Sermon – Cleansing can be Painful

(I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 18, 2026 at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA. You can listen to the audio at this link.)

If you have ever had a serious wound, you know how it works.
Often, the most painful part is not the injury itself, but cleaning the wound.

Cleansing a wound hurts.  

Just put some rubbing alcohol on a wound.  
It stings. 

It burns.   

It does not feel good at all.

But we do it anyway, because we know something else.
If you do not clean the wound, infection sets in.
If you just cover it up and hope for the best, the damage spreads, and things can get worse.
Cleansing is painful, but it is how healing begins.

And it takes time.

That is the image I want us to carry into this story today.
Because what Jesus is doing in the Temple is not a riot.

It is not random anger.
It is not loss of control.

It is a protest for the sake of healing.

In John’s Gospel, this moment comes at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.
And that matters.

In the other Gospels, Jesus cleanses the Temple near the end, when everyone knows who he is. 

In John, Jesus is still an unknown.

He has turned water into wine at a wedding, quietly, almost privately.
Only the servants know what happened.

And then he walks into the Temple during Passover and disrupts everything.

This is how John tells us what kind of Messiah Jesus is.

Before he preaches any sermons.
Before he gathers large crowds.

Before he builds a reputation.

Jesus goes straight to the center of religious life and exposes what everyone else has learned to live with.  

That is confession.

Confession is not inventing new sins.
Confession is naming what already exists and saying we are tired of carrying it.

It reminds me of how many are comparing the tactics that ICE is using to Gestapo tactics.  As if what they are doing comes from a foreign source.  But that’s not the case.  

These tactics are more like the slave patrols and slave posses that relied on citizens to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway enslaved people in the US, as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Clause that is right in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution.  

The 1850 law explicitly commanded “all good citizens” to assist US marshals and federal judicial commissioners in the “prompt and efficient execution” of the law, meaning that citizens in free states could be forced to participate in capturing escaped slaves.  Refusal to comply could result in fines or imprisonment.  Just follow the orders, or else…

You see these tactics that we are witnessing are not some foreign virus that has inflected us.  They are an American cancer that we have never fully been dealt with.  

Confession is dangerous, because it threatens the arrangements we rely on.
It threatens a status quo that benefits some and harms many.
It requires us to be uncomfortable long enough for healing to begin.

Just like cleansing a wound.

Jesus enters the Temple during Passover, the festival of liberation.
Passover remembers a God who hears the cries of the enslaved.
A God who confronts economies built on suffering.
A God who refuses to let exploitation pass as normal.

And what Jesus finds in the Temple is not worship gone wrong.
It is access restricted.
It is money welcomed and people excluded.

The money changers are there because Roman currency was considered idolatrous.
It bore the image of Caesar, declared him son of god.
That money could not be used directly in the Temple.

So it was exchanged.

But the system had become corrupt.
Profit was being skimmed from what was meant for God.
Animals for sacrifice were sold at inflated prices.
The poor paid the cost.

Money was allowed in as if it were ritually clean.
Women, the disabled, Gentiles were pushed to the margins because they were considered impure and unclean.

Jesus does not condemn sacrifice.
He restores access.

Isaiah had spoken of a day when all would come and eat and drink without money.
Jesus enacts that vision with his body.

He pours out the coins.
He overturns the tables.
He drives out the animals.

And he says, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”

This is not a tantrum.
It is truth telling.

There is a temptation to reduce this story to individual behavior.
To make it about personal morality.
But that will not hold.

Jesus does not cleanse individuals here.
He confronts a system.

Our culture is far more comfortable with individual explanations.
It feels safer.
Those individual explanations tell us that outcomes are earned.
They give us a sense of control.

If something goes wrong, someone must have made bad choices.
If people suffer, it must be their own fault.

That logic is old.
It was used against abolitionist and those helping to free slaves. 
Against labor organizers.
Against women seeking equality.
Against the civil rights movement.

We hear it now.
If she had just obeyed orders.
If she had just followed the rules.

Then she wouldn’t be shot and killed.    

