday in Lent.

In the gospel according to John, Jesus’ prophetic sign act of cleansing the Temple comes not on the heels of the street theatre Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem as in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but at the very outset. We have the prologue (In the beginning was the word), John the Baptist, the Wedding Feast at Cana and then BOOM.. Jesus drives the moneychangers, and the folks selling cattle, sheep, and doves out, overturning the tables and dumping out the coin purses for good measure. Somehow, this scene, this encounter, this revolt, this collision serves as our entry point into the identity and authority of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Important, I think, that this purgation is paired with the giving of the law on Sinai with its injunction against idolatry, and Paul’s proclamation of Christ crucified as foolishness in the eyes of the world.

Barth, in pondering this passage, writes, “The new thing of Jesus is the invading kingdom of God revealed in its alienating antithesis to the world and all its orders” (CD 4.2, 177). In his usual fashion, Barth wants to hold up for us God’s in-breaking otherness that comes to us in the person of Jesus to set us free from sin and death, and to liberate all the peoples of the earth through his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension. The God of the Exodus, disclosed to us, for us, in flesh and bone, in blood and sinew in his only-begotten Son, is a liberating God who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Freedom, gospel freedom, arrives, comes to us, graciously invades in the new thing of Jesus with not one stone left standing. Not one stone is left standing so that the true temple, the temple of Jesus’ own body through whom all things came to be, can be seen, worshipped, loved, and lived from. The God who creates out of nothing, and raises the dead clears the decks of all human presumptions about us climbing to God, gaining God, buying God, possessing God, so that He can act decisively in the person and work of Jesus Christ, so that He can speak again the words of his promise in that open place, that good and broad land of not one stone where God is God and we are not.

All that is not God in Christ Jesus is revealed in its hollowing out, diminishing, death-dealing parasitism and goes under the sign of the cross. Last week, we heard those words from the Gospel According to Mark, “For those who want to save their life will lose it.” Far from being a call to heroic martyrdom, taking up one’s cross is really as simple as resting in the Promise–remembering who and whose we are–and fasting from all self-reliant and self-justifying attempts to earn, or achieve, or improve towards what can only arrive as gift, from outside ourselves (extra nos). “Going to Christ,” as Ruth Burrows says, “with empty hands…” Perhaps. But Christ also comes to us, gently, mercifully unballing our clenched fists so that we can receive Him, so that He can wake up in us, so that we can let ourselves be loved into loving. God first loves us. Before the commandments are handed down to Moses, what does God speak? “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” A free God wills a free, flourishing, just, and merciful humanity with each one at table.

The ways we try to “save our own lives” are countless. It’s the false promise of every one click purchase on Amazon that arrives in a van with “Caution: Happiness Inside,” emblazoned on its side. It’s the false promise of every “like” we get on Facebook and Instagram. It’s the false promise of every 7 Steps to a Better _____ book that crowds the self-help section at the bookstore. It’s the false promise of those “Up Your Game in Lent” emails that choke my inbox. 

But the false, idolatrous promises never really pan out for long. We might get a temporary respite from our dis-ease, desperation, and distress, but they creep back after the serotonin hit of opening a new package leeches away. It’s a peace that we understand, it’s peace that we generate and that’s precisely the problem: we actually don’t have the power to save ourselves. 

Jesus comes into the Temple to free us, cleanse us, save us from all our frantic attempts to justify ourselves before God, before our neighbor, before the advertisers. Tables overturned and cattle and sheep running amok in the streets, coins still spinning on the floor we find, each one, Christ and Christ Alone mighty to save. Our justification–being made right with God–is accomplished in the incarnation, life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus which we receive by grace through through as sheer, unmerited, and undeserved gift. This justification is not the result of our good behavior and neither can it be withdrawn when we mess up. We are sealed as Christ’s own forever. It doesn’t depend on us. It “was reckoned to him” (notice the past tense) as Paul says of good as dead Abraham at 100 years old. It comes from outside all our usual human frameworks of gaining and losing, pure and impure, wise and unwise, old and young, fruitful and barren. It’s a pronouncement. A declaration. A juridicial decision made by the God who desires to be God with us and for us, who has placed us in the loving, trustworthy, easeful, and eternal embrace of his beloved son through the Holy Spirit.

