Lent 3 - John: Overturning the Tables

Lent 3 – John
John 2.13-22

He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. (Jn 2.15)

How we love this Superhero-Jesus, striding into the hall of power and destroying the structures that prop up the corrupt system! Reading the story today reminds me of the liberation movements rolling across northern Africa, sweeping around the Arabian Peninsula, along the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. It’s like a tidal wave, inundating the entrenched powers.

Over the past year, people who have suffered decades of corrupt, cruel and ruthless dictators, have poured into the streets, determined to overturn the powerful. Their weapons? Twitter….and shouting, singing, banners and posters, marching with arms raised, dancing—all fueled by the energy of pent-up frustrations, so long repressed.

In the Superhero movies, the camera pulls away as the crowds cheer and the credits start rolling. We stand up, put on our coats and file out of the theater, satisfied that the villains have gotten their due.

It has been a year now for some of these revolutions and, as we have seen, even after the tyrants are ousted, there is no happily-ever-after. In real life, the cameras keep rolling and the reporters keep chronicling…..the armies unwilling to give up control, the political parties fighting among themselves, the jockeying for power, the postponed elections, the attacks on churches and mosques.

We are easily distracted and the temples we create so quickly become something neither we nor God intended—like the marketplace of the moneychangers. Our plans begin well enough, but we are soon derailed.

Jesus has called us to follow him. What tables need to be turned over in our own temples? Laws that permit prisoners to be detained without being charged?

In this story, Jesus reminds us that our schemes are not the end of the story. Resurrection does not depend on us. All Jesus asks is that we follow him—love God and one another, care for the neighbor.

This week in Bethlehem, at the Jacir Palace Hotel, wherw I stayed last fall, the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conference hosted 600 Christian evangelicals, mostly from the US. The participants included Rev. Joel Hunter, the spiritual adviser to US President Barack Obama. The conference was sponsored by Bethlehem Bible College. Although the stereotype of Christian evangelicals includes a belief in the rapture, and a generally Christian Zionist perspective, the discussions at this conference showed that these assumptions are being challenged. The participants engaged in theological discussions, visited with local Palestinian Christians and witnessed the realities of life in the West Bank.

The conference included topics like Biblical Hope, Biblical Justice, Christian Zionism, Theology of the Land, Non-Violence, Peacemaking and the Church, and Reconciliation.Read more about their experience….. This is no super-hero solution, ushering in an era of peace in the Middle East, but these conversations with the “other” are a small step which will help the participants care for their neighbors—especially the new neighbors they met this week. [Photo is a billboard across the street from the Jacir Palace Hotel.]

God of the frustrated, the desperate and the hopeless, help us build temples that carry on your ministry with the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, the hungry, the prisoner. Help us recognize the tables we need to overturn, and help us stay focused on the ministry you started. Amen.