John 2:13-25 (NIV) (13) When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. (14) In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. (15) So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. (16) To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (17) His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”[a]
(18) The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
(19) Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
(20) They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” (21) But the temple he had spoken of was his body. (22) After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
Nehemiah 13:1-9; 15-22 Nehemiah’s Final Reforms [13] On that day the Book of Moses was read aloud in the hearing of the people and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into the assembly of God, (2) because they had not met the Israelites with food and water but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing.) (3) When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent.
(4) Before this, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, (5) and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine and olive oil prescribed for the Levites, musicians and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests.
(6) But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had returned to the king. Some time later I asked his permission (7) and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. (8) I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room. (9) I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God, with the grain offerings and the incense.
(15) In those days I saw people in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day. (16) People from Tyre who lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath to the people of Judah. (17) I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, “What is this wicked thing you are doing—desecrating the Sabbath day? (18) Didn’t your ancestors do the same things, so that our God brought all this calamity on us and on this city? Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath.” (19) When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. (20) Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. (21) But I warned them and said, “Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will arrest you.” From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. (22) Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy. Remember me for this also, my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- While the story of Jesus’ cleansing the temple is well known, I believe that it is little understood. What was it that could have made Jesus so angry that he made a whip and beat men, sheep and oxen out of the Temple with it? What so enraged him that he overturned tables, spilling the silver and gold coins all over the ground?
John writes that his disciples remembered that it is written, “The zeal of Thy house did eat me up.” The disciples were referring to Psalm 69:9. For zeal for your house has eaten me up. The insults of those who insult you have fallen upon me.
In Romans 15:3 we find that same language. Here the Apostle writes, “For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The insults and abuses of those who insult and abuse you, fell on me.”
How were these people insulting God? Deut. 5:1-21 gives us the primary arbiter of righteous relationships between God and humankind. Dr. George Mendenhall, Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan’s school of Near Eastern studies wrote in his book Tenth Generation, that these Words were given to protect us from participating in aggression, abuse, conquest, deception, manipulation and oppression, and from those who sought to impose the same on us.
These are the only words that God gave speaking face-to-face with a human being, and hence contain the only commandments that ever came directly from God.
These commands are known in Hebrew as the “Ten Words.” God gave us “Ten Words” to guide all human social relationships.
The first three are foundational to our relationship with God,
Have no other Gods before me. Priority
Make no carved, molded or fashioned images of anything for yourself to worship. Integrity
Remember the Sabbath, the rest of God, and keep it holy. Sanctity.
No graven images. The engraving doesn’t take the form of carved images on rock and metal as much as it now takes place in the form of ideas engraved into our minds, our habits, our socialization processes, which put us at odds with the revealed will of God.
The community of exiles that were engaged in the process of rebuilding Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple under the leadership of Governor Nehemiah had spent seventy years in Babylonian captivity. They had Babylonian ways, customs, social relationships, currency and or course elements of Babylonian religion. So the rebuilding was two dimensional. There was the physical rebuilding, but then there was also the process of spiritual rebuilding. What bothered Jesus was not the gold, the silver, the doves, oxen and sheep. It was the violation of God’s most sacred law in the very temple of God by the very people who were supposed to be setting the example for others. It was compromise with human standards and practices of that rattled him.
Nehemiah had been away for an audience with the king. When he returned he found that one the priests, one who had been entrusted with the spiritual, ethical and moral health of the people, was in collusion with one of their godless enemies, Tobiah. We discover that another priest was married to the daughter of Sanballat. Tobiah was an Ammonite, one of the descendants of those who did not welcome Israel, but sought to prevent it from passing by them on their journey to the land of promise. In Nehemiah 4:1-4, we read, Then Sanballat heard that they were rebuilding the wall, he was angry and in a great rage, and he ridiculed the Jews—saying, “Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, seeing they are burned?” Now Tobiah the Ammonite was near saying, “If a fox climbs on it he will break the stone wall down.”
