Zeal and Longing

A Reflection on the Gospel for March 7th, 2021:
​Third Sunday of Lent

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​John
2.13-25

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body.

After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about human nature, for he himself knew what was within the human person.
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Pause. Pray.

And then read more...

​The red words rise up. Things Jesus said, now recorded in a red letter Bible.


A Marketplace.  
It implies a location where an exchange happens to the benefit of two parties. He got rid of the commodity tied to their future earnings, and what they had made, and the place where the exchange would happen. The animals, the coins and the tables. Sacrifice was never supposed to be transactional, it was supposed to be surrender. Worship. Coming into His Presence cannot be bought.  
Not by coin, not by conniving. 
Not by purchase, not by persuasion. 
Cannot be earned by the sweat of my brow. 
It has been bought for me a different way. The only way. For me. For you. For all of us. The way it was won is highlighted in a word — house.


My Father’s house. 
His disciples standing at His back recognize living zeal in what they see and remember something they read before in the Songs of David, "A zeal for your house…" (Psalm 69:9)  
Your house.  
I hear the echo of another of David’s songs in the corners of my mind, "One thing I ask… that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord, to seek Him in His temple." (Psalm 27:4) Other red words of Jesus rise up, words His disciples won’t hear until the Last Supper looms, "In my Father’s house there are many rooms." (John14:2) The brick and mortar temple and heaven have something in common.  
House = The Presence of God. 
Then Jesus stands before them and equates Himself, this man with the calluses of a carpenter, to His Father’s house. A temple and a way back to heaven. 


Destroy this temple. 
The way back was through a breaking, not a buying. There were hints of this right through the whole of Scripture. As walking in the garden with God was being lost to us — because we took rather than surrendered — whispers of a way back began.  


The bruising of a heal yet to be born, a child of a child of a child of Eve.  
God giving the skin from an animal Adam had named to cover them.  
Isaac almost offered.  
The blood of a lamb being painted with a branch on door post after door post in Egypt.  
A system of sacrifice started on the shoulders of a mountain, carried through a desert, passed from parent to child in a new land. 


All the brokenness pointing toward the one brokenness to come, the breaking of God Himself. His coming into His creation, becoming part of it through a blessed virgin —the Blessed Virgin. So that He could walk shoulder to shoulder with us, feet in the dust. So that He could be broken as He joined His perfection to our suffering — wood of the forest against His back, metal from the mountains through His hands and feet. So that He could bring us home.  


This cannot be bought by us, cannot be taken. This can only be received.


Those standing behind the upturned tables, those in robes standing behind vessels and altars, those standing behind Jesus — everyone was mystified by the moment. But the disciples kept following behind Jesus and found out: Brokenness doesn’t get the final word. 


I will raise it up.


There’s one more word I want to say, but I have to wait 'till Easter morning. In Lent I long for the "Alle…ia!"




​Noreen Smith

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