Not in God's House
Beloved, today we meet Jesus in a very different posture from where we left him last week. At the wedding in Cana, he revealed God’s generosity—water transformed and overflowing as the very best wine, joy spilling over into the community, abundance poured out without reserve. A quiet miracle where Jesus really says nothing.
But today, Jesus walks into the Temple with a fire in his bones. This is not the soft, celebratory Jesus of Cana. This is the Jesus who sees something sacred being distorted and refuses to let it continue on his watch.
And if we listen closely, today’s story has something to teach us—not only about Jesus, but about what God desires for us, as people who follow Christ, for the Church which is intended to be Christ’s body in the world, and for a world longing for holiness and justice and hope that hasn’t been commercialized, legislated, or fenced off.
Before we go any further, we have to pause to clarify something vital. John’s gospel uses the phrase “the Jews” in ways that history has misused and weaponized. And so we must be careful, pastoral, and faithful readers who refuse antisemitic interpretations of the text.
Jesus was not an outsider critiquing another religion. Jesus was a faithful, practicing Jew—formed by Jewish law, prayers, scripture, pilgrimage, and tradition.
The conflict in this passage is not between Jesus and “the Jews,” but between Jesus and institutions that have started to obscure God rather than reveal God.
The Temple was the beating heart of Jewish life. It was where God’s presence was believed to dwell most fully. It was the place where sacrifices were made, where pilgrims came from every corner of the region, where prayers were lifted for healing, for forgiveness, for hope.
And there is a rich and beautiful story across the Hebrew Scriptures about how God chooses to dwell among the people—first in a tent carried through the wilderness, then in the Ark of the Covenant, and eventually in the Temple that Solomon built.
All of these were signs of God’s desire to be close to God’s people.
But by the time Jesus walks into the Temple courts that day, something has gone wrong.
It wasn’t that the money changers or animal sellers were doing something inherently sinful. They were providing what the sacrificial system of the day required. But somewhere along the line, the necessary structures had begun to overshadow the holiness they were supposed to support. And Jesus names the contrast clearly—this is God’s house, not a house of business.
The line between reverence and routine had blurred.
The line between holiness and hustle had collapsed.
And Jesus sees it. And he acts.
John’s gospel offers a profound theological turn here. John’s prologue proclaims that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And so Jesus is not simply visiting the Temple. Jesus is revealing himself as the Temple, as the embodied presence of God among the people.
He overturns tables not to destroy the Temple, but to break open the belief that God can be contained within it.
…Because God’s dwelling place is no longer confined to a building, or a tradition, or a system.
God’s dwelling place is now found in the life and love of Jesus—unbound, uncontained, unrestrained.
And the truth is, no one around Jesus fully grasps what he is doing or saying in this moment. In John’s gospel, this happens often—characters misunderstand Jesus at a surface level, and thereby miss the deeper truth he is revealing. John uses these moments as a narrative doorway through which divine meaning breaks open for us as readers.
So when Jesus declares, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” the Temple authorities hear only the literal. They look around at the massive structure—years of labor, generations of devotion—and they are incredulous. Forty‑six years it has taken to expand and modernize this sacred place, and now this man from Galilee claims he can rebuild it in three days?
But of course, Jesus does not mean the building.
He means his very body—the living presence of God among the people.
But no one is ready to hear that yet.
No one can yet imagine a world where the presence of God walks and breathes and loves right in front of them.
But their misunderstanding is not failure.
It is foreshadowing—because the truth Jesus speaks will only be fully understood through resurrection eyes… eyes that have seen all that has yet to unfold.
And his anger? It is not directed at individuals. It is directed at the ways institutions—however well‑intended—can limit full participation in God’s life and love. Requirements of the Temple system could hinder access to God based on geography, economics, or ritual purity.
Jesus refuses to allow those barriers to stand.
And perhaps we need to take that seriously.
And as we stand on the weekend when our nation honors
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this story takes on an even deeper resonance.
Dr. King understood something about Jesus’ table‑turning courage.
He understood that love—real, gospel‑shaped love—sometimes has to confront systems that wound, exclude, or dehumanize.
He devoted his ministry to tearing down barriers that kept God’s children from living fully into the dignity God gave them.
He knew, as Jesus knew, that the holiness God desires is always tied to justice, and that any institution—religious, legal, or cultural—that obstructs belovedness must be reformed by truth and liberated by love.
Dr. King spoke often of the danger of becoming too comfortable within institutions that benefit some while burdening others. And he also spoke of the hope that rises when people allow God to unsettle them for the sake of a world that is more just.
His ministry reminds us that overturning tables is not an act of destruction,
but an act of faithful reconstruction.
It is work born from the conviction that God’s house—God’s world—should look like God’s love.
And so today, Jesus’ righteous disruption and Dr. King’s faithful insistence meet us with the same invitation:
to be a people who refuse complacency when God is calling us toward liberation.
Here is the good news of this story: God is with us.
Not only in sanctuaries.
Not only in the rituals we inherit.
Not only in the places we designate as holy.
God is in the streets.
God is with the oppressed and marginalized.
God is with the justice warriors of this day.
God’s presence cannot be contained by any institution—not even the ones we love.
God’s love dwells with us through Jesus
and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
God chooses to be with us—wherever we are, however we arrive, whatever we carry.
And so, friends… this story invites us to ask hard, faithful questions:
Where are the places our love of the institutional church—its traditions, its timelines, its budgets, its committees—might get in the way of God’s love?
Where are the places we can loosen our grip on institutionalism so that God can be God—unbound, surprising, free?
Where do the institutions of our society create barriers that keep us from embodying God’s love in the world?
Barriers of race, wealth, citizenship, gender, access?
Where do we need to overturn some tables so that God’s justice can flow?
These questions are not meant to shame us. They are meant to free us.
Because Jesus’ table‑turning is not destruction.
It is liberation.
So we return to where we began.
At Cana, Jesus revealed God’s abundance.
In the Temple, Jesus reveals God’s holiness.
In both, Jesus reveals God’s love.
And that love lives among us still—calling us, shaping us, sending us.
May we be people who welcome that love,
who allow it to unsettle us when needed,
who trust its presence beyond our institutions,
and who carry it boldly into a world that longs for the freedom only God can give.
May it be so.
Amen.
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