This morning, we are looking at flipping tables. Today, flipping tables can mean a few things. On one hand, you’re at a busy restaurant like the Silo on a Saturday morning and are waiting for the busboy to clean up the table of the folks who just left so you can have a seat. The busboy is trying to flip the table for a new guest. On the other hand, flipping tables can also mean getting a room ready. In a few weeks when we have our St. Patrick’s Day goodies after church on the 17^th, we will need to help the deacons flip the room and get it ready for the preschool gym class the next morning.

John chapter two serves as the book’s overture for what he is going to unpack throughout the rest of the Story. The scripture immediately preceding ours in this chapter is Jesus turning ordinary water into wine at a wedding in the village of Cana. John does not call this a miracle but rather a sign pointing to who Jesus is and the power he has. Our Story today points to what Jesus is ultimately going to do;[i] without actually using the word, Jesus speaks of his upcoming passion and Easter. Listen to the Word of the Lord!

John 2:13-22

13-14 When the Passover Feast, celebrated each spring by the Jews, was about to take place, Jesus traveled up to Jerusalem. He found the Temple teeming with people selling cattle and sheep and doves. The loan sharks were also there in full strength.

15-17 Jesus put together a whip out of strips of leather and chased them out of the Temple, stampeding the sheep and cattle, upending the tables of the loan sharks, spilling coins left and right. He told the dove merchants, “Get your things out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a shopping mall!” That’s when his disciples remembered the Scripture, “Zeal for your house consumes me.”

18-19 But the Jews were upset. They asked, “What credentials can you present to justify this?” Jesus answered, “Tear down this Temple and in three days I’ll put it back together.”

20-22 They were indignant: “It took forty-six years to build this Temple, and you’re going to rebuild it in three days?” But Jesus was talking about his body as the Temple. Later, after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered he had said this. They then put two and two together and believed both what was written in Scripture and what Jesus had said.[i]

The Jewish Passover was approaching on the calendar. The Passover is the yearly festival that faithful Jews celebrate to mark their release from slavery from the Egyptians; it’s a time they remember how God led them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Passover is all about liberation, freedom, and bright hopes for the future. Passover was the time faithful Jews looked out for the new messiah to come and deliver them from their current pain and turmoil under the rule of an oppressive Empire.[iii] The Passover was a festival all Jews had to observe, and they came from all over the ancient world to celebrate it in Jerusalem. The city was packed with people, animals, soldiers, vendors, religious officials, and sightseers, and there was a carnival atmosphere.

The center of the celebration was the Temple itself where the people would come and make their sacrifices and offerings to God. In what is known as the Court of Gentiles, animal vendors would set up shop selling lambs, doves, and other animals for sacrifice by the Levitical priests for the multitude of people’s sins, their thanksgivings, and other spiritual obligations.  Since it drew people from all over the ancient world, you would also see these tables like you see at international airports where you exchange your American dollar for British pounds. The money taken at the Temple for Jewish sacrifices could not be impure, dirty money from Rome or Persia; rather, it had to be exchanged for local untainted, purified Jewish funds.  The sale of animals and the exchange of money was not the problem for Jesus; it was where all the buying, selling, and exchanging was taking place: It occurred in a set-aside place of worship for those seeking God.

The Court of the Gentiles was included in the Temple architecture to welcome uncircumcised God-fearers into a place of worship. It was designed for those Gentiles who believed in the one God but who were not ethnically Jewish.  So here was a place that was set aside for a group of people seeking to worship and find a God they did not yet fully know but whose worship location had been taken over for a marketplace. It was a literal regentrification of a divine worship space! 

Jesus was torqued. God’s house was turned into a marketplace, an emporium, a spiritual Walmart at Christmastime of sorts. A place set aside for spiritual seekers to come in contact with God was displaced for carnival’s expediency. The “in group” could care less about those trying to learn about the holy worship of the Divine. The proverbial rams with all the power were butting out the sheep, the lost ones, with an inferior worship experience. No longer was the Temple about encountering God; the Temple had become a place where transactional business took place.  It was symbolic of how the Holy was usurped by the secular. And Jesus was fuming. 

