March 3, 2024, The Vocabulary of Jesus: Holiness – or – Don’t Mess Up the Living Room, John 2:13-22 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ March 3, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

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Today is the third Sunday in Lent, and I’ve been concentrating on some Lenten vocabulary this year – some words that are important for our Lenten observance. I’ve been trying to focus on one word each week, and to look at it through the lens of Jesus’ life and teachings. So the first week of Lent, we looked at the word “Temptation.” We read about how Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, right after his baptism, and before he began his public ministry. The most surprising thing about temptation is that Jesus himself was tempted. Even though he is God, he had to wrestle with doubts and fears and sheer physical weakness, just like we do. “He was tempted in all things just like we are,” says the letter to the Hebrews, “but without sin.” And that tells us two things – first of all, that we don’t need to feel shame because we are weak, because we doubt, because we are tempted to make the easy decision instead of the right decision. Temptation is not sin. And the other thing is that whether we resist, or whether we give in to temptation, we can come to Jesus, our great high priest in confidence, for forgiveness, for strengthening, and he will not condemn us, because he knows what it is to be tempted.

The second Sunday in Lent we heard the invitation of Jesus, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me.” So our second word was “cross,” and we talked about how Jesus walked the way of the cross his whole life, not just in the final days of his Passion and death, but from the moment of his conception, when in his great love for the world he had made, he gave up the joys and privileges and comforts that belonged to him as the Lord of the Universe, to be born a little boy, in a poor family, in an occupied nation. Which is the ultimate in foolishness by any worldly standards. Because the way of the cross is sacrifice, and not prosperity. The way of the cross is suffering, and not comfort. And the way of the cross definitely leads to death, just as the processional cross leads us in the Mass every week right up to the altar, where we share the broken body and the spilled blood of Christ. And why would any sane person choose that? But what the world doesn’t know and can’t understand is what Jesus revealed in the Resurrection – that the cross is the only way to true and abundant life.

Today, then, we take up the word “holiness,” which is maybe a little more slippery than our first two words. Holy is what we are supposed to be, as the people of God, we know that. When God gave the people of Israel the Law, through Moses, he told them, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” And so, it is easy to think that holiness means perfect obedience. We read the Ten Commandments this morning, which are the very heart of the Law. If we want to be a holy people, that must surely mean that we need to be people who obey those commandments, all the commandments. That’s why we post the Ten Commandments on the walls of courthouses. It’s why we teach our children to obey the Ten Commandments.

But that doesn’t quite work, because clearly, God is not holy because he follows rules – even his own rules. If you remember, Jesus seemed to have a pretty creative relationship with the law, to the frustration and rage of the Pharisees, who took it absolutely seriously. He let his disciples pick grain on the Sabbath when they were hungry, he pardoned a woman caught in adultery when she should have been put to death, and he pointed out that the commandment about murder and adultery could be broken in a person’s heart, without taking any kind of action. Clearly, the holiness of God is something more than obedience – even perfect obedience. The holiness of God is something we might call “ineffable” – which means something that’s impossible to pin down with dictionary definitions or regulations or clever analogies.

The essence of the word “holiness” is not about morality; it’s about something that is set apart. “You shall be holy to me,” God says to the people of Israel, “for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” For us, to be holy is to belong in an exclusive way to God and to no one else. That’s why God speaks of himself as a jealous God. We usually think of jealousy as a bad thing, a kind of unhealthy possessiveness. But God’s jealousy is the unconditional love of a Father for a wayward child; it is the unwavering faithfulness of a husband to his unfaithful wife. Calling his people to holiness means that God sets his people apart, to be his beloved, and his alone.

In the gospel reading today, Jesus behaves in a pretty shocking way. I think most people imagine Jesus as a kind of zen-like figure, inscrutable and unflappable, quiet, but always ready with a word of wisdom or an act of kindness. Certainly most movie depictions of Jesus are like that. If we weren’t so familiar with the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple, we might really be shocked and offended when we read about him knocking over tables and driving animals – human and otherwise – out with a whip. Because, really, what the people were doing was perfectly logical and practical – people who came to the Temple to offer sacrifices had to procure animals somehow, so this was kind of one-stop shopping, all in the service of Temple worship, all in the service of the Law.

What enraged Jesus was not that this was an offense against the Law, but that it was an offense against the holiness that belonged to God. The Temple was the place of God’s Presence in Israel. His Father’s house was meant to be a place of prayer, a place set apart for worship, a place to humble yourself, a place of awe – not a kind of religious WalMart, however practical that might be.

When I was little, my best friend was Lindy Kohler, who was one of seven sisters. The Kohlers lived in a huge house. Mr. Kohler was a lawyer, and rarely home, and Mrs. Kohler wasn’t around very much either, and they were a family with very few rules. We could – and we did – pretty much anything that came into our heads to do in that house. We made horrendous messes sometimes. But there was one hard and fast rule, and that was that we were to keep out of the living room. The Kohler’s living room was a place set apart for the entertaining of special guests, and it was absolutely spotless at all times. The furniture was polished and dust-free; there were no scuff-marks on the floor; nothing was out of place. No matter how wild those girls were, they would never have dreamed of invading the sanctity of that space. That might be a fair picture of one kind of holiness.

But when we try to apply this story of the cleansing of the Temple, it’s not quite as simple as it might seem. Is Jesus telling us he hates it when we hold a raffle for a church fundraiser? A lot of churches have come to that conclusion. Or is it about decorum and respect: all about keeping things holy by making sure we dress in our Sunday best for Mass, making sure we keep the kids from making noise or running down the aisles of the sanctuary? Is this a story about keeping God’s living room spotless?

It’s a good thing for the church to consider carefully what it means to honor God in the way we order our life as his church. But Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple is not really about raffles or suits and ties or unruly children.

And the reason I am sure about that is because this Church building, built of bricks and stones and wood, as beautiful as it is, is not the new Temple. You are the new Temple. The people of God are the place of God’s Presence in the world. Jesus points to that right here, though it confused the people who were there at the time. When they demand that he show them some kind of a sign that would explain the damage he’d done, he gives them one. “Destroy this Temple,” he says, “and I’ll rebuild it in three days.” They just thought he was crazy. But he was talking about the Temple of his body. And of course, he did exactly what he said he would.

Peter writes, “As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” We are becoming, we are being built into, the body of Christ, which is the living Temple. What do we need to drive out of our hearts, passionately? What tables of old assumptions and habits do we need to overturn? That’s the work of Lent, to take a fresh look at our lives; to judge our own hearts; to repent of our unkindness and selfishness, to pull out weeds of bitterness and envy and regret; and to set our feet back into the way of the Cross.

Because our call is to live out our holiness, our set-apartness, in an unholy world. Jesus showed us the way: by being people of compassion and mercy, of grace and truth, by loving one another unconditionally as we have been unconditionally loved…by being here to serve, and not to be served, as our Lord taught us when he knelt to wash the feet of the disciples.

We don’t live out our holiness by keeping the living room spotless. We live out our holiness by opening the doors wider, by welcoming everyone out of the unholy marketplace of the world and into the holy presence of God. +