Verses seven and eight of chapter four tell us that Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabians, Ammonites and Ashdoditess plotted together to come fight against Jerusalem and cause confusion and failure. Of course that plan failed, because Israel prayed and watched day and night. The workers on the wall worked with a sword in one hand and their tool in the other. So Sanballat and Tobiah came up with a new tactic. Have them marry our women. Introduce them to our daughters. These young, womenless men were considered easy prey.
Sanballat's Jewish allies, however, kept Sanballat and Tobiah informed as to the progress of the work in Jerusalem. Nehemiah's far-sighted policy and his shrewdness kept him out of the hands of these neighbor-foes. In his reforms, so effectively carried out, he discovered that one of the grandsons of the current high priest Eliashib had married a daughter of this Sanballat, and was thus son-in-law of the chief enemy of the Jews.[13] Nehemiah also found that Eliashib had leased the storerooms of the temple to Tobiah, thus depriving the Levites of their share of the offerings in Nehemiah’s absence. The high priest (and/or possibly his son Jehoida and the unnamed grandson) was driven out of Jerusalem on the ground that he had defiled the priesthood (Neh.13:28).
Who and what is leasing space in our souls today—in the temples bought and paid for with the precious blood of Jesus? What Gods and ideologies and cultural practices have we latched on to that violate the sanctity of our relationship with God and rob us of the peace and joy and creativity that is ours through Christ?
Our temple, our soul-life, housed in our physical human bodies, is that which the resurrected Christ in us, “the hope of glory,” seeks to cleanse. As with Eliashib, there are associations with people, ideas, practices, loyalties, that interfere with the first Word, priority—“You shall have no other Gods before me.” There are experiences that have formed our consciousness and desires in opposition to that which God would have for us, and that deprive us of the full benefits of our salvation in Christ.
Genesis 8:1 tells us ,”God remembered Noah.” God remembers that we are but flesh. God remembers that we too often choose the way that seems easiest. God remembers that we are often blinded by our experiences, what we think is right, what we think we know, what our feelings tell us—and by our associations, who we hold in high esteem, whom we look up to, who we listen to, who we are intimate with. This is why God remembers us and invites us to rest, through priority, through integrity, through love. God is available to continually cleanse us through Christ our resurrection hope and life.
“5th Study in the Gospel of John ” John 2:1-12 When the steward of the house tasted the water which had become wine, and did not know where it came from, he called the bridegroom (10) and said to him, “Every man serves the good wine first; when all have drunk freely, the poorer wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.” In our fourth study of the Gospel of John, Jesus demonstrated that sometimes we have to get out of God’s way, so that God’s miracles can begin to take place. Jesus mother set the tone for our discipleship with the words, “Do whatever he tells you to do.” We discovered that Jabez, although born into the human condition of pain, suffering and loss, through total dependence on God, overcame the conditions of his birth and God established him in the family of David.
In reading our recent history, I discovered that in 2010, this congregation engaged the study of Vital Signs. We read that every stable growing congregation is grounded in guiding values—prayer, Bible study, a collective personality and witness guided by unconditional love of God, and an organizational life guided by God’s mission in the world. In your work, you affirmed three central values: 1. The community of faith is more important than any individual— 2. The great commission to reach the world is more important than any one community of faith—finally3. Becoming one with Christ is the way we honor and glorify God and enter into a relationship with God.
In order to focus on the way in which the first sign—water into wine establishes these core values for the church, we turn to the story of God’s miraculous blessing of Abraham. This blessing was necessary in order that God would make the covenant with him in Genesis chapter 17 verse 5. “No longer will you be called Abram, exalted father, but your name shall be Abraham, (father of a multitude).”
Yet in order for him to prove his trustworthiness for this great anointing, Abram was tested. He had taken his nephew Lot with him. By mutual agreement, Lot and his family had settled in the well watered Jordan River valley. Abraham settled in the foothills of Canaan. In Genesis 14 it came about that the kings of the city-states in the valley went to war with each other. In the process, Lot, his family and his possessions were taken as refugees by the invading kings. In verse 14 we read that when Abram heard that Lot had been captured, he led 318 trained fighters to the rescue. He traveled into southern Syria and rescued Lot, his family and his possessions. Abraham put the needs of the community first over his own individual needs.
