This week’s Gospel lectionary is John 2:13–22.

All four Gospels tell the story of Jesus casting out the merchants and money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem during the festival of the Passover. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke place this story at the end of Jesus’s life (Matt 21:12-17; Mark 11:15-20, Luke 19:45-48), in John’s telling it is one of the first things Jesus does, following immediately after his first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1-12). By placing the story at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, John uses it as a key for explaining the life and ministry of Jesus—and ultimately for why he will be crucified.

John’s telling of the events in the Temple is distinct in other ways, as well. Most significantly, the other three Gospels interpret Jesus’s actions in the Temple as anger against those who have defiled the holy space by making a dishonest profit. In those Gospels, Jesus quotes Isaiah 56:7, saying, “It is as written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers” (Matt 21:13; Mar 11:17; Luk 19:45). The implication is that, while the Temple should be a place of worship, the merchants and money changers have made it into a place of dishonest commerce.

Institutional Maintenance

Yet John’s telling does not include this negative assessment of those doing business in the Temple. He does not refer to the merchants and money changers as “a den of robbers.” In John’s Gospel there is no suggestion of dishonesty among the merchants and money changers. Rather, they seem to be doing business in a perfectly legitimate way.

The sale of animals and the exchange of money was entirely necessary for the festivals taking place in the Temple at Passover. People needed cattle, sheep, and doves in order to make their proper sacrifices at the Temple (see Leviticus 1–7). Since in the time of Jesus, Jews would have been traveling to Jerusalem from all over Mediterranean world, it could not be expected that they would provide their own animals over such a long journey. Those selling animals at the Temple were performing a religiously necessary service.

So, too, with the money changers. Because people were traveling to the Temple from many places, the exchange of currency was again necessary for carrying out the expected religious rituals. Visitors from distant lands exchanged their money for local currency, which they used to purchase animals for the sacrifice.

In my mind, John’s telling of the Temple incident is much more discomfiting for mainline Christians like myself. The versions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which the merchants and money changer are accused of being “a den of robbers,” would seem to let good Christians like me off the hook. There, I can rationalize, Jesus is upset with people who exploit religion for their own financial gain. Jesus is upset with the Pat Robertsons and Creflo Dollars of the world—not with me.

But John’s telling is not so willing to let me go. He describes Temple functionaries providing a necessary service, giving no indication that they are in any way behaving dishonestly or exploitatively. That means that, in John’s telling, Jesus is upset not with the exploitation of religion but with what simply seems to be the necessary apparatus of religion itself.

To transpose the scene into our day, Jesus is upset with the building fund, and the stewardship campaign, and the new pipe organ. He is upset with the membership drive, and the bake sale, and the youth car wash. He is upset that the maintenance of the institution has displaced the actual practice of the faith.

Crucifying Jesus

According to John, after Jesus has cast the merchants and money changers out of the Temple, his disciples “remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” The allusion is to Psalm 69:9—with one important modification. In the psalm, the verb is in the past tense: “It is zeal for your house that has consumed me” (Heb.’akaltani; Gk. katephagen me). By contrast, John transposes the verb into the future tense, “It is zeal for your house that will consume me” (Gk. kataphagetai me).

With the shift to the future tense, the psalm comes to function on two levels in the story. In the immediate sense, the disciples recall the psalm as a justification for why Jesus has cleared the Temple. It is Jesus who has been so consumed by zeal for the Temple that he has driven out the merchants and the money changers.

Yet, in a more profound sense, the quotation of Psalm 69:9 is not about the Temple at all, but rather about Jesus’s crucifixion and ultimately his resurrection (John 2:22). In fact, the association of Psalm 69 with Jesus’s crucifixion was common among the New Testament writers (see, e.g., Matt 27:34, 48; Mark 15:23, 26; John 19:28; Rom 15:3).

In this light the meaning of the Psalm quotation changes. “It is zeal for your house that will consume me” reveals itself to be a prediction that the very ones who are most zealous for the Temple are the ones that will ultimately destroy Jesus. Those who have the greatest investment in the success of official religion will chew Jesus up and spit him out.

You see, establishment religion cannot abide Jesus, who is the world-shaking intrusion of God’s free and radical love into the world. The keepers of the status quo cannot tolerate the Christ, who upends all settled realities, flipping the world on its head. Institutional religion cannot countenance a God who even now is making all things new.

The Resurrection of the Body

So we who are likewise beholden to the status quo must be careful in our practice of religion. We must be diligent that our zeal for the church doesn’t come at the expense of the gospel. We must take care that our anxieties about our denominational futures don’t impair the practice of faith among us. The only institution that matters—the only temple—is the body of Christ, crucified and resurrected.

According to John’s Gospel, on the night before he was arrested Jesus left his disciples with one final commandment: “Just as I have loved you, also should you love one another” (John 13:34). That commandment is the only thing that matters. Our traditions don’t matter. Our institutions don’t matter. Our anxieties about the future don’t matter.

The only thing that matters is radical, self-giving love—each of us for the other—so that we all might have life—and have it abundantly (John 10:10).