Chaos - that's what it was: chaos. Tables flipping, money flying everywhere, animals in a stampede as man and beast fled from the Court of the Gentiles. Then the figure of Jesus emerged, standing with whip in hand. "Get out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market."

This is not the Jesus meek and mild that is so often portrayed,is it? This is not the nice, gentle, pastoral shepherd who leads us into green pastures and beside still waters. This is the angry Jesus, the passionate Jesus, the Jesus who scares us to the core. What's going on here? Why is Jesus so angry, so passionate about what is transpiring in the Temple?

The scene that greets Jesus at the Temple during this high holiday is not unexpected. Merchants offered sacrificial animals for sale to Diaspora Jews who had traveled long distances to make their annual pilgrimage. Being able to purchase animals at the Temple instead of bringing them on a long trek was a convenience for the observant. Likewise, the money changers accepted coinage from any number of the places and replaced them with the Tyrian coin required to pay the Temple tax.

Jesus' reaction to this typical scene is shockingly aggressive. If we John's Gospel, the physicality of Jesus' reaction is increased by "whip of cords," used to drive the crowd from the outer courtyard. Some grammatical imprecision in verse 15 makes it unclear whether Jesus uses this whip to drive out only the animals(the sheep and the cattle) or if he plies this whip against the backs of the sellers and money changers as well. In the same way that the animal stables are opened, so too are the financial stables. First the coins are poured out; then the tables themselves, heaped with spilled riches, are overturned completely.

It is difficult to understand the anger of Jesus. After all, these merchants were not doing anything illegal or immoral. In fact, they were providing a service that helped people to worship. As much as we want to understand this story as an indictment of commerce at the Temple, I think it is much more than just that. Jesus is angry not just with the merchants but with the entire Jewish religious system that had desacralized God and worship.

The real problem here is not just that Jesus is mad, but that he is at the Temple mad, that He is at the Passover mad. Hundreds of worshipers would have been at the Temple at any given time during the Passover. This was one of the holiest of feasts for the Jews, because through it they remembered that the death angel had "passed over" their homes that last night in Egypt. This is when they paused to remember their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. This is when they were coalesced as a people by God. Now, of all times, Jesus shows up and really lets them have it.

Why? Simply put, worship has become a "market enterprise" rather than a spiritual enterprise. Worship had become a matter of ritual, of doing the proper thing at the proper time, rather than a matter of the heart and soul. Religion and worship had become matters of transaction rather than relationship: you pay your money and you get forgiveness. Or as in our modern church, you just say a few words and accept Jesus as your Savior and all will be forgiven and you will go to heaven when you die. Before you revolt, hear me clearly; there is nothing wrong with the previous sentence, except when that is all there is to one's faith. There was nothing wrong with the Jews buying doves, goats, lambs, and cattle for sacrifice, except when that was all there was to their faith.

When our faith is determined more by what we want or need than by what God wants for us, then we are destined to become more like Walmart than the Church of Jesus Christ. We have so prostituted the nature of the Church that often people go "church shopping" with the attitude of seeing which church offers the most bang for their buck, rather than spending time in prayer seeking God's will.

The problem with this type of Christianity is that it can be both superficial and artificial. Jesus is striking out at a loss of sacredness, at a loss of a sense of holy places and holy times, which is revealing of a loss of relationship with the Holy One, God. When worship becomes duty rather than love, obligation rather than opportunity, it is not long before it becomes optional altogether. When we lose worship, when we lose the sense of the Holy God among us, we have lost what makes us special creatures of Holy God. Whenever I have seen a person drop out of church and worship, except for medical reasons, I know it will not be long before God will be a distant memory. When God becomes a distant memory, then we have opened up our lives to all manner of chaos. For without the Spirit, creation always returns to chaos - every time.

To regain a sense of the awesomeness of God, we need to begin with regaining a sense of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was to be a separate time, a holy time, in which we consciously pause to nurture our soul. The Sabbath was to be a reminder that life is not all about who we are or what we do, but that it is more about who God is and what God does. Through a genuine Sabbath of rest, of deep worship composed heartfelt prayers and serious wrestling with the Scriptures, we can regain that sense of God's presence and renew our souls. When was the last time you let your mind rest and your soul soak in the presence of God? In our overactive and spiritually undernourished Christianity we are in danger of losing our very souls. It takes a long time for a soul to heal from starvation - much longer than we could ever dream. Much as those with anorexia learn to live on very little if no food at all, so we learn to live on just enough spiritual food to get by. And our soul slowly dies - and we do not even notice.


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