Zeal for Your House Consumes Me (John 2.13-17)

However familiar we are with the passage about the cleansing of the temple, we still find it a bit disturbing. This is not really the Jesus we’re used to. We like the Jesus who heals lepers, who sets repentant sinners free, who forgives his executioners from the cross.

So we wince uneasily at his use of physical force as he throws furniture about and cracks a whip on the crooks who sat behind them.

We squirm in our seats at his display of emotional indignation as he opens the cages holding sacrificial lambs and pigeons and says “Get these out of here!”

We cringe uncomfortably at his attitude of spiritual intolerance. Let’s be honest, this is not great material for a school assembly on “British values” is it?

The truth is though that there are certain things, dressed up in the guise of religion, that Jesus just will not put up with.

Why was he so ticked off? In Mark’s gospel, it says that it was down to the fact that the temple was supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations. But it had become little more than a noisy souk; the place where heaven was supposed to touch earth had become a shabby, middle-eastern bazaar; dirty, congested, loud, unruly, and chaotic.

When you read John’s gospel you find that Jesus cleared out the temple at the beginning of his ministry. But when you read Matthew, Mark and Luke it comes right at the end, in the last week of his life. You may have noticed this.

It’s a puzzle. And some experts suppose that the gospel writers arranged their material thematically rather than chronologically – so they disagree with one another about when this actually did happen. Was it at the beginning or at the end of Jesus’ public ministry?

For what it’s worth, my view is that Jesus cleared the temple not once but twice. He did it at the beginning of his ministry (as John says) and he did it at the end as well (as Matthew, Mark and Luke testify). He did it twice because it needed to be done twice.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus visited the temple on his pilgrimage for the Passover, was incensed by what he saw and turned the tables over. This is what Erin just read for us. But I think that all the corruption gradually crept back in again and after three years the temple shambles was just as bad as before, so Jesus did it all again.  

Just as Jesus cleansed the temple on more than one occasion, because he had to, we too need continual cleansing from him. Just like the temple leaders, we let things slip. From time to time our worship goes stale and tired and it needs renewal.

Or busyness and hyperactivity creep back into our spiritual lives. Our priorities get muddled. Our focus on Jesus becomes obscured by other things. Our hearts need to get into line again. AW Pink said, “The Christian who has stopped repenting has stopped growing.” So we need to let Jesus walk round our lives individually, and our life as a church, and let him clear out all that is not right.

Every year, at the beginning of the school term we used to go through our children’s hair looking for head lice. It’s strange, but Kathie never once said, “Wow, pediculosis capitis, almost indestructible, feverishly burrowing into human scalp, laying eggs and sucking my child’s blood – what a marvel!” Some of you are going to start itching now… No, we feverishly applied potions and poisons to clear them out.

It’s the same with worship! When we ask God to comb through our spiritual life and bring to light all coldness of heart so we can repent of it, we receive the Lord’s cleansing and we can welcome the power of the Holy Spirit to live a transformed life.

In each instance of Jesus cleansing the temple, he got upset. Why was he so angry about selling livestock and changing money? Everyone has to go shopping and visit the bank.

He was angry because temple sacrifices had become a racket. It was an organised rip-off. You couldn’t bring your own lamb from the farm to offer to God. Someone on the door would inspect it, find something wrong with it and say, “Oh no, that’s not temple standard, you’ve got to offer one of these instead.”

So you went and got yourself an official temple-approved lamb or pigeon to bring to the altar and this authorised merchandise would set you back up to 20 times the market price. And of course, they made a tidy profit off you to garnish their lavish lifestyles.

Oh, and you couldn’t pay for the lamb with the cash in your wallet either. Oh no. You could only use special temple coins to pay. And the money-changing cartel stung you with extortionate commission charges. The gospels say that the Pharisees and Sadducees who controlled all this were lovers of money. It stank. Ordinary people were getting fleeced by the system. That’s why in Luke’s gospel Jesus calls the whole outfit “a den of robbers.”

Thank God that has all gone now!

• We don’t need a priest to pray on our behalf; Jesus has opened the way for us all to meet God face to face.
• We don’t need an altar to cut the throat of an unblemished lamb on; Jesus’ innocent shed blood has made all those sacrifices obsolete. All we need is a table to share a meal remembering it.
• We don’t need to pray towards a temple in Jerusalem; Jesus has replaced it and we can face him wherever we are.

In the Old Testament there were predictions that when the Messiah came he would come to his temple like a launderer’s soap or a refiner’s fire. And here he did come to cleanse and to burn with indignation.

And it says here that when they saw Jesus like this they remembered the prophecy; “zeal for God’s house burns me up”. They watched Jesus put God’s house in order and they said, “that’s what the Messiah is going to do.”

