Today’s text presents some questions that we must deal with from the beginning so that we are on sure footing as we walk through it. All four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, present us with an account of Jesus cleansing the temple but they do not present us with the same account. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell us about Jesus cleansing the temple during His final Passover, during the week of His arrest, death and resurrection. They all tell us that after the Triumphal Entry that Jesus returned to the temple, chased out the animals, turned over the tables of the money changers and declared and taught “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer (Mark adds for all nations), but you have made it a den of robbers.” Matthew, Mark and Luke are consistent in the timing, in the content and in the outcome, it was the cleansing of the temple that was the final straw that caused the scribes and Pharisees to pull out all their stops to see that Jesus was destroyed. The only thing that John’s account has in common with that of the other synoptic gospel writers is the removal of animals and the turning of tables, everything else about it different. John’s account has different timing, the beginning of Jesus’ ministry rather than the end, a different statement being made by Jesus, “Take these things away! Do not make my Father’s house a house of merchandise!” and a different outcome, rather than seeking to kill Him, the religious leaders came and asked Him who He was and what authority He had to do what He had done. Critics say that these are inconsistencies that prove that the Bible is simply stories written by men to attempt to make Jesus look as they want Him to. Some scholars argue that John’s gospel is written thematically rather than chronologically and so John simply set the story at a different place in his account and gave a different perspective on the same event. Other scholars take a different tract, one that I take in my belief and how I will teach this passage today, there were two separate events; Jesus cleansed the temple two different times for two different purposes that created two different outcomes. At the end of Jesus’ ministry, He was cleansing the temple not just to reveal that His death and resurrection would be the final sacrifice of the sacrificial system but to show that His sacrifice would be for all men, that there would be no more dividing wall or separating courts, He was making the temple ready for the salvation of men and women from every nation. In John’s account Jesus’ ministry is just beginning, in fact, this is His introduction to Jerusalem, to the religious leaders and in many ways, even to His disciples. Remember, Jesus’ public ministry didn’t begin with His first miracle of turning the water into wine because only the servants knew that the miracle had been done, it was a private miracle. The first thing that Jesus ever did “in public ministry” was to go to the Temple and point to His Father. This morning I pray that we can see that the cleansing of the temple in John 2 is Jesus righting a wrong but it’s not the wrong we assume. It has little to do with money or merchandise. Jesus went into the temple and told the truth about His Father, He was changing the perception of and the approach to God and He was turning upside down beliefs right side up again. Jesus was revealing that worship is not an effort to gain God’s presence it is a response to realizing we are in God’s presence, it is not an action that moves God but the action of being moved by God. Today I pray that we will let Jesus have full access to our hearts and our lives, to trust Him to enter in and examine our worship and that we will let Him turn over the tables of our hearts so that our worship can be like Jesus’, born of intimacy with God and offered as gratitude to the God who has chosen to be our Father.