A Place to Begin to Heal (Second Sunday after Epiphany; John 2:13-25; January 21, 2018)

A Place to Begin to Heal

Second Sunday after Epiphany
John 2:13-25
January 21, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

John's Gospel spends a lot of time in Jerusalem. Luke gets there three times: once at Jesus' birth, once when he was twelve, and then as an adult for the last few days of his ministry. Mark and Matthew only tell of one visit: for Jesus' last days. John, on the other had, even though it begins the story part of the story with Jesus as an adult, has Jesus in Jerusalem four times as an adult: here during Passover, in chapter five during an unnamed festival, in chapter ten during Hannukah, and once again during Passover beginning in chapter ten.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke--together called the Synoptic gospels because they can be "viewed together"--Jesus goes to Jerusalem in order to beard the lion in its own den. Jerusalem is the center of everything that Jesus is opposing and he conducts his ministry there to highlight the stark differences between the version of God's dream that he preaches and what he views as its theological perversion of it in the center of political and religious power. In other words he goes to Jerusalem to pick a fight.

Not so much in John. Oh, there is conflict, but the stories lack the feel of deliberate confrontation with the powers that be. You will certainly feel free to disagree with me, but the conflict that occurs seems to me to be more spontaneous on Jesus' part, as if Jesus went to the Temple for other reasons and then found what was happening too egregious not to confront. His objection to what he saw is that the practice of exchanging currency and selling animals for offerings should not be happening within the Temple complex at all, since that mixes business and religion.

So Jesus started overturning the tables and booths. He scattered the coins. He made a whip of ropes and used it to drive out the merchants and the sheep and cattle. Imagine the scene with tables upset, cattle and sheep running around trying to get away, the merchants yelling, and, at the center of it all, a half-mad peasant from Galilee yelling about God and whirling a whip. I mean, it's one thing to express an opinion, but it should be done in a way that doesn't disrupt commerce or inconvenience people just trying to go about their business. Jesus should have arranged for this protest in advance. The authorities would have provided a "free speech zone" far enough removed from the Temple so that things could continue without the chaos that Jesus brought.

My colleagues have been wrestling this week with whether Jesus was angry. Some of them have been saying that the text doesn't actually say he was angry and somehow they cannot believe it of Jesus unless the story actually says so. I don't think there is any question. Of course he was angry. How else would the disciples have put what happened with the bit from Psalm 96 that says, "...passion for your house consumes me"? If not anger, then which passion would this have been?

Representatives of the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce demanded to see his permit for this public outburst. They wanted to see "a miraculous sign." Had they heard about his water-to-wine trick? His answer wasn't very reasonable: "Destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up."

They replied, "What are you talking about? It took forty-six years to build this temple and you say you can put it up in three days?"

The story concludes, "many people believed in his name," that is, they trusted Jesus, but Jesus did not trust them.

If my theory is correct, if John was written for a traumatized community, then trust is a really big issue.

Like me, you were horrified when you heard the news that thirteen siblings, ranging in age from two to twenty-nine years, had been imprisoned by their parents, tortured, shackled, and starved for at least eight years. The Turpin children were rescued when their seventeen year old sister climbed out of a window at dawn and managed to call police from a deactivated cell phone. The siblings are getting medical and psychological care.

Although the parents have been charged with multiple felonies, the investigation is really only just beginning. I try to put myself in the place of one of the children, but what I know of their experiences far exceeds anything I have been through or witnessed. One thing that I can say for certain is this, though: every one of these survivors will struggle with the question of who they can trust. As they struggle with that question, they will also confront the question of who they are and what their story is.

The two people who were supposed to have kept them safe from outside threats were themselves the greatest threat to their welfare. The two people who were supposed to have nurtured them to become competent human beings capable of loving and being loved deliberately withheld even physical nourishment. The two people who were responsible for helping them frame a strong story about the value of their lives instead told them, at least in their actions and almost certainly in their words, that they did not deserve even to be alive.

These siblings were dependent, even more than most children are, on their parents. And their parents were monsters who treated their dogs better than their children.

Some of them have before now never even met a trustworthy adult. For others it is a distant memory. How will they learn to trust anyone or anything?

Some of them, I am certain, have never heard a compliment. How will they learn to tell--and believe--a story about themselves as people who deserve not only to be alive, but to be loved?

Was John's community feeling the same way? Parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, and perhaps grown children had been willing to sever their family ties simply because they were followers of Jesus. The authorities of the Jewish synagogue were willing to throw them out, cutting them off from the connection to the Jewish community, a connection that kept them safe from persecution by the Empire. Who could they trust? Having been sold out by the people who were closest to them, was there anyone?

So, right after John gives his community an invitation to a party, he takes them to Jerusalem, the symbolic heart of their heritage and where real power in the Jewish community resides. And there he reminds them that Jesus has the authority that the establishment had claimed. The temple was corrupted. The leadership was ignorant. Jesus understood, though. And he understood that complete trust was simply not possible outside of the group of Jesus' followers. He knew that he could not trust himself to them, even if they seemed to trust themselves to him.

In John's writings in general, there are clear boundaries between the inside and the outside of the community. In John's gospel there is no "Whoever isn't against us is for us." (Mk 9:40) Jesus doesn't trust those who are outside the community. The community doesn't have to, either.

You might agree with me that this isn't a very good place to end up. Hunkered down behind some imaginary or real wall, looking suspiciously outward to those who don't belong, is hardly a healthy way to live. But it's understandable, of course, especially given the community's recent experience.

So maybe that's not such a bad place to begin. The Turpin siblings are being treated by a carefully selected treatment team that is limited in number. The children will interact with only a few people at first. That can't be a place to stay for ever, but it is a good place to start.

It’s a better place to begin than being thrust into the wider world. We know that while most people will be kind, some--out of malice or ignorance--will undermine any remaining trust they might have that the universe is a good-enough place to live. Before their introduction into the wider world they need a chance to decide that there at least a few trustworthy people in the universe. They are getting that now. They have a long way to go. They may never see the world in the ways that you and I take for granted. But their life will get better.

John's community needs this space for healing as well. Jesus, whose spirit lives in their midst, knows their need and stands as a guardian over them. They do not have to trust the rest of the world, at least for now. For now, they can allow themselves to be cared for by Jesus who has the authority to do so. They should not stay there forever, but we are only in the second chapter of John. It's early days and neither their journey nor ours is complete.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.