John 2:13-22 -Exploring the Temple Incident
We explore this verse in John’s Gospel:
“Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. “
1. The Setting
The story takes place within the 3rd temple (1st Solomon’s, 2nd one returning from Babylonia). Herod’s temple did take a generation to build. He ruled 36 years and the temple took 46 years to construct – and it was huge! The Temple area had been enlarged to a size of about thirty-five acres. Today the Western Wall, the so-called Wailing Wall, is all that remains of the ancient walls of Herod’s Temple
More specifically, the events took place outside in the Court of Gentiles. There was a market there selling sacrificial animals and birds outside the place where the priests worked. There was also a money exchange, since the Temple dues had to be paid in Tyrian coinage, and most people had Jerusalem coinage only. This meant that the atmosphere in the Court of the Gentiles was like an oriental bazaar where merchants haggled with Jewish pilgrims – like souvenir shops clustered round modern-day cathedrals
The market did provide a valuable service. Those selling animals were providing a service to those who needing an animal to sacrifice during Feast time. Obviously this had been approved by the Jewish leaders in the temple. This was a great convenience to Jews traveling great distances, since they did not have to have livestock in tow. They could buy the necessary sacrificial animals right at the temple.
The money changers were providing a valuable service. A tax was collected from every Israelite who was twenty years old. This was due during the month preceding the Passover and was either sent in by those who lived at a distance or paid in person by those who attended the festival. They had to pay in Jewish money and not by a foreign coin and nbsp;work, to enjoy working, and to experience thenbsp;work, to enjoy working, and to experience thethus the need to have their money exchanged
2. The issues
A. Jesus saw trade in the Temple as a desecration of its true purpose so, maybe with the help of others, he tried to shut down the trade in sacrificial animals and the money-changing that was going on. It was not a case of type of activity but where it was done.
B. He saw the Court of the Gentiles as a sacred place, part of God’s Temple. The tradespeople used the Court of the Gentiles as a short-cut between the city and the Mount of Olives – the Temple precincts could be entered from all four sides. The Court of the Gentiles was something less than a place of prayer.
Jesus was not the only one to object: there was widespread criticism of the 1st-century Temple scene among Jewish writers. The general hullabaloo of the area made this impossible, and it angered him. There is a strong contrast between “my Father’s house” and “a house of merchandise.” This Father and any house of his have to do with prayer, worship, true religion.
Jesus is claiming to have the authority to correct evils performed in the temple. John is interested in showing his audience early on that Jesus is the long awaited Messiah, and as such, he is divinely empowered from on High to purge the Temple of its impurities.
C. He made an assessment that the trade and money changing exploited people, especially the poor, by making excessive charges, so he intervened. This is based on the other Gospels not John who never uses the phrase “den of robbers.” Their endeavor to buy God’s favor is what fueled Jesus to cleanse the temple precincts.
D. Jesus thought the priests and Temple personnel were abusing their sacred roles by being involved in business in a sacred area. It was not the animal vendors and money-changers he criticised as much as the Temple establishment who allowed it. The ruling priests, especially the high priest himself, gave permission for these commercial activities to take place. They were ultimately responsible for this desecration of a holy place.
In the end, the temple story is important in John because he wants to convey the idea that what contributed to Jesus’ arrest and death was his so-called profanation against the Temple, and that it would be through his death and resurrection that he would fulfill the role as Messiah.
3. Contemporary voices
David Lose – God is no longer just accessible through the temple. In today’s world, church is not the destination but where we receive and then sent to partner to God in ordinary life.
Lawrence – The temple represents economic exploitation
Becky Zink-Sawyer – It is a message against all injustices that seek positive transformation
Daniel Clendenim –The cleansing of the temple is a stark warning against every false sense of security — against every nice-n-neat box I try to stick Jesus into for my own comfort. Jesus comes to challenge rather than to reinforce my prejudices and illusions. He comes to defamiliarize what religion makes safe and cozy. He never once says, “understand me.” He says something far more radical. “Follow me.
Bill Loader – We don’t need the Temple to find God, we have Jesus for that
Scott Hoezee – The money changers et. al. were eclipsing the real role of the temple. The Jews no longer saw the temple as God’s house and lacked their faith of the past.
