Exodus 20: 1 - 17; John 2: 13 - 22
But why did Jesus try to threaten the livelihood of particular people in the Temple precincts? What were they doing that was so wrong? Some would like to picture Jesus at this moment as rejecting the whole cult of the Temple and of sacrifices, rejecting even the very idea of institutional religion. I’m not convinced the text actually points to that. But I do think the incident points to some powerful lessons about the nature of institutional religion.
Religions appear to need both an inner and an outer side: an emphasis both on the place of the heart, on inner spirituality, but at the same time some formal way of expressing that in public. In the rest of our lives, our friendships and loves need rituals such as giving presents, sharing meals together, the exchange of hugs and kisses, in order to sustain them and to express the strength of the relationship. Something similar is true of our relationship of God. Religious rituals are our trysts with God, the places where our relationship is made public, focused and deepened.
But there are two problems with the formal, organised side of any religion, including our own. The first problem is that instead of expressing the underlying reality, they can easily become a substitute for it. By placing emphasis on external actions, it easily becomes open to charges of being empty, even hypocritical. This charge is reflected within scripture itself, which includes a strand highly critical of the Temple and its sacrifices. So the prophet Amos pictures God as saying:
‘I hate, I despise your festivals,
And I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them. (Amos 5: 21,22)
So the formality of organised religion makes it possible for a gulf to open up between our outward practice and the reality of our heart.
But there is a second problem with the rituals of organised religions, which is that as the surrounding cultural landscape changes, their meaning and significance can become lost to subsequent generations. The language of the cult remains static whilst that of the culture changes.
One example of this is how bizarre the practice of sacrifice probably strikes many of us as being. The reasons why sacrifice made sense thousands of years ago to religious people living in completely different societies to us are lost in the mists of time. But we would do well to remember just how bizarre our own religious practices must seem sometimes, even to people in our own culture.
By chance, our first reading today, in instructing the Israelites not to covet their neighbour’s ox (Exodus 20: 17), reminds us that oxen were once part of the everyday language of the Israelites, and that when they were required to sacrifice oxen and similar animals, they were being asked to give up something which was close to them, something which they already had. The sacrifice was an obvious expression of their lives, of what mattered to them.
But clearly by the time of Jesus people needed to buy animals to sacrifice in the Temple. The culture had moved on, but the cult had not. And so there was a gap to be bridged between people’s everyday lives and the language of religious practice. This gap was filled by those who sold the oxen, sheep and pigeons for sacrifice, and by those who changed the money by now used in the outside world for the money still accepted by the Temple authorities. The problem, the scandal, for Jesus, was that they did so at the expense of the worshippers. They exploited the gap between people’s everyday lives and the language of religious practice and made it harder, rather than easier to cross.