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 18, 2026
by Pr. Matthias Lorimor, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: We find God not in a place, but in a person who promises to never leave us.
Where do you go to find God? An old family church? A nature trail? A ministry site? As faithful Jews, for Jesus and his disciples the answer was simple: the temple. Prior to its destruction in 70CE, the second temple had been the focal point of the Jewish faith. It was the place where one could find forgiveness, could have a personal encounter with God, and where God’s spirit was thought to literally dwell among God’s people. Yet, as Jesus indicates to the religious leaders, after it was razed to the ground and after Jesus was raised on a cross, Jesus became for Christians what the temple had once been. It isn’t some form of Christian supersessionism in which Jesus became some “better” temple, only a different one. Yet, it is still miraculous to think that, in Christ, rather than finding God in a single, fixed location (like that old Church building the congregation can’t imagine being church without), we find forgiveness, encounter God, and find God dwelling among us not in any one place but in a person.
That may be the real point of the cleansing of the temple, at least in John’s Gospel. Contrary to what many assume, Jesus cleansing the temple was not an emotional outburst of uncontrolled anger nor was it an attempt to literally expel every single animal and money-changer in the entire outer-court. Instead, Jesus “went away” after making a carefully calculated decision, took time to weave together a whip, and came back to perform a public demonstration by flipping some tables in the gargantuan outer-court, all to make a point: that faith isn’t about that old family church, that nature trail, that ministry site, or any place. But by an indescribably beautiful miracle, we find the grace of our God again and again in a person who isn’t fixed in place but is coming toward us.
