But It’s Not Private Property!

Exodus 20:1-17  John 2:13-22

The little streets in Worthing where I first lived were wonderful places.

Queen Street. and King Street . Brittany Road and Normandy.

Rows of little back to back houses with  alley ways down the side which ran off round behind the back gardens.

How we loved to pedal our bikes up and down these old alleys or run back and forth with great mad games of chasing. Whooping and shouting as we went.

Most of the neighbours were tolerant, but old Mr Jupp was not.

Old Mr Jupp would come bursting out of his back garden gate waving his stick at us whenever we came racing by.

“Don’t you children know, it’s private property round  here, so keep the noise down – in fact go away and don’t dare come back”

We checked with our mums and dads – and the alleyway around Mr Jupp’s house were not private – we had every right to go there they said – but whilst we whooped and hollered our way around the place we always tiptoed past Mr Jupp’s just in case he were to come bursting out.

When Jesus burst in on the temple precincts he wasn’t having a go at the business community. He wasn’t actually that concerned that money was changing hands in a place of worship. What angered him was that the holy people were turning God into private property.

A no go area that you tiptoed into if you even went there at all.

They were saying unless you made this sacrifice. Unless you kept this law in this way. Unless you made that payment. You were outside of the love of God and that was all there was to it.

So the people had become slaves to the money changers and the keepers of pigeons, so they would be able to come onto that private property that they believed God’s kingdom to be.

The Ten Commandments were not meant to be burdensome.

They were meant to be the laws which marked out the people of God, to give them a morality and a character to make them all into holy people, to prepare them during their wandering wilderness years for the blessings of life in the promised land.

By keeping the commandments the people were supposed to show that they were slaves in Egypt no longer. They had their freedom and they had their God and they were on the way to salvation.

The religious rulers had subverted these holy intentions and this made Jesus so angry.

We can sadly see the same traits developing in our day.

The divisions opening up in the church whereby everyone who holds an absolutist position will not enter into dialogue with those who see things differently

Don’t come down here upsetting us with your  new thinking don’t you know this is private property.

The good news for us is that the cleansing of the temple opens the way for us to draw near to Jesus whoever we are and from whatever background we come from. We do not earn a place in his kingdom through the carrying out of the appropriate temple ritual – but simply by casting ourselves upon his love.

Letting faith do the work rather than our own deeds.

The Gospel with which we have been entrusted is the most precious thing in the world  but we do not guard it in vaults for which only a few of us know the combination.

The Gospel is in the public domain and space needs to be cleared for allcomers to draw near.

And for us who feel sometimes as if we are stepping onto a holy ground not of our deserving and are inclined to tiptoe quietly past God’s garden gate – let it be know that the loudest cry from Calvary is not the last gasp of a dying man – but a great bellow of love from the Son of God intended to reach every ear.