The tables go crashing! The whip stings! The money rolls on the floor!

The Gospel for this coming Sunday is a "they-ought-to-have-put-Jesus-under arrest" story, worth reading every day this week as we prepare for the Third Sunday in Lent.

Often called "the cleansing of the temple" to make it sound acceptable for third-graders in Sunday School classes or the Priscilla Club in the local parish, John 2.13-22 is better described as a story about the crashing, wrecking, liquidation, shattering (anything from that anticeptic cleansing!) of the Grand Temple, the Jerusalem "megachurch." Cleansing, after all, makes it sound as though Jesus took a dish cloth and cleaned off some dirty counters. Jesus did not "clean" the temple. He smashed it up, toppled tables, and "let all hell loose," as Daniel B. Clendenin accurately describes the chaos:

Incensed at the sacrilege of it all, Jesus improvised a whip, thrashed the animals from the temple, scattered the coffers of the money changers, and overturned their tables: "How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"

Strong stuff! Strong enough to want me to take down and throw right out the parish windows all the church's sanitized parlor pictures of Jesus by Warner Sallman! Over a half billion copies have been printed since 1940! Isn't he just adorable? I'll bet he bought that tunic in the temple boutique and no doubt had his hair done in the narthex salon. No wonder we misunderstand Jesus so badly. Bad art, bad theology!

Wondering how in the world the Church's pastors will be preaching on the story, I'll be musing over John's story of Jesus demolishing the Grand Temple in the coming days and will certainly listen carefully next Sunday to my pastor's sermon (he'll need some guts to preach on it). May God bless him with indignation and a vision of Jesus that deserves telling.