And in the eyes of the world this appears only as the foolishness of the cross: a catastrophic failure of a Messiah according to worldly power and all “reasonable” frameworks of expectation. Everything except the love of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit is revealed as but dust, and we return, are carried home by Jesus, to rest in the refreshing promise of God who is able to do what God promises. We want, of course, to pretend that we have some say in all this, to think that we bring at least something to the table: some tinny coinage, a lambchop, a burger, our faith, our piety, our heroic service. We so desperately want to be the doer, the giver, the author. But Jesus in his great love for us, in his desire to drag us kicking and screaming, grumping and harrumphing to himself will have none of it. Those tables of merit and demerit, of moralism, performancism, and legalism, are tipped over in Jesus Christ. When the dust has settled we are like Peter, James, and John after the Transfiguration: “Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” Jesus for us, whose mercy and loving-kindness follows us all the days of our lives.

It turns out that Christianity is not a religion but the unveiling, the disclosure, the revelation of a person–our personal Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. True religion listens. False religion walks away to self-create. Religions are human ways of appropriating God’s freely-given grace in and through his beloved children and meting it out in dribs and drabs, measuring progress–who’s in and who’s out, who’s killing it and who’s failing miserably, who’s winning and who’s losing, who’s got faith and who doesn’t. That is a very tenuous place to live from (indeed I find it nothing short of terrifying to be constantly assessing whether I’m doing it right, or to hitch my salvation to whatever passing mood happens to blow in). 

Free grace squanderously poured out for all is the in-breaking antithesis of all those human-centered strategies for management and control tied to getting it and losing it. Resting in the promise of the promise-keeping God and in the faithfulness of Christ Jesus to us cleanses us of all our attempts to “do” or perform our faith under our own efforts, from our inveterate habit of self-reliance, from our perceived need to justify ourselves, save ourselves. David Zahl puts it nicely when he writes, “A pure gift upsets the balances of power. It may even invert them. Unconditional love is so threatening to sinful men and women and the precious hierarchies they create, that the one time it was made fully manifest in history, we killed it.”

So the invasion of free grace into our temples reveals to us the secret story that runs the show. It’s some version of what Curt Benham calls the “Just tell me what to do… what habits I must form in order to maintain my relationship with God,” mindset. Two things are at work here. First, we desperately want some Pharoah to tell us how many bricks to make. That our good standing with God depends on how much we do, produce, and stack up for God. Second, we think that “maintaining a relationship with God” depends ultimately on us. We are the maintainers of the relationship instead of the Lord of Hosts who chooses not to be God without us, who is a covenanting, promising, and provisioning God whose maintenance of the relationship with us and for us infinitely overshadows all our feeble attempts at maintenance.

But again, the Good News of the Gospel is always about what has been done in Christ for us, not what we have to do to earn what is always already freely given. The Christian life is not behavior management, performative moralism, or  spiritually disciplining ourselves into Jesus’ arms stretched wide on the hard wood of the cross in loving embrace. No! All we are asked to do is repent and believe the Good News. The simple, humble recognition of our need for Savior and joyful gratitude that help has arrived in Jesus. You are loved, accepted, as you are and not how you should be or could be. No maintenance required! Not what you can do, but what has already been done for us. Everything else shooed out of the Temple so that Jesus and only Jesus and we in Him remain. Resting, singing, dancing, laughing and serving from the Temple of Jesus’ love–the safest, sturdiest, place in the world. In him, the liturgy of ordinary life—chickadee spring song, changing a bedpan, carpooling screaming children, grinding coffee, stacking chairs, dropping off a meal, the work we have been given to do—is revealed as sacramental dailiness: the daily bread of this life just as it is in Him.

Amen.