We explore some thoughts around this verse:
"Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!" His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking of the temple of his body. "
David Lose – God is no longer just accessible through the temple. In today’s world, church is not the destination but where we receive and then sent to partner to God in ordinary life.
"John, however, uses this same scene to announce the inauguration of a new era, one in which the grace of God is no longer mediated or accessed through cultic sacrifice but instead is available to all who receive Jesus as God’s Messiah."
"Notice, for instance, that not only the timing of Jesus’ actions is different in John, but so is the accusation he levels at the moneychangers. Rather than accuse them of turning the Temple into a “den of robbers” – accusing them, that is, of defrauding the poor – Jesus instead says they have turned the Temple into a market place. Ironically, however, the Temple had to be a market place – or at least have a market place – so as to enable devout Jews to purchase animals for sacrifice and to change the Imperial coin for the local currency with which to make such purchases.
"So when Jesus drives the animals out of the Temple, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and demands the end of buying and selling, he is really announcing the end of this way of relating to God. God is no longer available primarily, let alone exclusively, via the Temple. Instead, as John confesses in the opening verses of his account, Jesus invites us to experience God’s grace upon grace (1:17) through our faith in him.
"Given that John’s account was written well after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, his insistence – and perhaps reassurance – to his community that they would find God’s mercy in Christ outside rather than inside the Temple makes practical as well as theological sense. And, to tell you the truth, I think it has the same potential today.
"Many of our people, I suspect, tend to think of church as a destination. It’s a place you go to receive…well, spiritual things (actually, it’d be interesting to ask people what they expect to receive at church, but that’s probably another sermon!). But, taking a cue from John, I wonder if we’ve got things a little backwards. Don’t get me wrong, I think worship is important. But rather than imagine it’s a place we go to for some experience of God, I wonder if we shouldn’t imagine it as a place we’re sent from in order to meet, and partner with, God in everyday life.
Lawrence – The temple represents economic exploitation
"The Law is not intended primarily to provide a legal framework for society (although it does so by extension) but to reveal Yahweh’s character. The Law (which is given in the account we have this week in Exodus 20: 1-17) does not establish Yahweh as the great legal eagle in the sky. Rather it explains the Exodus! It explains grace! This is the kind of life Yahweh intends for people – that is why Yahweh heard their cries in the slave pits and delivered them out of Egypt! To be Yahweh’s people is not so much a case of being given laws to live by but being given Yahweh’s fellowship – hence the primacy of the first commandment.
"The problem, in Jesus’ eyes, is what it had become – a corrupt system that had its own dynamic that was “exempt” from the laws of God. What had started out to facilitate worship had become an exploitative economic system in its own right. It is the Synoptic Gospels, rather than John’s, that emphasise the corruption of the system and the way in which it militated against the poorest people. Jesus’ problem was not that it made sacrifice possible, but that it made increasingly impossible for the poorest! It made access to God dependent on economic circumstances – and God’s grace and compassion was, in fact extended to the neediest first. This is what drives Jesus as he drives the traders from the temple. Jesus was aware of how economic systems take on a life of their own, and benefit some at the expense of others.
Becky Zink-Sawyer – It is a message against all injustices that seek positive transformation
"The “takeaway” message of this text is the fact that there always will be injustices that provoke us to anger (not a gratuitously violent or self-destructive anger, but a righteous anger that can be the beginning of positive transformation)
"As frail, sinful human beings, we are forever in need of cleansing in both corporate and individual ways. This text calls us to acknowledge our places of defilement, and the ways in which we cause and perpetuate them, as part of our Lenten discipline
"Who is Jesus? Jesus is the One who can be provoked to righteous anger in an effort to cleanse what has been defiled. Much has been made of the rare portrayal of the “angry Jesus” in this story. We got a glimpse of that Jesus in last week’s gospel text (yet another connection between these texts) when he rebukes Peter for his misguided resistance to the idea of a suffering Messiah. We see other flashes of the “angry Jesus” throughout the gospels, usually in moments of frustration with those who do not understand his mission or who try to thwart it. The “takeaway” message of this text is the fact that there always will be injustices that provoke us to anger (not a gratuitously violent or self-destructive anger, but a righteous anger that can be the beginning of positive transformation)
Daniel Clendenhim
The cleansing of the temple is a stark warning against every false sense of security — against every nice-n-neat box I try to stick Jesus into for my own comfort. Jesus comes to challenge rather than to reinforce my prejudices and illusions. He comes to defamiliarize what religion makes safe and cozy. He never once says, "understand me." He says something far more radical. "Follow me.
