Today’s Gospel reading from John presents one of those clear moments in Jesus’ public ministry that utterly defies the popular perception of Jesus as a peace-loving philosopher who just wanted everyone to mind their own business and be nice to everyone else. In this scene, which apparently the early church thought important enough to include in all four Gospel traditions (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Jesus makes his own whip so he can drive out the moneychangers and merchants. In John’s Gospel, this is all the more striking because it comes right after the wedding at Cana, where Jesus changes water into wine. It’s as if he’s trying to get our attention or something. The same guy who helped a bunch of wedding guests continue partying is now getting all revolutionary up at the Temple.
Nor can we paint this as just a show of anger over an obvious injustice. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all suggest that the moneychangers were being dishonest: Jesus accuses them of making a house of prayer into a den of robbers. But in John there is no such accusation. It’s the trade itself that seems to bother him. St. Augustine, reading this passage, is perplexed. There was nothing, he reminds us, inherently illicit about selling animals on the Temple grounds. The animals being sold were sold for the twice-daily temple sacrifices. Why, then, would Jesus be angry at people who were only assisting in what was, for first-century Jews, a good and necessary religious task?
This is an important question, because it forces us to look more deeply than the surface. On the surface, we might jump immediately to the conclusion that true worship is polluted when it touches commercial interests. There may be something to that . . . but I don’t think that’s really the point.
Here’s what Augustine says:
Who are they that sell sheep and doves? They are they who seek their own in the Church, not the things which are Christ’s. They account all a matter of sale, while they will not be redeemed: they have no wish to be bought, and yet they wish to sell (Tractates on John, 10.6).
Augustine suggests that Jesus is mad less about the selling itself than about the motivation. The people in the Temple aren’t just involved in routine commerce surrounding Temple worship; they’re involved in commerce purely for the sake of commerce, with no interest in what it’s for. They sell things for sacrifice, but they don’t have any intention of offering sacrifices themselves.
When we put it that way, Augustine’s reading starts to sound a little more provocative. We like to think that our daily lives, our work, our play is fine just because it’s not evil. We’re not cheating people, we’re not breaking the law, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re good members of society, and so on. But what Jesus seems to say is that avoiding evil isn’t good enough. Being nice isn’t good enough. Doing business within basic moral parameters isn’t good enough. In fact, it kind of makes him mad. He wants more . . . but what exactly does he want?
Augustine says, “They have no wish to be bought, and yet they wish to sell.” What he wants is us. Jesus points to the legalistic development of the Temple’s sacrificial system and says, this isn’t real sacrifice. Oh, sure, animals are sold and given. But the meaning is lost, because hearts aren’t being given. “Do you think,” God asks in Psalm 50, “I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” And in Psalm 51 we read, “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
There is a reason, then, that John, unlike the other three Gospels, includes the strange dialogue about the Temple’s destruction and renewal. “He was speaking,” John tells us, “of the temple of his body.” Jesus is the new temple, and Jesus is the site of the ultimate sacrifice that reconciles us to God.
It is only in this new temple, Jesus’ body, that Christians now offer sacrifice to God. Our sacrifices of time, money, presence, love—they mean something only because they participate in the sacrifice of Jesus. They mean something because they are offered in the new temple that is his body, the Church.
What, actually, are we doing in church? Do we wish to sell, or do we wish to be bought? Augustine’s question is a tough one. Are we here out of self-interest? Are we here because it makes us feel good to be here, because it contributes to the respectable image we want to cultivate of ourselves? Are we here, in the words of many modern Christians, “to be fed,” to be nourished? So many us have bought in to the idea that worship is about us rather than about God, that worship is about meeting our needs.
I hope worship does meet some of our needs, that it does “feed” us in certain ways. After all, we feed on Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. And that is crucially important—the most important nourishment in the world. But the food we get is not necessarily the food we think we want. The truest nourishment, even the nourishment of Holy Communion, is nourishing only when properly received, and the proper disposition for worship is not that of a consumer waiting to get something that God, or the Church, owes us, but that of a person whose life has been saved by another. We are heirs of heaven by adoption, by grace; we have been saved from sin and death by a loving Lord.
Our worship is always, therefore, eucharistic—an act of thanksgiving—whether or not the sacraments are involved. God owes us nothing, because he has already given us everything that we never deserved in Jesus Christ. We come not primarily to be fed, but to offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, as St. Paul says in Romans 12, as a living sacrifice. And it is only in that offering that we can ever really receive the nourishment that the Lord offers us in return.
“Who are they that sell sheep and doves? They are they who seek their own in the Church, not the things which are Christ’s.”
It will probably do me little good to say, “Do not seek your own good; seek Christ.” Because I know as well as any of us that the gospel of self-fulfillment is far too compelling to be overturned by a simple alternative. In the end, though, the selfish motivation can work for the good, and that is because, in the end, nothing satisfies but the complete denial of self and the complete gift of self to the body of Christ. However much we might try to make ourselves happy with good works, with a good social image, with the basic attempt to avoid obvious evil, the only way to find ourselves is to give ourselves up, to allow ourselves to be bought, by Jesus the new temple, and offered as an offering of praise and thanksgiving to God.
And so I encourage you, in the name of God, especially in this season of Lent: let go of the consumer approach to Catholic faith. Let go of church membership as a useful tool for social or personal improvement. Let go of Christianity as a family tradition with merely historical worth. Let go of the idea that God is impressed with your pitiful efforts to meet him halfway. Embrace, instead, your identity as one who has been bought with a price. Embrace the knowledge that God’s love for you is more important than anything else in creation.
Please God prevent us from being moneychangers and merchants, so interested in our own good that we ignore the worship of the God in whose temple we sit.