John 2:13-22 page 1

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In those long-ago days when I was in training as a preacher and still living at home with my parents, I was preparing a service one evening in my bedroom when my sister came in.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm preparing a service," I replied.

"What are you preaching on?"

"The Church," I said.

"You're always preaching about the church."

She had a point. A concern for God's Church had been with me since my conversion, because I felt with typical teenage passion that it hadn't been what I needed in order to show me Christ, apart from a few glowing individual exceptions.

That concern became a passion as I grew in the faith and read more and more. The prophetic word of Psalm 69:9 that the disciples remember when they see Jesus in the Temple could have been my motto: 'Zeal for your house will consume me' [verse 17 of our reading].

Bringing this story into Lent is quite powerful: we often call it 'the cleansing of the temple'. When the President of the Conference preached on John 2 and 3 at the recent reopening of Broomfield he said it was a story of transformation: and it's that, too. But the transformation into the good needs to be prefaced by a cleansing of the unwholesome.

So today, given that we are three Sundays into Lent, we're not going to explore this passage in terms of a formal exposition, we're going to think of it in terms of Lenten cleansing - the cleansing of the church and of the individual.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.