“The Cleansing of the Lord’s Temple”
John 2:13-22
3/18/09
In this week’s news we were told of the
outrage being expressed against AIG, one of those mega insurance
companies that recently received billions of dollars’ worth of
bailout money from the federal government, but which is now using that
money in part to give out millions of dollars’ worth of
bonuses. It’s taxpayers like you and I who are expressing
their outrage against this corporation, and rightly so, since AIG is
not using its bailout money for the purpose for which it was
given. Imagine how you would feel if a homeless person came up to
you begging you for some money in order to buy a sandwich, but then
took that money and went out and bought cigarettes instead. But
the outrage that we feel when someone takes advantage of us and misuses
our gifts is nothing in comparison with the outrage that God feels when
the same is done to Him and His gifts. And in tonight’s
Gospel text we see His outrage in action, when He reacts to the fact
that the house where He intended His gifts to be given out had been
turned into a house of trade.
In the O.T. the temple was the center of worship for
God’s people. It was where they would go to hear
God’s Word, to receive the forgiveness of their sins through the
animal sacrifices offered there, and then to respond to these gifts of
God with their praise and thanksgiving. There was no paying for
these gifts. God’s forgiveness was free. One might
wrongly conclude that God charged for forgiveness, by the fact that a
person had to bring one of his sheep or goats to be offered as a
sacrifice for his sins. But in reality it was the animal itself
that paid for the person’s forgiveness with the spilling of its
lifeblood. And this is just what happened to Jesus. But in
His case it was God who provided this Lamb as the sacrifice for the sin
of the world, and it was His blood shed on the cross that purchased our
forgiveness once and for all.
For His sake God’s gifts are free. Our
salvation costs us nothing; the price has been paid in full by
Jesus. The Church is not in the banking business, brokering
salvation through some kind of a transaction between ourselves and
God. The Church doesn’t charge for the forgiveness of sins
nor withhold it until certain requirements are met. The Church is
simply in the delivery business, giving out at no cost what cost the
Lord His life to give us for free.
You can see, then, why it was such a big deal to
Jesus that the people had turned His temple into a place of
commerce. In their wheeling and dealing within the confines of
this house of worship they made it appear as if God’s gifts were
up for sale. And this was sanctioned by the very men whom God had
chosen to deliver His gifts to His people at no charge - the priests
and the teachers of the Law. It would be like me requiring you to
pay to hear God’s Word. Of course, there would be a
separate charge if you wanted to receive the Lord’s Supper,
another charge for anyone who wanted to be baptized, then additional
charges for anyone wanting to be confirmed, married, or buried.
Extra charges would be incurred for hospital and home visits.
Now, this is not the same thing as the Scriptural mandate that
congregations are to pay their pastors their due wages for carrying out
their pastoral duties. Christians must support those whose job it
is to deliver God’s gifts to them. But they must not think
nor be led to believe that by supporting the pastor they are paying for
God’s gifts. Even if you can’t afford to pay the
pastor, the gifts of God are still free. To teach that you must
pay for your salvation or that you could make some sort of contribution
towards it in any way exchanges the truth of the Gospel for a lie by
teaching that salvation isn’t a free gift after all. At the
very least it is to say that Christ’s payment was not enough;
you’ve got to add something to it yourself.
It was the practice of selling indulgences in
Luther’s day that led people to believe that they were buying
their salvation. The Roman Catholic Church taught that one could
purchase the good works and merits of the saints and thus pay off the
temporal punishments one deserved for his sins, with the result that he
would spend less time in purgatory having to pay them off. Soon
people were led to believe that they could even help release a loved
one’s soul from purgatory by just paying the proper fee.
But what happened to the proclamation of Christ crucified for the
forgiveness of sins? Not only did all this teaching about
indulgences make it appear that God’s gifts were for sale, but it
made Jesus’ payment completely gratuitous. No one depended
upon Him anymore, at least exclusively. Instead, they relied on
their pocketbooks and the merits of others. Tough luck for those
who were poor!
So pastors and teachers in the Lord’s Church
must be careful that they don’t turn the Lord’s divine
service into a business transaction by preaching anything other than
the free forgiveness of sins for the sake of Christ crucified.
His sacrifice alone is the all-sufficient redemption price that was
paid in order to reconcile you to God. For a pastor to preach or
teach that your salvation depends upon some contribution from you is to
put salvation up for sale. Such pastors turn God’s house
into a house of trade and a robber’s den, and those who do so
will suffer the wrath of Jesus on the Last Day when He comes again to
clean house, only this time He won’t be using a whip of cords,
but the whip of His words of judgment.
You who are not pastors, however, also need to be on
the alert that you don’t treat God as some sort of loan officer
or salesman whose gifts you think you can purchase. Christians do
this all the time when they try to make deals with God, promising that
they will do something for Him if He’ll do something for
them. Some, when overcome by a guilty conscience on account of a
particular sin, try to alleviate their guilt by doing something good to
sort of balance things out with God. Rather than confess their
sin, repent of it, and hear God’s words of forgiveness spoken to
them for Christ’s sake, they try to pay off their sins
themselves. Still, some Christians turn worship itself into a
kind of transaction, where just going through the motions of listening
to a sermon, participating in the service, praying, singing, and even
receiving the Lord’s Supper become things they do to try to earn
God’s favor. “God will have mercy on me, if I live a
godly life and do all the things Christians are supposed to
do.” To view the worship of God in this way is to do
exactly what these traders were doing in His temple. But to do so
is to put ourselves on the receiving end of the Lord’s whip.
Lent, however, is the season for confessing our
poverty before God while at the same time receiving the riches of
Christ for free. By nature not only do we think we have to pay
for God’s gifts, but we actually believe that that’s
possible. But neither one is true. We do not have to pay
for God’s gifts, because Jesus has paid for them Himself.
Nor could we pay for them, because we have nothing with which to
purchase them. As Luther remarks in the Small Catechism, our
salvation was not purchased with things like silver or gold, but with
the holy, precious blood of Christ and His innocent suffering and
death. The stroke from the whip of the Law that was due to you
and me was given to Christ, so that we might receive God’s riches
at Christ’s expense.
In the Scriptures the Lord sends out this
invitation: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the
waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy
wine and milk without money and without price.” The gifts
of God are free. If anyone has purchased anything it was God
Himself. At the cost of His Son He purchased you to be His own,
that you might live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in
everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. May the
Lord continue to purge His house of all that would rob us of His gifts,
so that we might always receive those gifts free of charge for the sake
of the all-sufficient payment of the cross of Christ. Amen.