Consuming Zeal

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. INTRODUCTION Part of what makes up any society is a shared sense of what is acceptable. This includes things like speed limits, financial and ethical systems, health care policies, and religious freedoms. In some societies, that common sense is very narrow and in others it is very broad. Sometimes the social norms are imposed through laws and policing and sometimes simply through social pressures. Regardless of their scope or enforcement mechanism, however, for a society to function, there must be agreed upon limits to what the people who make it up can and can’t do. Since Jesus walked the earth, every society that has included His followers has had to come to grips with how to handle Christians. Early on, Christians were despised and fed to lions for sport. At other times and places, Christianity was the dominant religion and wielded its influence in every conceivable way. Because God is creator, king, judge, all-loving, good, wise, and powerful, and because Christianity is good, beautiful, and true, when Jesus is faithfully followed, societies flourish. However, both because Jesus hasn’t always been faithfully followed by His followers and because non-Christians have always had their own reasons to reject Christian doctrine and practice, even when there has been a Christian presence, that hasn’t always been the case. Embedded within all of this is a question that was front and center in our passage, even as it is front and center often in our lives today. How Christian is someone able to be before he finds himself outside of his society’s shared sense of what is acceptable? Or, conversely, how much of God’s system must a society reject before genuine Christians are compelled to act in defiance? This passage certainly doesn’t answer every question (or even many questions) we might have on this subject, but it definitely gives us a vivid picture of one line crossed and one Christian response to it. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had turned one of the most holy and joyful feasts God had given His people into several days of godless exploitation. Upon seeing this, incensed, enraged, and consumed with zeal, Jesus temporarily put an end to it, as He moved closer and closer to fulfilling His mission of putting an end to it forever. The big idea of this passage is that Jesus came to put an end to the world’s mockery of God and atone for the sins of those who participated in it. And the big takeaways for us are that (1) living in a thoroughly Christian way means that we will find the limits of what a non-Christian society will tolerate and that (2) at some point societies become so corrupt and hostile to God that Christians will have to resist. Let’s pray that God would help us learn from the consuming