So, it’s no secret – our country has fallen on hard economic times. Day after day, whether we listen to the news on the radio or see it on the television, we hear of more and more people who have lost their jobs – from the high power, white collared executives to the dirt-under-the-fingernails, 70-hour-work-week blue collared folks – nobody has proven themselves to be immune from the effects our country’s economic instability.
However, did you know that in the midst of all of this hardship, we’ve been given advice from our government officials and chief financial officers on how to improve our current situation and recover our economy? The answer, they say, is not to do what we might think would be the smart thing – to save as much money as we can. Rather, the advice that has been imparted to us as faithful citizens of these United States is to go out and spend, spend, spend. This advice comes from the idea that the more money we spend on our economy, the better our retail stores, car dealers, and banks will be able to return profits to the communities, bettering the lives of all who live in our country – it’s a cyclical and reciprocal relationship that has been created and established for the purposes of mutual improvement for all members of the community.
All the while, this suggestion of mass spending sprees causes an almost knee-jerk reaction to us shoppers as we flood our malls and car dealerships and continue our business with our banks. That reaction is has happened so much that it, now, comes almost naturally – as we drive down the highway with our gas lights blinking in our faces, or as we walk down the aisles of our grocery stores finding the best deals on our eggs, cheese, and milk, or as we look for that bargain on a dress or new pair of shoes – how much do all of these things cost?
Like us, the readers of John’s gospel were very familiar with this question of “how much” – especially when it came to practicing their faith in the act of worship. And we can see why in this text.
As we read, we see that Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem for the Jewish celebration of Passover. Passover, as you’ll recall, is one of the biggest and most important celebrations in the Jewish faith because of what it celebrates. The celebration of The Passover is an act of worshipful remembrance of God’s delivery of the Israelites from the tyrannical enslavement of the Egyptians. Under the leadership of Moses, who experienced God’s promise of liberation and freedom from a burning bush, the Israelite people were led out of Egypt and out of the oppression of the Egyptian king into the land that God had promised to Abraham and Sarah hundreds of years before.
Which would bring us to today as Jesus walks into the Temple courtyard with his disciples. For Jews around this time, the participation in Passover included many things. But two of the main elements of participating in Passover involved a long pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the sacrificing of animals as a symbol of thanksgiving in the remembrance of God’s deliverance from oppression.
So here we have Jesus just at the beginning of his ministry, having arrived at Jerusalem so that he might practice his faith as a devout Jew, and experiencing all of the sights and sounds of Passover – the shouting of vendors about deals on their clean sacrificial animals, the hustle and bustle conversations of people trying to figure out where they need to be for worship, the clinking of change as money-lenders help the pilgrims to make the correct change so the pilgrims might be able to participate in worship, the bargaining conversations of people and vendors trying to settle on a price appropriate for a sale, the smells of the small barnyard animals as they meander around the Temple, the looming gazes of skeptical Roman guards who would rather be somewhere else than in the midst of this controlled chaos…
But then something happens. Jesus, whom the disciples had witnessed only days before doing things that would encourage the party to go on – things that would bring joy and happiness to the lives of others, has suddenly fashioned a whip and is chasing out the animals and their self-employed owners, flipping over makeshift bank tables, and spouting off something like, “Get this stuff out of here! Stop using my Father’s house as a shopping center!”
In this moment, the disciples have a moment that many of have experienced. In the midst of all the action of life, they remember something very important. You know that feeling – you’ve been working hard all day, getting tasks completed and reaching towards a day’s worth of goals, and then out of the blue something completely different than what you’re focusing on pops into your heard. This happens as the disciples are witnessing Jesus’ actions in the Temple. The disciples remember the words of the psalmist from Psalm 69:9, “It is zeal for your house that has consumed me…” These remembered words are a mystery for the disciples for now.
And as the sellers and their livestock are feverishly making their way out of the Temple courtyard, Jesus is confronted by a group of Jewish leaders who question Jesus about his authority to come in to the Temple and do all of these destructive things. Jesus responds with a statement that incites both confusion and a bit of comical relief, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
What does this mean? Everyone knows that the Temple – which wasn’t even finished at the time of Jesus’ little outburst – had been under construction for almost the last fifty years. Really. I mean, think about it. Fifty years versus three days? How ridiculous does that sound? How is one man going to build and complete a temple in three days that has taken almost fifty years, and countless working hours, to build?
