March 7, Lent 3B (John 2:13-22)

I’m a lover of words, and I have long loved the Gospel of John. I am struck every time I read the strange and wonderful opening line of this strange and wonderful book: “In the beginning was the Word.” There is much in this book to know and to ask about Christ, the Word become flesh. And yet, reading through the second chapter now, my wonder turns to John, the man of words writing Christ as the Word. It is John as reader, writer, and interpreter of Jesus who fills the pages of the sacred text for me today.

The historical facts of John’s life are not settled. Is he the apostle and personal friend of Jesus or an Ephesian elder who followed Jesus at a greater distance? Is he an embodied voice of a whole community or school of thought that we might now call Johannine? Is he a literary symbol or a textual device? The text doesn’t clarify this, but it does invite readers into a “mind at work,” to borrow language from Michael Card, the internal world of a man, real or imagined, engaged in interpretation as a profound practice of faith.

As this week’s reading begins, I am immersed in a suspenseful narrative. I enter the temple with Jesus, pulled along by John’s storytelling and my own imagination. There are stalls of cattle and sheep and cages of doves waiting to become sacred sacrifices to God. There are vendors, money changers, and crowds of customers doing the business of sacrifice. In response to all of this, Jesus takes up a posture of resistance. He acts swiftly, disrupting the profane and abusive business that has overwhelmed the sacred space of the temple. The cattle and the sheep flee, coins fall to the floor, tables crash, and Jesus speaks his protest: “Stop.”