The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Each year about 60,000 flights are cancelled or disrupted because of bad winter weather. It costs the airline industry an estimated 60 billion dollars each and every year. Disruptions can not only be inconvenient, they can be extremely expensive. The word disrupt means to interrupt or impede the progress of something, like the normal course of events, or the ordinary execution of business, or even one’s own life can be disrupted. A kid can be disruptive in school, or perhaps at a baptism. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and other disasters can disrupt life as we know it as well. It seems that protesters these days disrupt more meetings and traffic than ever before. And all of us have experienced a time when an illness or a diagnosis or some family emergency has disrupted our plans.
But while it is true disruption is generally regarded as a bad and inconvenient thing, disruption is not always a bad thing. If disrupting is disrupting something to right wrongs or prevent bad things from happening, then in fact disruption is a good thing. It stands to reason then that disrupting the disruptors is also a very good thing. The assigned Gospel lesson this morning is about disruption, which in this case comes in the form of Jesus upsetting the apple cart, of turning over the tables, of making a whip, of driving the money changers and the merchants off the temple grounds.
And today, you may not have noticed or witnessed it to think you witnessed it, but what you saw in the rite of Holy Baptism, the sacrament of Holy Baptism, was Jesus now entering the lives of these three children to disrupt the normal course of life for these children. Namely, we don’t get to hear much about Jesus the disruptor, but behind the scenes that’s exactly what Jesus is and what he does.
It was Passover. Like every other obedient male child of the day and adult, he was required to go to the temple three times a year. It was the Law. He was to be there at Passover. He was to be there at Pentecost. And he was to be there at the Feast of Tabernacles. It was the Law, and the Law had a purpose. Its purpose was to bring the children of God into the presence of God so that he could forgive their sins in the rites of sacrifices, have fellowship with his own children, his people the Israelites, and remind them of how he saved them and adopted them as his very own children out of slavery in Egypt.
During Jesus’s three and a half year earthly ministry, he went to the temple three times for Passover. He cleansed the temple on two of those times, on the first visit, and then had to repeat it on his last visit three years later. Our Gospel lesson this morning records the first visit to the temple. After being baptized by John the Baptist and tempted in the wilderness, wandering, he entered the temple grounds, and there he was angered by what he saw. He was angered over the contempt that the people had over the holy things and the holy rites of the temple, in his Father’s house. He was also angry that merchants and money changers and the religious elites had created a bit of an extortionary plan to charge more money for the sacrifices, and to put their finger on the scale, and not to give dollar for dollar in the exchanges. It was an extortionary exploitation of God’s children under the guise of worshiping God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Our reading began with verse 13: “The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And he found in the temple those who were selling oxen, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated. And he made a scourge of cords and drove them out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and he poured the coins of the money changers out and turned over their tables.” Who would have thought Jesus had such a temper?
Today in the Gospel lesson, and as we’ll see in the rite of Holy Baptism, we see a different kind of Jesus, a disruptive one who intervenes to save his children from all that is evil in this world. Here in the temple there is no meek and mild babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. Here in the temple he’s not the young boy that years earlier had gone into the temple and spent days there discussing profound theological parts of the Old Testament. He isn’t turning water into wine to save a wedding, and he’s not healing the blind or the lepers, and he’s not raising the dead. We don’t see him teaching in this moment with winsome parables as he had done for his ministry. The Jesus before us this morning doesn’t look much like a teacher, a healer, a comforter, a friend, a counselor, and the man who once said, “He who is without sin, cast the first stone.” We see a Jesus who is all business, a man filled with righteous anger, who made a whip of cords and like a madman drove everyone who abused his Father’s house from his Father’s house.
It’s a surprising side to see for the Prince of Peace. Most of us prefer the Jesus that goes after that one little lost sheep. We’re used to the gentle, soft-spoken portrayals of Jesus who calmly confronts sinners while outwitting his adversaries. We want that Jesus who told the disciples, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me, for such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” We like Jesus, we like that Jesus who welcomes children and sinners, and instructs his church to baptize even the youngest among us, like the three before us this morning, whose lives have now been spiritually disrupted by Christ in the waters of Holy Baptism. For in the rite of Holy Baptism, God joined his Word of promise of forgiveness, adoption, to ordinary water, and disrupted the lives of these three children.
The Gospel lesson goes on to show that Jesus holds absolutely nothing back, full bore. In short, he disrupts what had become the ordinary business of the church, money in that case. This is the Jesus that accuses his enemies and the oppressors of oppressing his brothers the Israelites. He demands they stop exploiting and cheating his people and his Father.
