A woman told me once what a difficult time she was having with any criticism of her cooking. So much so that it was creating family tension at the dinner table. So much so that she was looking for excuses not to cook at all. So much so that it was creating more family tension. So much so that she finally wanted to look into it. Now, I don’t pretend to be a therapist—we have good ones around here I refer to and defer to. Some things take forever to track down in the recesses of people’s pasts, but the cause of this was a no-brainer. “Tell me about dinner at your house growing up,” I asked. Well, she said, about once a week my father would get so mad at my mother for burning the chicken or something that right in the middle of dinner, he would explode. The next thing we knew the table would be turned over, and everyone would run for cover.

By his anger, the woman’s father had created insecurity in the sacred space of family dinner that one would have a right to expect to be a secure emotional space. His standards of perfection kept everyone on edge all the time. No one could ever feel comfortable going to the dinner table. It always ended up being about him and how to please him.

Our gospel lesson today takes us to Jerusalem, to the Temple, to the sacred space where the family of God gathered in order to feel the acceptance and blessing of the Holy God of Israel. In that place people rich and poor came to bring their own animals or to buy them from merchants in order to make the necessary burnt offerings on the table of the Lord. Jesus meek and mild walks into this chaotic scene with a whip in his hand. Come again? Right. He turns the tables over and starts snapping that whip, driving out all the sheep and cattle, and driving away business at the same time. And before the scene is over, Jesus seems to make himself the issue.

So what’s the difference between the two men I have just described? We need to walk carefully through this story and find out. One warning: Keep an eye on Jesus. He’s still got a whip in his hand here in this temple, too.

Passover meant that Jerusalem swelled with people. The usual 80,000 or so would triple to a quarter of a million people for the great festival that celebrated the deliverance of Israel from captivity in Egypt. Because of the unusual crowd, the demand for animals was high. It was like Christmas shopping season at an outdoor mall, with the merchants overstocked and worked from sunup to sundown. Pilgrims traveled great distances to join in. To join in meant they had to offer sacrifices for their sins. Unblemished animals. Preferably sheep or cattle, but if you were poor, two turtledoves would do, or maybe a partridge in a pear tree—who knows?

Were they doing something wrong? Not by any account that they could figure. They were doing what the whole tradition of their ancestors had said to do. The sacrificial system was itself a sacred cow, don’t you know?! It was not to be questioned. The temple priests were certainly not going to do so, since they got their own livelihood out of the system, just as the merchants did. It was a neat little arrangement. Unfortunately, it was not always so neat, and it turns out Jesus doesn’t go for spiritual arrangements at all.

It’s the not-so neat-part that leads us to call this incident —“Jesus cleansing the Temple.” We assume that the sacrificial system itself was okay and that Jesus was simply cleaning up the abuses. Here’s how that reasoning goes: Because of the crowds, the merchants had moved their business from outside the Temple precincts, where it belonged, to inside the walls of the Temple to the outer court. It would be like setting up tables in the narthex and in the James Gallery. You couldn’t go into the sanctuary unless you had the proper offering. And the merchants are making a killing. Supply and demand. The market ruled even before Adam Smith said so.

So some people say that what really got Jesus’ goat that day was the injustice that was going on—that maybe the merchants were overcharging the poor. He was just cleaning up the system, in other words. That makes sense, except that there is no hint in the text that that was so. Others think the issue was just that the merchants were in the Temple and not outside it where they belonged. They were turning his Father’s house of prayer into a marketplace. And he does say that. We often joke about that in church today, as if he is still snapping the whip at us when churches have garage sales in the parking lot or bingo on Tuesday nights or youth choir auctions (careful, George, you’ve gone to meddling!). But even that doesn’t seem to be the crux of the matter. Jesus drove the sheep and cattle and doves right out of the Temple altogether. He didn’t give a sermon on reforming the system to be more just. He drove them out. He didn’t clean the tables; he turned the tables over.

We find out in the next verses what’s really happening. Jesus is not cleansing the Temple at all; he is rejecting it altogether. The Temple and the whole sacrificial system together he deems wrongful as ways and means of grace. Like the prophets of old, he says God wants spiritual duty, not ritual blood. He is abolishing any system that makes you pay your way for access to God or buy your way to a clear conscience.

