Exodus 20: 1 - 17; John 2: 13 - 22
This morning’s gospel reading shows us one clear consequence when God meets with people in a new way. People’s livelihoods are threatened. People can lose their jobs.
The New Testament relates that St Paul at least twice got into serious trouble because the message of the gospel threatened local businesses: first in Philippi, when his preaching deprived the owners of a slave-girl of the large amounts of money she was making them through fortune-telling (Acts 16:16 - 24); and later, in Ephesus, when silversmiths provoked a riot, realising that Paul was threatening their lucrative trade making silver shrines of Artemis, the chief divinity of the city (Acts 19: 23 - 41).
Throughout history, when the good news of God in Jesus has begun seriously to affect individuals and communities, people’s livelihood has been threatened. In the nineteenth century, people in the slave trade lost their livelihood as a result of abolition; and today Christian charities working throughout the world threaten the livelihood of loan sharks through the setting up of credit unions, take trade away from those who enslave others, and from those who encourage and exploit others’ enslavement to addictions of any kind.
But there remain plenty of other people for whose loss of work we should be longing: those who earn their livings from the arms trade, from unnecessary damage to the environment, from unnecessary torture of animals. The good news of liberation through Jesus can be nothing but bad news for people who plan to continue making their living in these ways.