"The "cleansing" of the temple is a delicate euphemism for the only violent act of Jesus that’s recorded in the gospels (were there others left unrecorded?). The story was important enough to the early church that all four gospel writers included it
"In the temple, Jesus encountered people selling animals to the pilgrims who needed them to make their obligatory sacrifices. He met the money changers, too, for worshippers also needed to exchange their Roman currency into Jewish money in order to pay the temple tax in the coinage of the "sanctuary shekel."
"At some point, as Jesus encountered all this religiously-oriented "business," he lost it and all hell broke loose. Incensed at the sacrilege of it all, Jesus improvised a whip, thrashed the animals from the temple, scattered the coffers of the money changers, and overturned their tables: "How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!" he screamed. Later his disciples would remember Psalm 69:9 and attach a sense of prophetic fulfillment to this startling event: "Zeal for your house will consume me."
"What was Jesus thinking as he wreaked such havoc in the temple that day? Maybe he objected to any and all commercial activity in the temple, even honest transactions that were necessary for pilgrims to fulfill their religious obligations. Or maybe he detested the exploitation and avarice of the religious authorities who controlled all access to ritual purity.
"What do this violent act and dark saying mean? Some people see a prophetic prediction of the destruction of the temple that occurred in 70 AD. A simpler interpretation focuses on the purification of the temple to its sacred purpose, as a place of prayer for all people, without manipulation or exploitation by the religious gatekeepers. A third nuance suggests that it is in Jesus’s own body, and not in the temple building, that we meet God.
"The cleansing of the temple is a stark warning against every false sense of security — against every nice-n-neat box I try to stick Jesus into for my own comfort. Jesus comes to challenge rather than to reinforce my prejudices and illusions. He comes to defamiliarize what religion makes safe and cozy. He never once says, "understand me." He says something far more radical. "Follow me.
Bill Loader – "We don’t need the Temple to find God, we have Jesus for that"
"God’s temple will be no more. Instead we will have Jesus as the one in whom we find God. [John] 4:19-26 effectively says the same thing: only one sacred site: Jesus. "
Scott Hoezee – The money changers et. al. were eclipsing the real role of the temple. The Jews no longer saw the temple as God’s house and lacked their faith of the past.
"Whatever Jesus saw that set him off that day in Jerusalem, there is one little detail we should notice because it might just give us a clue as to what this should mean for us even yet today. The telling detail is John’s insertion in verse 17 of Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for your house consumes me.”
"Psalm 69 is about suffering for your faith. It’s about how the world sneers at us for claiming that a worship service is more valuable than anything that could ever happen in the citadels of worldly power. It takes faith to believe that what we do in worship on a Sunday morning matters in an eternal sense.
"The writer of Psalm 69 believed that the ancient temple of Israel was the center of the universe, the house of God, the dwelling place of the cosmic Creator.
"So maybe Jesus threw out the moneychangers because their ever-expanding emporium was eclipsing the real meaning of the temple. Maybe the temple had started to look like just any old Jerusalem flea market, and so people were forgetting that to have faith was to believe that God’s house is most definitely not just any old place. Maybe Jesus wanted to shake people up so they could remember that to have faith is a radical thing that should make us radically different from those who do not have faith. Jesus’ fellow Jews had the wrong focus. They no longer had the radical faith of Psalm 69. The psalmist endured insult and injury because of his outrageous belief that the living God actually dwelled in the temple. But some of the Jews in Jesus’ day had forgotten
"Jesus reminded them that it was God’s place, or was supposed to be, and if they didn’t perceive the presence of the living God there, then there was nothing distinctive about the temple at all. Jesus was a little more sensitive to such things than the average person in Jerusalem.