Now he went to Passover and went to the temple because he wanted to be with his heavenly Father in a unique way, and that’s the nature of the church. In doing so he was fulfilling the Law, because that’s what he was to do, perfectly, and he did all the time. But the temple was the house of God the Father. It was the place God had promised that he would meet with man, that he could abide there among sinful human beings in the Holy of Holies. Jesus understood that being in church, speaking and singing the liturgy and hymns, hearing the scriptures read and preached upon, was a special, unique communion with the heavenly Father that is found nowhere else on all the earth. It’s only in the church these things are done. Being in the church, where God is present in Word and Sacrament ministry, is actually being in the presence of God. You are now where he promised to be: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” That’s a baptismal verse, by the way. That’s why the religious law in the Old Testament requiring Hebrews to worship once a year in the temple at Passover came to be in the first place.
But Jesus wanted to go to church. He wanted to be in his Father’s house. The fact that there were a lot of sinners and hypocrites in the temple didn’t dull his desire to be with his heavenly Father. In fact, the fact that the priests and the scribes and the Pharisees had all corrupted the teaching of the Old Testament and turned it into a religion of works righteousness and had robbed the people of the Gospel didn’t take away from Jesus’s desire to go to the temple and worship. He wanted his Father’s house to be a house of prayer, of right worship, of fellowship, not a den of thieves. So he drives the offending parties from the temple.
But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The religious leaders didn’t appreciate the disruption, especially the one that affected the bottom line, the cash flow. It cost them too much money if these merchants and money changers were shut down. Therefore the Jews answered and said to him, verse 19, “What sign do you do to show us that you can do these things?” In other words, they want to know by what authority he can trump what they have put in place. They are the office holders in their view, not him. They demand to know why he does what he does and when he does it. They demand a sign that he has divine authority to act in such ways. And for his part, Jesus is going to provide the whole world with proof, and that proof is called Easter morning. And Jesus said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll raise it up.” And therefore the Jews said to him, “It took 46 years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days?” But Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered what he had said.
See, Jesus was not only in the temple as the Son of God. Jesus was the temple too, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Where Jesus is, there God the Father is, and there God the Holy Spirit. Knock down the temple in three days, destroy this body of mine, and I’ll raise it up on that third day. Thus Jesus has the authority to make clean that which was unclean, to bring to life that which was dead, and to disrupt the disruptor: the devil, the world, and the old sinful nature.
And that’s made clear, by the way, in the baptismal liturgy. We learn also from the Word of God that we’re all conceived and born sinful and dead in death, and so we are in need of forgiveness. We’d be lost forever unless delivered from sin and death and everlasting condemnation. Then comes the Gospel, the good news: but the Father of all mercy and grace, his Son Jesus Christ, who atoned for the sins of the whole world, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. That’s what God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit did for these three children. He made them clean. He adopted them into his holy family, the body of Christ, the church. He poured the Holy Spirit into them, and he secured for them a life everlasting in the heavenly realm.
Hebrews 10: “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean,” it’s a baptismal reference, “from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed,” another baptismal reference, “with pure water.” Listen to what Paul wrote in First Corinthians 3:16 and 17: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and that the Spirit dwells in you?” By virtue, by the way, of Baptism and your true Christian faith. “If a man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.” One who is baptized in Christ and believes and trusts in Christ for the remission of all their sins, they are in fact a temple.
We just saw the construction of three new temples right before our eyes. Baptism is the Gospel, my congregation knows, in liquid form. Everything that is in the preached Word is in the baptized Word, joined with the water, just like the body and blood is joined with the bread and wine in Holy Communion. Luther liked to say “in, with, and under.” Titus says this about Baptism: “He saved us, not because of the works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of everlasting life.”
In the waters of Holy Baptism, the old life, the life lived apart from God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the life lived by the vast majority of people in the world, has now been disrupted. Here in little Immanuel Lutheran Church, in Holy Baptism, a life lived in the church: Jesus takes back that which was taken from God in the Garden of Eden, his righteous creation. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection becomes our life, our death, and our resurrection. It’s imputed to us. That’s a fancy word that means put on top of us, or wrapped. We’re wrapped in it, so that when God the Father looks upon us, all he sees is a sinless saint, not the sinner that we see in ourselves. Romans: “Do you not know that all of you who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life,” that is, in the knowledge and reality of the resurrection.
In the waters of Holy Baptism, Jesus comes and disrupts the plans of the devil, the world, the old sinful nature, for the one who is baptized and has been given the gift of faith. The old life and its condemnation has been cancelled, and the new has come. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” These three were born today of the Spirit in the waters of Holy Baptism. Jesus makes the baptized clean, a temple fit for occupancy by the Holy Spirit. This morning, this is what he’s done for these three children. The old is passing away. The new has come. Praise be to God. Amen.
Please stand. May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Jesus Christ. Amen. Please be seated.