As Abram returned victorious, we have what the biblical scholars refer to as a theophany. God appeared in the presence of a human being, a king, this king is not one of the kings mentioned in the battle. Neither is his so-called kingdom one of the city-states engaged in the conflict. The word Salem here translates as city of peace. He was the prefigure, the very the Christ, the logos made flesh, as king of the messianic Salem, the New Jerusalem.
Melchizedek, king of Salem gives us a sign, the sign of the Christ. He brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of the Most High God. Verse 19 tells us that he “blessed Abram saying, 'Blessed, highly favored be Abram of God Most High-Possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High who has delivered your enemies into your hands.'" Abram had passed the test. He had been faithful to God, because he put Lot’s trouble ahead of his own comfort. He put down his own safety, the needs of himself, his personal enterprise, his flocks, his herds, his farming, to rescue his nephew. But he did this because he was already praying, relating to, and meditating with the most high God.
Perhaps like Jesus, Abram’s first response was, “It is not my time yet.” This is not why God called me to leave my homeland—not to engage in petty wars, not to play the great rescuer of Lot’s party or in Jesus’ case, the married couples’ reception. But when we are open to God, when we live in a full relationship with God, developing the spiritual sensitivity to do what God tells us to do, to go where God tells us to go, to stand on the principles God requires us to take a stand on, then we discover the blessing that comes from living in God’s will.
But it was not for the married couple that God had Jesus perform this sign. Verse 11 tells us his disciples saw the glory of God in the making of water into wine, and they believed on him. It was for his disciples, this small group he had recently gathered to himself, that he made himself totally available to what God wanted, even though he did not fully understand why God was asking him to seemingly “start early.”
Through Abram’s obedience on behalf of Lot, God, the Most High, became the life of the party for the coming children of God. This is the man God chose to make His agreement with, on behalf of the world: “Through you, my faithful brother, shall all the families of the earth be blessed (Genesis 17).
The water of purification was used to cleanse the hands and feet of those who came and went from the party. It was a part of the Hebrew ritual of purification. But being pure doesn’t bring joy. Being clean doesn’t fulfill the soul’s needs to know life of extreme joy. God’s joy is not about happiness, giddiness, living on a high. God’s joy is deep, satisfying, that only the wine of Joy, the life of God can bring us.
The world is looking for real joy, real peace, for real satisfaction. It seeks the heavenly party that never ends, fueled by the wine of God’s life. Through the joy that comes from living life in communion with God, we discover that God is truly “the life of the party.” So what are we waiting for? Let the party begin—let it begin.
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’sgood pleasure to give you the kingdom (Luke 12:32).” Someone has said that “Fear is the cheapest room in life’s house, and at the same time the most costly.” 2nd Chronicles, chapter 15, gives us an episode in the life of King Asa of Judah. Having just won a greatvictory, he was passing the home of Azariah. The spirit came upon this man and sent him out to the king, saying, “If you seek Yahweh he will be found by you, but if you forsake him he will forsake you.” We are left to wonder, why would God need to give these words of faith to King Asa? He had just been blessed by the Lord’s intervention, an answer to prayer. Before going into battle, Asa had prayed, “Lord, there is one like you-we rely on you—in your name we come against this vast army. Do not let man prevail against us.”
Maybe after such a great victory he needed to be reminded of who had won the battle. Our egos are all too ready to take the credit for the good stuff that happens, even though we have watched and fought and prayed for it to happen. Our egos tend to be stronger than our prayer life. Because we often fail to thank God as the apostle taught—In everything give thanks, we are likely to take the credit.
Our egos constantly overpower our sense of need for a deep devotional life with God. We have time for what we need to do, but God takes up too much time—time with God is not essential in our natural-earthbound minds—until like Asa, we face an enemy, be it the enemy of poverty, or sickness, or death, threats to our domestic tranquility. In the same manner, the Hebrew Bible bears witness to the fact that Israel constantly turned away from God toward idols of their own and their neighbors making.
Sometimes, because we are not really grounded in the Word, grounded in our prayer life, grounded in our devotional life, grounded in our praise life, our egos allow our obsessions, our attachments, our preoccupations, our additions, to take us away from understanding who we are and whose we are. We forget that God made us for himself, and our hearts will find no rest until they find their rest in him.