But we, the readers of John’s gospel, are given a little narrative insight – Jesus wasn’t talking about the physical building of the Temple; rather, Jesus was referring to his own body. And we find that the disciples, too, realize this but only after much contemplation and the resurrection of Jesus.
During this season of Lent, I would suggest to you that we focus on this practice that the disciples model for us – remembering – remembering how the things that Jesus said carried the authority of Scripture – remembering that the way that Jesus lived showed all who encountered him that all are children of God and worthy of experiencing God’s gift of grace – remembering that in Jesus’ death there was forgiveness for all, even those who killed him, his enemies – and remembering that in his resurrection, Jesus’ life, teachings, and death are the hallmarks of the One who is God and loves God’s creation to the point of self-sacrifice. These are things that the disciples remembered.
Remembering is such an important part of discipleship.
Because of remembering we are able to have a holy encounter with God through God’s Spirit.
Because of remembering our faith can be deepened – creating an even better understanding of this Jesus, who’s crucifixion and resurrection will be remembered and celebrated in a few short weeks.
Because of remembering we are able to look back and embrace the pain and loss and suffering in each of our lives as individuals and as a Christian community.
And because of remembering we can look on that pain and suffering that is embodied in the season of Lent, and recall the direction to which Lent points – Easter – the resurrection – God’s universal gift of grace found through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
However, before we arrive at Easter, it is good for us to linger in this season of Lent – this season of remembering – especially in the way that the disciples remembered. In the midst of Jesus’ acts of a mini-rebellion, we find the disciples remembering how Scripture answers an important question that is on the minds of disciples of all times and places: How much does it cost?
How much does it cost? It’s a question that doesn’t just pop into our minds when we think about our groceries and gasoline. The question is on our minds, too, when we wonder about what might happen when we decide to participate in God’s offer of grace as followers of Jesus.
One of my favorite historical figures in church history is pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonheoffer. Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German Lutheran pastor that participated in the German Resistance against the powerful Nazi Empire of the early Twentieth Century. Due to his unswerving allegiance to his faith and his God, Bonheoffer helped in founding the Confessing Church, an underground, Protestant organization that recognized that the Christian church was not an "organ of the State" for the purpose of strengthening the Nazi agenda, but only subject to Christ and Christ’s mission (The Barmen Declaration, 1934).
In 1939, Bonheoffer joined a secret group of high-ranking military officers in the military intelligence office, who planned to end the National Socialist regime by killing Hitler. Bonheoffer was arrested in April of 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to
Switzerland was traced to him. He was charged with conspiracy and imprisoned in Berlin for a year and a half. Again, Bonheoffer was imprisoned, following the failure of a plot to end Hitler’s life in 1944, and Bonheoffer’s connections with the conspirators were discovered. He was again arrested and was imprisoned in a procession of prisons and concentration camps, ending at Flossenbürg, where Hitler demanded that the conspirators be destroyed. At dawn on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonheoffer was stripped of his clothes, beaten and ridiculed by the German guards, walked out to the Flossenbürg Camp’s yard, and was executed by hanging.

Like Jesus’ disciples in the Temple, we would be good to remember the words of Psalm 69:9, “It is zeal for your house that has consumed me…” Bonheoffer, in his passion and zeal for Christ’s church and out of fear of the perversion of the church by the Nazi agenda, dedicated his life for the survival and sustained existence of the church – acts that would eventually consume his life to the point of losing it to the hands of the ones he sought to keep it from. This, too, is the zeal that the disciples experienced in that Temple courtyard – a realization that if Jesus would continue in this manner, it would eventually cost him his life – which we know, and the disciples realize – eventually does. This is what real discipleship looks like – zeal and total consumption our lives for the Gospel of Christ and Christ’s church. As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called to a life that offers to all of the world God’s life-giving, grace-filled relationship of love.
I encourage you to live out the rest of this holy season of Lent remembering how much it costs to be a disciple of Jesus the Christ. It can’t be boiled down to giving up bars of chocolate or cans of soda for a few weeks. Rather, the call of Christian discipleship is to live into the fullness of Jesus Christ, and it will cost us our lives if we are so willing to give it.
Amen.