12After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.
13When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"
17His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me."[b]
18Then the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?"
19Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days."
20The Jews replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" 21But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
The temple in the time of Christ was an impressive structure. Remember that this is not the home for God originally built by Solomon. Created in a little over 46 years by “Herod the Builder” it was meant to inspire grandeur, and wonder in the hearts of all those who passed before it. It was built in order to garner favor with the Jewish people. Historians who have studied it agree that, had it survived the Romans, it would have been one of the wonders of the ancient world.
The temple structure itself sat on mount the size of twenty football fields. It was divided into three courtyards. The ancient historian Josephus wrote that the columns which were thirty feet high were so highly decorated that they "caused amazement to the spectators, by reason of the grandeur of the whole." (Antiquities of the Jews, Book XV, 11, v)
If you have ever seen pictures you can imagine this, but I will try to paint the picture in order to set the stage for our scripture. The tall structure is called the "The Holy Place," in which only priests were allowed to enter, this is what we see when we think of the temple proper. In the back of the "Holy Place" was the "Most Holy Place," in which only the High Priest was allowed to enter once a year. In front of the tall structure was the altar, where animal sacrifices were killed and burned. In front of the altar and Holy Place was a square courtyard for the Jewish women. Women were not allowed to enter the altar area. Non-Jews, i.e. Gentiles, were not allowed pass through the temple walls at all, upon pain of death. There were tablets inscribed with promises to that effect surrounding the gates that passed from the Court of the Gentiles to the others.
It was into this court, the court of the gentiles that Jesus first passed in the scripture we had just read. It had become tradition for the sacrificial animals be sold near the temple for matter of convenience. Later, that tradition moved to inside the Court of the Gentiles. Usually the sellers were priests themselves, or family that the priest had allowed to rent space within the temple wall. In addition foreign coin was not permitted to be offered up to God in the temple offerings, so there were money-changers who did the people the service of changing outside currency for the local breed—for a fee of course.
I need to convince you of something though, before going on. The Courts, including the court of the Gentiles were all a part of the worship space. Say, as our sanctuary building is divided into (from the parking circle) the Portico, the Narthex, the Nave, and the Chancel—that’s church vocabulary for the porch, the foyer, the sanctuary and the place where the pupil is. Everything within the walls of the Temple Mount are considered to be holy ground, consecrated worship space, and the dwelling of God.
It was this scene into which Christ walked. Imagine, the place of worship so profane not only with the shouts of competitors hawking their particular sacrificial animal, but the smell of all those animals. If you have ever mucked out a stable you know right what I mean.
It get’s Christ’s dander up.
Growing up we had kind of an unwritten rule in my mom’s house about taking off your shoes at the door. I remember one time I went into an appopleptic fit when two of my friends marched up the stair with their boots on. Partly it was from fear of my mother. But it was also something else. It was also the fact that I did love my mother and didn’t want to disobey a whish that she had. Well not this wish anyway, have no allusions that I was the perfect son. But Christ here is the same. He calls the temple his Father’s house on more than one occasion in the gospels. And now, as he enters on what should be a time of worship and of coming together to witness of God’s provision, he sees the filth that the priest of the Lord have allowed the temple to become. How utterly angry he must have been! The tribe of Levi, entrusted with the most holy mission of bring the will of God to the people, those who had a sacred trust, had instead made part of the house of God a fecal festival where the focus is on creating a profit.
As Christ’s anger begins, I again have a tape of the Disciples conversation going on in my head. Jesus comes in through the gate of the gentiles, into the Courts of the Lord. He silently and grimly assesses the situation and then…
“Hey, Andrew, what’s Jesus doin’?”
“Makin’ a whip I think…”
“Oh… Uh, why’s he doin’ that?”
“No idea.”
“You gonna ask him?”
“No. He’s making a whip. You wanna be first? You ask him.”
So, Jesus makes a whip. Probably something out of hempen rope that was handy. Nothing too serious, but still; A whip. The next passage in the text I think does a great job at understating the situation. It tells of how Jesus drove the people out of the Court of the Gentiles, sheep and cattle and people, turned over carts, tables… Lots of action going on there. The thing is, and this isn’t stated because the author assumes we know this already, but the passage doesn’t tell you how big the Court of the Gentiles is. The whole complex is about 20 football fields. The Court of the Gentiles is the biggest single area in the whole complex. It’s roughly about 5 football fields in size. FIVE. The scene in our imagination changes a little bit now. Before it was maybe a few minutes of righteous fury, glorious in its brevity. Now it is the systematic removal of people from an area of 500 yards. That takes a while. If the disciples thought Jesus was crazy last week…
Again the scripture lends itself to my over-active imagination. It says the disciples recall the scripture, “Zeal for you house will consume me.” (Psalms 69:9) I have them wide eyed and slack jawed, still standing near the gate where Jesus left them, waiting out this terrible passion that Christ has, and then gaining a glimmer of understanding when he calls it “my father’s house,” and being able to put the prophecy together with the prophesied.