The enemy uses these natural human weaknesses, this tendency to yield to self-will over God’s will, to create unknown tears in the fabric of our faith where fear can seep in. So as Asa came back victorious, basking in the defeat of his enemies, God said to him—“The Lord will be with you, as long as you stay close to Him.” God was preparing Asa for what was to come. In the TV dramatic series West Wing, each episode ended with the President asking his staff, “What’s next?”
In the third chapter of Ezra, we read, beginning with verse 2, that Jeshua and Zerubbabel and their associates began to build the altar of the God of Israel. They were the first exiles to return from captivity. They were surrounded by hostile people. It was hard to recognize Jerusalem after 70 years of decay as an isolated ruin. The Persians had even changed the name of the area to “trans-Euphrates.” The late Dr. Chinua Achebe reminded us in his writing that this was the same manner in which European colonial powers divided up Africa and made national boundaries across previously intact tribal lands, renaming these nations to suit their imperialist designs.
The temple had been destroyed, walls torn down, dwellings demolished. But Ezra 3:3 tells us, “Despite their fear of the peoples around them, they built the altar on its foundations and sacrificed burnt offerings on it to the Lord, both morning and evening sacrifices, and verse 4, Then in accordance with what is written, they celebrated…. They were not moved by what they feared.
After 70 years of exile, it was not just the decree of King Cyrus that brought them back to Jerusalem. God had made a promise 70 years earlier through the Prophet Jeremiah (29:11), For I know the plans I have for you—plans To prosper you and not to harm you, Plans to give you hope and a future. So they were not moved by fear of real dangers, real strife, real hardship, and real chaos. They did not get depressed or discouraged by the decimation they found. How did they do this?
They got to work. The first thing they did was “build.” They built on the foundation that was already laid there. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth (1 Cor 3:11), “There can be no other foundation beyond that which is already laid; I mean Jesus Christ himself.” Jesus is the Word made flesh. When things fall apart, when challenges rise, we must always continue to build. And we must build on God’s foundation, for all other ground is sinking sand.
The second thing they did was to offer sacrifice. There are many sacrifices that God’s work requires of us. They offered the burnt offerings in accordance with God’s Word. The third thing they did was in accordance with the written Word of God, they celebrated. They had a party. Maybe they composed some new songs based on the words of Jeremiah 29:11, because God had been faithful. This is how they overcame fear. This is how we overcome fear. If we build our lives on the revealed Word of Christ, the transmitted witness of scripture, and the sacrificial living of subjecting every issue, every situation, every fear, every question, every action to God, then no matter how determined the challenges, deceptive our enemies, or unrelenting the onslaught, we will not be moved by what we fear.
Gospel of John #4, Second Miracle, Part A 9. Jabez was honorable above his brothers; but his mother named him Jabez (sorrow-maker), saying, “Because I bore him in pain.” 10. Jabez cried to the God of Israel saying, “Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me, and you would keep me from evil so it might not hurt me!” And God granted his request. 1 Chronicles 4:9-10
Jesus, his mother and his disciples were in attendance at a wedding at Cana of Galilee. They host had run out of wine, and Jesus mother came to him with the problem.
He responded to his mother in Aramaic, asking, literally, “What to me and to you?” This can be translated, “Woman, why are you involving us in this? It is not my time yet.” Jesus’ self-understanding, and our understanding of what it means to be disciples of the Christ, was not guided by his own vision, his mother’s vision, the dictates of Rome, the dictates of Jews, and certainly not by the dictates and needs of a wedding reception. Jesus, and all who receive the Christ of God into their lives, is guided by God and God alone. Just as the Spirit descended on him like a dove, this sign of the first miracle, the miracle of the incarnation was God’s demonstration that the agenda of the Christ is always God’s agenda, not human agenda.
But John also seeks to convey to us, that while God’s agenda is not human’s agenda, there are some things we can know about God clearly, things that have always been true of the one true sovereign God, and the first and foremost is that God is Love. So paradoxically while God’s agenda is not defined by our specific agenda, the very nature of who God is-LOVE-always compels God to step in to meet human need, to satisfy our need for nurture and care, and to quench our thirst for life. When we address human suffing, human misery, oppression, hopelessness, we are responding to God’s agenda and not the human agenda.
