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Jesus enters the temple and drives out the salesmen who “were selling and buying there” (Matthew 21:12), trying to sell worthiness, purity, and access to God (Luke 19:45-46), just as the Catholic Church did later with indulgences and stipends of various sorts. This is the great temptation of all religion. Jesus symbolically dismantles this system by not allowing it to operate in its present form and releasing the animals that were sold for sacrifice (John 2:15-16). The temple of religion (read “church” or “mosque,” too) is henceforth to become personal, relational, embodied in him and other people, and not a physical building (John 2:21).
The precise message of the Raised Up Christ is that God is available everywhere, as his body moved beyond any limits of space and time. For some reason we like to keep God “elsewhere” or “just here,” where we can control God by our theologies, tabernacles, and services. We often tell God whom he can love or not love. Poor God must conform to our moral systems and judgments.
This public demonstration against and inside of the sacred space of the temple is surely the historical action that finally gets Jesus killed. The trouble with declaring one space sacred is that we then imagine other spaces are not! Here he takes on the major detours of false religion, which are any attempt to “buy” God by exclusionary purity and debt codes, and by emphasizing “sacrifices” (which the clergy just happen to control) over basic mercy and compassion (Matthew 9:13).
Jesus really did come to liberate God for humanity and humanity for God.
~ From unpublished notes
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