Jesus did not come with holy half-heartedness. And he doesn’t want spiritual indifference in his church either. He wants zeal in his people. He expects to see a bit of fire, a bit of enthusiasm.

The great preacher W. E. Sangster once interviewed a shy young man who was evidently short of self-confidence for the Methodist ministry. “Oh,” he said, “I'm not the sort of man who'd set the Thames on fire.” Sangster just looked at him and said; “My dear young man, I'm not interested to know if you would set the Thames on fire, what I am interested to know is this: if I threw you in the river would it sizzle?”

He wanted to see a bit of passion! All he needed was evidence of the fire of the Holy Spirit in his belly. You could throw some Christians in the Thames; they're so cold, they’re so dead, they'd actually lower the river temperature when they hit the water!

Are you ablaze with passion and zeal for God’s honour? Do you want this house of prayer to be filled with his presence and power? Do you want this church to be a meeting place where heaven and earth touch, where people encounter Jesus in salvation, in healing, in wonder, in praise?

This building was put up in about 1905 not as a monument to human achievement, but as a showcase for the glory of God. Over the years, as the ministry has grown and changed, the building has been modified. Bits have been added and taken away. It is a living space.

As you know, the PCC has been thinking and praying for some time now about how this building can more than ever be a house of prayer, a place of encounter with God.

This led to a week of prayer and fasting and a vision day in February in which – anyone who was there will testify - there was a tangible sense of spiritual unity. We unanimously agreed to seek architectural expertise to develop our basic vision for a reordered and extended church.

The PCC has formed a steering group (myself, Jenny Lewis, Simon Honeywell, Richard Spratt, Jennifer Brown and Martin Howard) and we met with an architect last Thursday. He hopes to have a study with drawings offering several possible projects for us to pray through and discuss by the summer holidays. We will aim for an Extraordinary General Meeting in September and we will decide then whether we push ahead or not.

We are not interested in change for change’s sake. We are considering inspirational modifications that will

·         put prayer at the heart of this place

·         provide more space for a growing congregation

·         give flexible options for outreach throughout the week

·         replace what has become unsafe or degraded

Why are we contemplating this? Because zeal for your house consumes me.

This year, there are several special events coming up.

The week of 9-15 May is being set aside as a national week of prayer. Our archbishops have written to every church in the land saying “Come on! Let’s pray for a great wave of prayer across our land. Let’s ask almighty God for the renewal of the Holy Spirit on the church nationwide and for the confidence to rise up with a fresh commitment to proclaim the gospel of Jesus.” So the Prayer Team are working on helping us do that with passion and enthusiasm. Because zeal for your house consumes me.

On 12 June we will celebrate the Queen’s 90^th birthday with a street party at which we will offer our neighbours and guests these superb commemorative booklets on the Queen’s reign and the centrality of her faith in Jesus Christ. I can’t wait for this. We want people in our neighbouring streets to know how good the Lord is and how joyful his people are. Zeal for your house consumes me.

From 21-27 June we will be hosting the Life Exhibition. I am so excited about this. It’s a multimedia, interactive exposition about Jesus to which we will be welcoming hundreds of schoolchildren from local schools over seven days. We want to proclaim the greatness of the Lord from one generation to another. So we are going to pray that children meet with Jesus here and begin a journey of discovery and faith. Zeal for your house consumes me.

We had a spectacularly good Alpha course last autumn where people came to faith in Christ, were filled with the Holy Spirit, and joined the church. We are running it again in September and we will pray for another spiritual harvest. The organisation, cooking, speaking, group leading is really hard work. But zeal for your house consumes me.

And there is so much else going on in this place week after week.

To pick just three; our youth work is growing. Our Connect ministry to retired people is bursting at the seams and the team is having to consider moving to two lunches a month. Messy Church has actually had to turn people away because it was unsafe to cram any more people into the building.

Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” That’s right. We need more people who can say “I’m getting involved because zeal for God’s house consumes me too.”

At the New Wine Leadership conference in Harrogate last month the staff team were among the 2,700 delegates to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury say these words:

“I believe from the bottom of my heart that the long years of winter in the church are changing. The ice is thawing, the spring is coming. There is a new spring in the church.”

With all respect to Justin, who I love, I did think when I heard it that it sounded just like a politician’s conference speech waffle.

But, you know what? It’s happening. I can feel the ice thawing too. And as I listen to other church leaders all over Teesside I keep hearing that the church is growing. May this recent season of growth be just a modest beginning to a great and sweeping move of the Holy Spirit in our region and nation! Zeal for your house consumes me. May it consume many!

So let’s rejoice over the past, let’s revel in the present, but let’s reach for a greater vision and greater experience of the Lord’s glory in the future. May it be said of us in future generations, “Zeal for God’s house consumed them.”

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 17 April 2016