Sermon for March 3, 2024 - The Third Sunday in Lent

Four years ago today marks the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States. In a matter of days, the world was turned upside down. Everything came to a grinding halt. The COVID-19 virus was the single largest disruption in our lives on a worldwide scale. No one escaped the reach of the virus. As a result, each of us have experienced first-hand the traumatic and disorienting disruption that left us disconnected and asking many questions. Why God? Why this? Why now? Where is God in all this? Even now that life is back to “normal,” it will take us years to look back and discern God’s presence in and through this experience.

By Scarsellino - bQHLstvakkK2yA at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22006955

As I read our gospel over and over again in prayer this past week, I wondered if the people who gathered for the Passover Festival felt the same way when Jesus came striding into the Temple complex that day. I wondered if they asked why? Why is he doing this? What does he hope to achieve? Where is God in this, especially because this disruption occurred in the very house of God?

The Temple was at the centre of 1st Century Jewish piety and spiritual practice. You need cattle and sheep and doves and money changers to run the Jewish temple. Jesus makes it impossible for people to buy animals for the required sacrifices, and impossible for those who have come from all over the Empire to change their money and pay their tithes. Jesus is quite literally shutting it down.

But, why? If you were raised in the church, you probably learned somewhere along the way that the problem was corruption: people were not just selling animals, they were cheating other people as they did. The other three gospels also include this story which helps us down the road to this conclusion. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus borrows from the prophet Jeremiah to accuse those who are selling things of making the temple a “den of robbers.” Maybe Jesus raises a ruckus in the temple to protest corruption and to clean it up, if only for an afternoon.

But in the gospel of John, this conflict in the temple takes on a different meaning. Jesus is not acting against corruption, or at least he is not only acting against corruption. He is involved in a bit of performance art. Jesus brings temple activity to a standstill in order to point to another holy place altogether. “Destroy this temple,” Jesus says, “and in three days, I will raise it up.”

Like a lot of what Jesus says in John, this line from Jesus does not follow what precedes it. You hear it, and you think, “Huh? Who said anything about destroying the temple?” Even the people listening to Jesus are confused. They point out that the temple has been under construction for decades. “Really, Jesus, you’re going to rebuild it in three days?”

The temple was the meeting place between the God of Israel and God’s people. Sacrifices were offered during religious festivals and at special times in people’s lives, such as in honour of a birth or in thanksgiving for a harvest. The temple was a holy place. It was a place where human life and divine blessing met. The biggest struggle is yet to come, when the Romans actually destroy the Temple and animal sacrifices cease altogether. What do you do when a fundamental aspect of religious life is gone?

In John’s Gospel, the body of Jesus is the new “holy place.” “The Word became flesh, and lived among us,” John writes. In the incarnation, with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s dwelling place is with human beings, as a human being. So, Jesus baits the Jewish leaders: “I dare you: destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up;” a clear foreshadowing of the resurrection.

Through his actions in the Temple, Jesus is changing the nature of our relationship to God. God is no longer the God who dwells only in the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies in the heart of a physical temple building. God is no longer only encountered through sacrificial rituals and spiritual practices. God is now personal, each of us has the potential to encounter God in the world around us, and within us. Through Jesus, we come to know God, who wants to know us, and for us to know God.

So, where does God meet you? Is your meeting place a church sanctuary filled with light, like this beautiful sacred space? Do you see God in a candle flame? Perhaps you have encountered and know the transcendent through a piece of music? Maybe you recognize God in the water, or in the bread and wine of the Sacraments. Maybe your holy place is a hike along the river or an elevated vista that puts you in the presence of God. Maybe it is silence and stillness.

The surprise in today’s gospel reading is that Jesus says that the transcendent is present in his body. The gospel of John makes this claim, that a human body -- unique but also a lot like your body or mine -- is the holy place of God. Jesus was not just “wearing” a human body like a set of clothes. He was a human body, as inseparable from his body as you are from yours. And God was inseparable from him.

During the season of Lent, we follow Jesus as he travels to Jerusalem, as his hands braid pieces of rope into a whip to herd cattle and sheep out of the temple, as his knees bend to the feet of the disciples to wash them. We watch him eat and drink with his friends, and we follow him to the garden, where the bodies of his disciples unsuccessfully fight off sleep while Jesus sweats through prayer. We see him beaten, crucified, taken down from the cross, and laid in a tomb. And in the stories of his resurrection, he is still a body -- huggable, touchable, scarred, and eating.

We are not naive about the trials of being in a body. We all bears the physical, emotional, and spiritual scars of walking this life, of getting older and indeed wiser. We also have no satisfying description of the miracle it will certainly be for God, after we are dead, to raise us to new life. Nevertheless, we will not let go of that hope, precisely because God was committed enough to human flesh and blood to become it in Jesus Christ and committed enough to human flesh and blood to raise Jesus up after his death, as a body able to eat fish, and point out scars to Thomas.

As the 3rd Century theologian and Church Father Irenaeus once wrote, “The Son of God became human, so that we might become God.” God disrupted the flow of the world by becoming like us through the Incarnation. In Jesus, God has experienced the human struggles and knows well our sufferings and our joys in this life. He has gone before us so that he might walk with us through our spiritual journeys. And as such, God has created a pathway to a deeper knowledge and love of Him through Jesus. Therefore, my Lenten prayer and hope is that because of this unconditional love you will feel God’s abiding presence and perhaps, just perhaps, see and sense a little more clearly just how God in Jesus Christ is accompanying you on your journey. Amen.