Jesus Flips the Tables: The Disruption of Divine Love
Jesus Flips the Tables: The Disruption of Divine Love
John 2:13-22
January 18, 2026
Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’But he was speaking of the temple of his body.
What is something that makes you angry? Shout out a few.
For me - Rude people, news stories about people being cruel to others, being on hold with customer service…
The anger that we can feel in our body and our emotions can set the tone for today’s scripture.
I imagine Jesus walking into the temple that day, the temple, which was the special place where humans and God meet one another.
I imagine this man, this God-with-us, divine embodied human walking in there and taking in the chaos. Letting it hit his senses: the moneychangers and the sacrifice sellers, the smells and the clamor, the animals bleating, and the vendors shouting, and the crowds navigating this noisy bazaar atmosphere in the temple’s outer court.
I imagined Jesus taking it all in, and the hot, churning ball forming in his gut, the tingling hands and the anger rising up his chest and heating his face. I picture him grabbing some rope and finding a wall to squat against, and with sharp clarity of purpose, pouring all his concentration into the task, braiding a whip out of cords.
Then, rising from his corner, intent on setting the record straight, he takes a deep breath and plunges into the center of the chaos, swinging his whip at the cattle, shouting, and chasing the bewildered animals out of the temple.
Turning back he lunges at tables, flipping them over, scattering money everywhere as though it is useless. He points at the doves and roars to the sellers, “Get these things out of here! Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!”
Not the usual image of Jesus meek and mild is it.
Something inside of me wants to get to my feet and cheer.
Let me back up and give some context to the scene.
This act Jesus did take place in the Court of the Gentiles, where thousands of Pilgrims came from all over and converged. This area was as far as non-Jews were allowed to enter the temple, as close as they could get to worship the God of Israel. It was their place to pray.
The next section inward was for Jews only, called the Court of the Women, where all Jewish people could go, but the farthest in that women were allowed.
Then came The Court of the Israelites, for only Jewish men, and inside that, the Court of the Priests for Levites, and inside that, the Holy of Holies, where God most resides, and where almost no human is allowed to go.
The temple, this holy place, where God resides. However, by the time this story is told, written down in the Gospel of John around year 90 AD, something has changed. The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. So it had been gone for over twenty years. The Roman army tore it down, stone from stone.
John puts this story near the beginning of Jesus ministry. The other gospels put it near the end part of the reason Jesus is arrested. For John, in his day, faith could not be centered on a building. The building no longer existed.
But why did that matter? What changed? Let’s look more closely at the temple.
The place where God acted was The Temple. It was first established as a house of prayer. It was the one place on earth where people were re-connected to Holy One after some life changing event, like the birth of a child, or the death of a family member, or after something that they did that violated a commandment or more law. The Temple was the place of restoration. That’s the heart of all those old Jewish rules and rituals about purity and holiness. When something happens, God provides the means to bring you back into relationship.
At some point this theology, these practices, became rigid. And the temple system and the lines of who is clean and unclean and the need for sacrifices to make a person right with God.
And just as all things do when we trade the way of God for the way of fear, it had become a system of restrictions and labels, defining who was more worthy, and deciding who had more access. In the name of approaching God, they had succeeded in creating a maze of requirements and expectations to get close to God, that limited that access to a very narrow chosen few.
Moneychangers were an essential part of the system because it was idolatrous to use Roman coins stamped with the emperor’s image to buy your sacrifice. The moneychangers were giving people pure tokens in exchange for impure money. It was big business, especially during Passover. It also meant the poorer you were, and the less able you were, the less access you had to a good relationship with God. (Rev. Joanne Whit blog post)
It is a system of exploitation via exorbitant tithes and taxes that blocks access to the divine — that literally keeps the bodies of the poor outside the gates of the temple, forcing them into more and endless debt before they can approach and worship God.
Jesus raised up his righteous anger about a system that penalizes the poor and prevents people from being seen as beloved, whole, invited into a sacred space. He disrupts a system that was not life-giving.
Jesus’ Body is now the Temple
Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up again on the third day.” On the third day . . . With that little phrase, John winks at his congregation, prompting them to affirm that Jesus is the Temple. If the Temple is the meeting place between God and the people, then Jesus is that meeting place. Sixty years after the Resurrection, twenty years after Jerusalem was destroyed, John’s community, knew - God meets us in Jesus the Christ, the Cosmic Christ.
That’s why this Gospel offers story after story of how people encounter God as Jesus meets them. Over the next few weeks we will hear of one person after another: Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind.
The Holy is not in a building but a body. Jesus is free to move about as he meets people and helps them experience love, wholeness, healing. He speaks, he touches, he is present in a body.
Christ – Incarnate Love, Body of Christ and Bodies
I’m thinking and praying a lot about what it means to honor human bodies — mine, yours, everyone’s — as holy places. As homes for God.
We live at a time where many people, many bodies are not honored or valued or respected. The recent actions of immigration raids and confrontations in Minneapolis and OK City and Princeton that if your body looks brown or black, you are suspect. You can be and will be detained. I am reading stories about students, teachers, mothers and fathers, people who work in restaurants, people on their way to work…
Although we need to pick and choose when we listen to the news and how much we can process before we are overwhelmed, I am struck by the many people, many bodies, standing, singing, praying, protesting. They are saying – STOP! Do not harm our neighbors. Do not commit acts of violence. Every person has a right to due process in our country.
Call to stop immoral, unconstitutional and indiscriminate actions that target people based on race, national origin or ethnicity or language.
In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes that it is not possible to lean into God’s love for my body, without simultaneously recognizing that God loves “all bodies everywhere.” The “bodies of the hungry children and women in war-torn places along with the bodies of sleek athletes and wealthy tycoons.” “One of the truer things about bodies,” Taylor concludes, “is that it is just about impossible to increase the reverence I show mine without also increasing the reverence I show yours.” In other words, once I value my own body as God’s temple, as a site of God’s pleasure, delight, and grace, how can I stand by while other bodies suffer exploitation, poverty, discrimination, or abuse?
As a church, we are a community of people - not the building, but the group of people – Body of Christ - connected, in relationship with each other, who are knit together in the Divine Mystery, embodied love who may feel righteous anger as Jesus the disrupter did.
As we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow, may we remember he said about anger.
“History ha[s]…taught… it is not enough for people to be angry—the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”
“I believe unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” Amen.
Resources
Rev. Kara Root, “What Makes God Angry,” March 4, 2018 inthehereandnow
https://kara-root.blogspot.com/2018/03/what-makes-god-angry.html
Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
(New York : HarperOne, 2009) pg. 35-52.
Rev. Joanne Whitt, “The Disruptive Jesus,” Feb. 28, 2024
https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/02/28/the-disruptive-jesus/