Our Gospel reading for this third Sunday in Lent tells us of our Lord Jesus cleansing the Temple.  It is a dramatic account of an angry Lord who makes a whip out of rope and who drives out the money changers and other Temple profiteers, turning over tables, and cleaning house.  Greedy people had turned His Father’s House into a den a thieves, a bazaar, a market place where worship was being turned into a money making venture.  Our Lord Jesus was filled with righteous indignation as the zeal of his Father’s House consumed Him.  By His actions we see that our Lord, the compassionate Shepherd, is also the Lion of Judah, and like Aslan from the Narnia Tales of C. S. Lewis, this lion is loving and gentle, but not tame.

 The Temple we are reading about was the third temple built on that holy site.  The first Temple was built by King Solomon.  The second temple was built by Jews returning from exile in Babylon.  They built it on the same site as the first one which had been destroyed.  This third temple was an ambitious structure meant to replace and far outshine the second.  It was begun by King Herod the Great in 20 BC and completed in AD 63 by King Herod Agrippa.  This third temple, the one featured in today’s reading, was a great source of national and religious pride.  It was a vast and beautiful structure.  Because sacrifices were offered in the temple, men sold cattle and sheep and doves to pilgrims for that purpose.  This quickly grew from being a simple service offered as a convenience into a money making venture for the sellers.  Also, because Roman coins were stamped with the image of the Emperor portrayed as a divinity, they were considered blasphemous and had to be exchanged for Jewish shekels.  The money exchangers also sought to make a tidy profit.  All of this served to create a bazaar like atmosphere.  Our Lord Jesus, who warned His disciples about savoring the things of man over the things of God (as we read in last week’s Gospel lesson) encountered not only this attitude but something even more corrupt.  He saw men actually taking the worship of God and using it to serve their worldly purposes.  Not only is this wrong, it is the precise opposite of what the followers of God should be about.

 When Jesus is challenged by the temple authorities, He says, “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again.”  The people did not understand at the time that our Lord was referring to the temple of His body destroyed by crucifixion and raised up again on the third day.  In fact, one of the false accusations brought against Jesus at his trial was that He had threatened to destroy the temple.  The Temple officials were anxious to protect their own interests, their power, their money, and their influence.  All Christians today, and especially those in ministry, should never forget, and have printed in their memories, that the greatest threat and most violent opposition Jesus encountered in His ministry was that of organized religion.  As Jesus warned, it would be the one who dipped his bread with Christ in the common cup who would eventually betray Him.  When religion prefers the things of man over the things of God, the result is not merely a thin, watered down religion.  The result can be a religion opposed to its own first principles, a religion in opposition to God.  Religious people must always be aware that we cannot serve God and mammon.  Christians must always remember that we cannot train and domesticate the Lion of Judah.

 Our religion calls us to awareness of and faith in the living God.  This living God is a God of love.  The very love of God is the reason He is angered by our sins.  If you love someone as a parent loves a child, you are never indifferent about them and it angers you when they do things which hurt themselves.  A mother or a father isn’t angry with a child merely because that child breaks the rules.  They are angry when that child engages in behavior that is self-destructive.  They are angry when that child puts himself or herself in danger through recklessness.  They are angry when that son or daughter does things which are harmful to them.  The more you love them, the angrier you become when you think something bad is going to happen to the ones you love.  God’s love and God’s wrath are not competing principles.  God’s wrath over our sins is an expression of His love, what we may also call His zeal for us.  The wrath which our Lord demonstrated in the temple illustrated his great love for his people, the very people who were being harmed and mislead by a religion which valued the things of this world more than the things of God.

 To be called to faith in the living God is to realize that you are a work in progress.  God is the potter and we are the clay.  The potter takes us broken vessels and breaks us further and then melts us and molds us into something strong and beautiful.  He restores us to the image in which we were created.  We are the clay and He is the potter.  He is the master craftsman and we are His work of art.  And so, we must be prepared to have Him mold us.  Sin has disfigured us.  God, in His love, molds and shapes us once again to our rightful image, and this can be a painful process.

 St. Paul reminded the Christian church in Corinth that they were the Temple of the Holy Spirit.  Are we prepared, therefore, to have our Lord drive out all corruption and deception from this temple?  Are we prepared to have our Lord drive out all corruption and deception from our lives?  Lent is a time to ask ourselves these questions.  What tables need overturning in our lives?  What habits and ways of thinking and attitudes and fears and prejudices and vanities need to be driven out?  You see, we follow a savior who leads us as a shepherd leads his flock.  Our faith calls us to a loving knowledge of the living God who is a refining fire burning off all our imperfections.  Our religion is not an opiate which makes us feel better about our circumstances.  Our religion is a life changing call to transformation and rebirth.  It is not a call to safety but to salvation.  It is not a call to complacency but to liberty.  The living God of love blesses us in our falleness but He does not leave us there.  Jesus didn’t die on the cross simply to affirm us as we are. He calls us to perfection.  He calls us to Heaven.  He calls us to have a loving knowledge of Himself, a knowledge which changes us from glory to glory until we are like Him and see Him as he is.

 In this Holy season of Lent let us then strive to see ourselves more clearly and let us give thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ for His zeal, His love, which redeems us and gives us the sure and certain hope of Heaven.