But obey and follow are often the language unjust systems use to protect themselves.

Jesus does not obey the orders of those in power here.
He disrupts them.

Not to create chaos.
But to restore shalom.

Shalom is not order without justice.
Shalom is the restoration of right relationship.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this deeply.

Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, he explained why nonviolent protest was necessary. He said that nonviolent direct action seeks to create a crisis, to foster such a tension, that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

That is John 2 – the Cleansing of the Temple. 

Jesus creates tension.
He does not do violence.
He forces confrontation.

And he does it during Passover, when the memory of liberation is already stirring in the people.
When Rome is nervous.
When soldiers are everywhere.

This matters, because some have tried to use this story to justify violence.
But the details tell a different story.

The whip is made of cords.
It is flimsy.
It is used to move animals, not to harm people.

If Jesus were inciting violent revolt, the soldiers would have intervened immediately.
Especially at Passover.

Jesus rejects the myth that violence saves.
But he also rejects the lie that silence heals.

Confession is not only about naming sin.
It is about laying down a weight.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that he chose love because hate was too heavy a burden to carry.

That is confession.

It is saying we are tired of carrying fear.
Tired of carrying resentment.
Tired of carrying supremacy and calling it faith.
Tired of carrying systems that crush people and pretending they are neutral.

There is a scene in the 1986 movie “The Mission” where a Jesuit priest carries a heavy bundle up a waterfall, a physical symbol of his guilt.
At the top, the burden is cut away.
He collapses.
He weeps.

That is cleansing.
Painful.
Necessary.
Liberating.

The Temple system was an economy built on suffering.
So was Pharaoh’s Egypt.
So is every empire that demands some people bleed so others can thrive.

Jesus exposes it not with swords, but with truth.

And that is why the leaders ask him for a sign.

He gives them one they cannot yet understand.

“Destroy this temple,” he says, “and in three days I will raise it up.”

They think he is talking about stone, or a building project. 
John tells us he is talking about his body – something far more valuable. 

God is no longer confined to a building.
God dwells in Jesus.

And through the Spirit, God dwells in living temples.

Which brings us home.

Christ Lutheran is a place of healing.

Not in theory.
In practice.

Sometimes healing here is literal.
It looks like wound care in the medical clinic, cleaning something that could become infected if ignored.
It looks like pulling a decayed tooth, not because it is pleasant, but because leaving it would cause far more damage.

That kind of healing hurts.
But it restores.

Sometimes healing is communal.
It looks like showing up in this neighborhood, listening, learning names, hearing stories, refusing to look away.
It looks like building relationships through Power to the Hill or Changing the Conversation.
Seeing wounds that have been ignored.
Choosing closeness instead of distance.

And sometimes healing is spiritual.

It happens here in worship.
When words of forgiveness are spoken aloud.
When peace is passed between people carrying heavy loads.
When the church names sins that have caused real harm for far too long.

Healing happens when bread and drink are placed in our hands.
When grace becomes embodied.
When Jesus enters us.

Healing happens in the waters of baptism, where we are marked as belonging to God’s family and given a promise stronger than fear.

This is what faithful cleansing looks like.

Not purity.
Not perfection.
But restoration.

Jesus flips tables to make room.

Room for people instead of profit.
Room for truth instead of denial.
Room for liberation instead of suffering dressed up as order.

And let us be clear.

The larger church in this country has done far too much whitewashing and far too little cleansing.
We have covered wounds instead of cleaning them.
We have chosen comfort over truth.
We have made space for money, power, nationalism, and fear, while pushing the poor, the immigrant, the queer, the disabled to the margins.

Jesus will not bless that.

But here is the good news.

Jesus does not cleanse because God is angry.
Jesus cleanses because God refuses to give up.

Confession hurts because healing is real.
Truth disrupts because freedom is possible.

Jesus still enters temples.
Living ones.
Communities like this one.

And he does not come with violence.
He comes with courage.
He comes with love that refuses to look away.

Thanks be to God that Jesus loves us too much to leave the infection untouched.
Thanks be to God that healing is still possible.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.