Because God is love, wherever love needs to intervene, we find the answer to the question Jesus posed to his mother, “Why are we to be involved?” For Jesus, the hour, the time of his passion, his death, his resurrection was yet to come. But in truth he discovered as we will discover or have discovered, that the time of our death begins with the acceptance of the Christ of God in us. The Christ presence dictates that we, and our old human agenda dies and Christ lives in us—guiding us into God’s agenda. In one of Paul’s earliest letters, perhaps one written on his first apostolic journey, he writes (Galatians 2:20): I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in my human body, I live by faith in— that is to say reliance upon and complete trust in, the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.
On hearing Jesus’ his mother responded, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Jesus mother was saying, “Let him loose. Let him do his thing. Do whatever he tells you.” When we get out of God’s way, then God’s miracles begin to transform our existence. God’s solutions begin to take on our problems, God’s deliverance steps into our failure.
Jabez literally means pain. He was born in the royal line of the tribe of Judah, the family of David. He was one of the 9 brothers born to Etam, the son of Hur, one of the five sons of Judah (Judah Ben Hur). Unlike his brothers, he had no offspring. The circumstance of his birth, some fetal trauma, had wounded both he and his mother. He was more honorable than his brothers, but his mother gave him the unfortunate label, “sorrowmaker.” Unfortunately we do our children great harm by labeling them, putting them down, discounting their value and worth as the HIGLY FAVORED OF GOD.
Too often we hear, “He will never be any good.” “He was bad from birth.” “He ain’t #%@*!” Whatever the condition was, it prevented him from having offspring. This meant that he would be landless, he had no sons to farm his vast holdings, hence no produce, no profit, no future. He would have no heir, no heritage and hence would never be respected as a clan leader.. Yet he is listed among the genealogies of the worthy offspring of note of King David.
God is not directed by human will, and yet it is human tragedy that cries out to God. This is why David speaking prophetically in Psalm 72:12-13 declares:
For he will deliver the needy when he cries for help, The afflicted also, and him who has no helper. He will have compassion on the poor and needy, and the lives of the needy he will save. He will rescue their life from oppression and violence, And their blood will be precious in his sight;
Jabez was a troubled young man. He would be called Travon Martin today, or Oscar Grant. But their blood is precious in God’s sight.
These children had troubled childhoods, they could have been called sorrowmakers or sorrowtakers, but they were God’s children, our children, a part of the fabric of life, of families, of men and women who with all their limitations and failings, like us, loved them, and they returned that love in spite of the pain and sorrow that life had for them. They certainly did not need to be shot down like dogs, because those who hate and fear us view us and all of our children as threats. They are the human need that cries out to us to let God do his thing in us.
So we ask with Jesus, “What has this to do with our discipleship?” The answer comes quickly, “Do whatever the Christ tells you to do.” “Do whatever love tells you to do.” Unlike Jabez, many are too wounded to call on God to enlarge their land, increase their options, give them alternatives, but we can.
We can reach out to them in love, so that they will build the self-esteem that one needs and realizes when we teach and preach and demonstrate that the Jabezes, the Oscal Grants and the Travon Martins are God’s Highly favored. We can cry out to God for them, embrace them and share our power, our life, our love, our compassion, our uplift, our encouragement with them.
We can reach out to them and teach them that they, too, notwithstanding the pain, the sorrow they bring, that they live in, that they carry, are the objects of God’s love, God’s grace, God’s care. Do what He tells you to do. Let God loose in your life. Let the love flow. Let your life glow.
For he will deliver the needy when he cries for help, The afflicted also, and him who has no helper. He will have compassion on the poor and needy, And the lives of the needy he will save. He will rescue their life from oppression and violence, and their blood will be precious in his sight; So we are called to bear witness to and align ourselves with the second miracle of the Christ, his first sign in response to the human condition. It is time for the disciples of Christ to respond to this sign, and “Do whatever he tells us to do?