His response? He started flipping tables and swooshing the animals out with a makeshift whip. Jesus was upset! As scholar Dale Bruner reminds us, Jesus’ anger is provoked by the people’s and religious leaders’ spiritual obtuseness through their mixing of the sacred with the profane. His flipping of tables was his dramatic act of trying to restore the honor of God within the confines of God’s house! And the people did not understand or get it.[iv]

Confronted by put-out vendors and religious officials who demanded to know what he is doing, Jesus simply replied, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (2.29). What the crowd and disciples did not know then but we as his disciples should know now is that Jesus is telling them that the Temple no longer will be the center of their spiritual orbit in encountering God; he is telling them that he will be the One people will come to encounter God. This was Jesus’ battle cry for a new order in the world, in worship, and in the soul.

So, Jesus implies that he is now the new epicenter of a person’s worship! Later in John’s Story we hear Jesus say, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (15.4), and we learn that we are called to worship and serve the Lord who now resides, not in a Temple of Stone, but within our hearts of flesh. The Lord in my heart, your heart, all of our hearts joined together called Church become the location for the Beloved of God and is called to be made holy and set apart. God moves His Presence from a singular place in Palestine to a corporate place in his disciple’s hearts and souls. God in Jesus is dwelling in you and me and through this and other churches! Wow!  Think about that fact for a moment!

So, Church, what does Jesus find when he enters the Temple of the Holy Father now residing in each of our hearts and in the heart of the American church?  What does Jesus discover as he enters our heart’s door leading to the Holy? What tables will he discover that are set up and getting in the way?

Perhaps you’ve thrown up within your heart a table of bitterness you have towards those who disagree with you. Maybe it’s the table of veiled prejudice and bigotry expressed through casual words or remarks. Maybe it’s the table of spiritual hubris because you feel you know better than that person, that elder or deacon, that pastor, that ministry team on how things should be done, and you let everyone know how right you really are and how wrong they are.  Then again, I’ve seen people put up barricading tables in their hearts and are oblivious to the spiritual drift in their walk with Jesus and they are not really honoring God anymore. These are the tables of indifference to prayer, indifference to personal spiritual nurture through learning, or neglect of personal and corporate worship. Furthermore, what tables have we set up in the church that prevent the new to the faith or those searching for faith from getting to know the Lord? All of us are invited to reflect upon whether the behaviors we display or withhold are tables thrown up as barriers to others who are earnestly seeking God.

Friends, the Good News is that Lent is a time for us to invite our Lord to come in and do a spiritual assessment of our lives. The Spirit’s assessment is not to shame us, guilt us, or damn us; the Spirit simply wants to show us where we can tighten up our faith here so there will not be expressed doubt over there. This is what our forty days in the wilderness are all about. In the Name of the One who is, was, and is yet to come. So be it. © 2024 Patrick H. Wrisley, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Glens Falls 8 West Notre Dame Street, Glens Falls, NY 12801. Sermon manuscripts are available for the edification of members and friends of First Presbyterian Church, Glens Falls, New York, and may not be altered, re-purposed, published, or preached without permiss

[i] The Message (MSG), Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. The NRSV reads: ¹³ The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴ In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. ¹⁵ 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. ¹⁶ He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” ¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” ¹⁸ The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” ¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” ²⁰ The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” ²¹ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. ²² 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.

[ii] Frederick Dale Bruner, The Gospel of John. A Commentary (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans’s Publishing Company, 2012), 141.

[iii] Diane Chen, Connections: Year B, Volume 2: Lent through Pentecost (Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship) by Joel B Green https://a.co/1CkURzk.

[iv] Bruner, 143-144.