Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, January 16, 2022
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Although Jesus’ temple cleansing might seem frightening and alarming, it was a passionate and loving act of forgiveness and freedom.
The placement of this cleansing story in John is one of many characteristics that sets John apart from the other three gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this story happens near the end of Jesus’ ministry—his teachings and miracles all building up to a fiery climax. But in John, his fit of anger as he overturns the temple marketplace is the first public thing he does. He wastes no time setting straight the people God has chosen as God’s own. John’s Jesus is neither passive nor gentle. He comes with fire and passion right out of the gate.
Israel had a long history of sliding away from God’s will, and then suffering the consequences of their actions by exile or occupation. By Jesus’ day they were occupied by Rome. Truthfully, all of humanity has had a long history of turning laws and rules that were once good and healthy for all people into policies of enslavement, control, or oppression. By the time of the Reformation, the Christian church had done the same—they had twisted God’s laws into terrible devices of torture and oppression. Over and over again humanity takes what is pure and good and turns it into something ugly and disgusting.
But time and time again God turns what people have destroyed into something wonderful and beautiful. Jesus’ destruction of the marketplace on the surface might seem corrosive, but it was in fact a movement toward freeing the oppressed and poor. They would no longer need to spend what little they had to appease a seemingly angry God. Jesus helped them (and us) to see that God is a loving, forgiving, passionate, and zealous God who needs no more than our love and loyalty.