Hardly any church bazaar or bake sale passes without someone making lighthearted reference to this scripture about Jesus at the temple, overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out those who are selling cattle, sheep and doves. Maybe we joke because we don’t quite know what to make of our typically calm friend now in a sudden rage. Surrounded by the chaos and filth of another Passover, which has become yet another opportunity for the temple system to extort and abuse the poor in God’s name, fills him with holy zeal. What kind of system dares to tell those who are the most vulnerable that they must make sacrifices to appease God? He yells at the sellers of doves—the animals most apt to be purchased by those with the least money—“Stop making God’s house a marketplace!”
For my own community this scripture appears on the very day we are gathering to rededicate the Potter’s House, the neighborhood coffeehouse and bookstore we call our “church in the marketplace” which has been closed the past year and a half for renovations. Those casting a vision for the Potter’s House in the late 1950s dreamed of a place that would bridge sacred and secular, a place where artificial separations of race and class would fall away, and through dialogue people would discover an essential unity. In this “third place” religious ideas could be shared without the baggage of traditional religious language. Conversation about the deepest matters over a cup of coffee would be honored as much as hearing a sermon. This marketplace church would buy and sell things, yes, but the primary commerce would be that of the spirit, in a creative exchange of vision and callings that could sometimes become actions to serve the common good.
Because, truly, what good is a church building or a temple without an exchange of spirit and vision? The temple, the church, is intended for so much more than it has become. To see a place of beauty and sacred encounter being used as just another economic tool against the poor consumes Jesus with anger. He knows what great potential it has for healing rifts among us, for serving God in our midst, rather than becoming a mockery of compassion and mercy. Jesus isn’t playing. What about us? Will we keep adding stones to the dividing walls, or will we join Jesus in tearing down what divides us? What kind of church will we be?