Sometimes I look at our offerings in the collection plate and get nostalgic for the good old days before Jesus got out his whip! I think about what could happen here if we all did our part and gave as we should. I’d like to set up one of those TSA security systems—like the ones at the airport. We’d make you take off your shoes and get wanded, make sure nobody enters the sanctuary without a proper offering in hand, then make sure you don’t take it with you when you leave. I tell you, so many good things could happen if we could just make money matter in this religion business. We would feed the hungry and clothe the naked and pay the pastor more. We would have good programs for the kids and the elderly and pay the pastor more. We would build beautiful buildings to the glory of God and build the faith of the faithful and pay the pastor more. I tell you, God’s business is good business, and good business is God’s business! Can you hear the whip crack?

Well, the religious leaders object. And I understand why. If Jesus has his way, there would be no need for a Temple at all. There would be no need for a physical house for God at all. And then what?

Indeed, then what? I have a friend who always likes to correct people who talk about going to church when they are really talking about going to the church house. And he’s right. He’s right because of this passage, among others. The people of God are the people of God. The church is not the building. And if this physical structure were to burn to the ground today, Wilshire, we would still be Wilshire. We would still be the church. But oh, my, I think about this beautiful tapestry, and the garden outside, and the lovely parlor with the maple wood floor—not to mention my gorgeous study. I don’t want those things messed up. We like our building and grounds. But can you hear the whip crack? We can too easily come to this building for one or two hours on Sunday, bring our offerings, and go our way thinking we have done our business with God. But have we? Have we really met God? If you go out of here and still hate your neighbor, still fight to defeat efforts to help the poor, still justify violence in the name of peace, have you really met God?

Jesus wants a whole new system—a system that is no system at all. He wants people to relate to God in the simplest manner possible. He makes access to God personal, and without respect of persons.

After the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, Judaism was born. Jews eventually recovered the idea that they didn’t need a building to be the people of God. And they still function that way today. What the prophets had said about caring for the poor and the stranger, about honoring God in your daily life—these would become the heart of a renewed faith. Christians came to this through our relationship with Jesus. He is the new temple of God where we all meet to gain access. And when we welcome the unwelcome in his name, we worship truly and prove we are at home with God.

Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up. John is being his usual ironic self, using Jesus’ words in delicious ways to show how Jesus is moving us away from the mechanics of religion to the pure grace of relationship. Like those in Jesus’ day, we have a choice: we can cling to systems that divides people up as acceptable and unacceptable on the basis of certain religious obligations—or cling to Jesus, who offers access to God through deep personal experience of trust in him and its consequence in the way we welcome and treat people around us.

Destroy this temple, he says. The first level of meaning is what the leaders would have understood him to refer to—Solomon’s temple, which had been rebuilt by Herod the Great. I will raise it in three days is like saying “lickety-split” or “in a flash.” It was simply a common saying that didn’t mean three exact days anymore than “a New York minute” means sixty seconds on the button. They couldn’t get his sense, though. No one can rebuild a building like that quickly.

But the second level of meaning is that Jesus meant that he himself was the Temple of God, the place where God and humanity can properly meet. Destroy him, and in three days he will be raised from the dead, thus doing away with any system as the ways and means of grace that is subject to death forever. Only the ever-living Lord Jesus Christ can present you blameless in the presence of God.

Listen, friends, if you like coming to this church, we like having you. But just coming to the church house doesn’t mean you have met God. You must give your heart to Jesus himself, put your trust in him. And if you want signs that show what a difference that makes, then look for ways and means to extend grace to those who are often left out by systems that divide people up by race or ethnicity or class or what people can do for themselves.

A dignified deacon of an upstanding church with a fine-looking building went to visit the church’s summer children’s camp. He made the usual rounds, talking with his church friends who were volunteering for the week as counselors and nurses and cooks. The next afternoon one of the counselors spotted the man hanging laundry off the back porch of a boys’ cabin. She asked him about it, and he told her that the two inner-city Hispanic kids had only three days’ worth of clothes to bring with them. He didn’t want them to be embarrassed or feel out of place because of their clothes. So he had washed them out by hand while the kids were out of the cabin and was hanging them out to dry.

You don’t need a church building to do that kind of religion. You just need a heart that beats with Jesus’ heart. That’s turning the tables on the systems of the world. That’s opening the inner sanctum of the temple of God to everyone equally. That’s cracking the whip with Jesus. And that’s the rightful ways and means of grace in action.