This whole reading sticks out in our minds, and rightfully so. It is one of the few times we have any kind of anger described when regarding Jesus. Usually we have him pictured calming the waters, the soother, the healer. But here we get a glimpse of the righteous warrior. And we get a pretty clear message. There are some things you do not do.
So many times in Jesus’ ministry we can be a little confused at his actions because we forget how Jesus sees. He sees the heart. He cannot help it, I think; the woman at the well is a great example. He views her heart before he sees on single facial feature, before he realize she is Samaritan, or a woman. It is the same here in the Temple Court. Upon entering he sees a different kind of filth. That of the greedy human heart. He sees the purpose that put those men in those booths and it was not the desire for Godliness. It was not even the desire to provide fro their families. It was their desire to take advantage and to put the almighty dollar, or shekel, before the promise of God. That was more offensive to him than all the dung and sweat in the whole of Israel.
We have here a stern warning. Sterner than the tablets that promised death to the gentiles who dared to cross the line into the Jewish Courts of worship. From Christ it reads, “You come into my Father’s house to worship? Then you better be darn sure that your heart looking for Him and nothing else.” Christ doesn’t expect us to come to the House of God with perfect hearts, or even with the best intentions. He took all kinds into his service as followers and healed all sorts of people in a vast array of afflictions. But what he will not tolerate are people who will not come as open supplicants before the sight of God. Or those who stand in the way of people who are. The house of worship is a place where we can let all our pretenses fall away before the sight of God. To lie stripped bare of every arrogance we allow ourselves during the week and say to God, “I have wronged your name. Take me back. Teach me again. I belong not to my self but to you and You alone.” But, if we chose to enter these gates with hard hearts, with pride, with inflated self worth, with ulterior motives… then we are only fooling ourselves until Christ is done making his whip.
Realize too that there are several more sublte ways in which we can abuse the Temple of God. Ways that are much easier for us to be tricked into doing by the Devil. Something so simple as forgeting what worship is about.
When the youth and I were planning for Youth Sunday, we took a few weeks and talked just about what worship was. At the basic form, worship is what comes from our hearts to God. So often i think we get it wrong by expecting worship to be the fix in our weekly lives. We expect to come to worship and leave with a sense of well being and peace. A sense that we can now face the week. But that isn't the purpose of worship. SOmetimes that does happen, but it is a side note. It is the effect, the cause of which is our coming to God in RIGHT worship. If we leave with a sense of unease, or we feel as if it wasn't worth our time... Usually we must consider the state of our own hearts as cause. Worship is NOT for us. It is for God.
Note here that the temple was called a house of WORSHIP. Not a house of sacrifice, of offerings, or teaching, or prohpecy, or even preaching. Everything done in the house of God is to lead to the WORSHIP of the Father. Communion between our hearts and the almighty.
We are left in this passage with a sense of hope. As you can imagine Jesus’ actions created quite a ruckus in the workings of the temple and either the priests, or perhaps their family members as Christ is giving them the heave-ho, they ask Jesus “Who gives you the right to do this?”
Our hope is in His response. And look closely at what he says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up.” The “you” in that sentence is understood… You tear it down, I’ll build it up. We are the destroyers. In the more literal sense he is speaking to his accusers, either in the crowd shouting for Barabas or in the council of the Sanhedrin. And, as the bible is for all the ages, He is also speaking directly to us.
No matter what we destroy, no matter what we fail, no matter the number of times our hearts break out of that stone, and the spirit of God comes flooding in all new and fresh, tearing down those walls we spent painstaking years putting up. No matter how often that happens, Christ will always rebuild in our hearts anew.
So, in some ways we need to be periodically whipped by Christ. We need that anger to sweep through us and clear out that which is keeping us from the Temple of God. And most of all we need Christ to be there at the end of it, whip still in hand, saying, “God ahead. Do it again. I’ll be here. You tear it down. And I will build it back up, better than ever.” Jesus truly is the Temple rebuilt. The place where in which we can worship and become reconciled to God.
This is the promise of Christ, and the will of a loving God who wants so desperately to be in the reality of our lives that he will allow himself to be, as the scriptures say, “Consumed with Zeal” for us and for the wish that our hearts be close to His.
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