Jesus Cleanses the Temple

Studies in the Gospel of John #6 


John 2:13-25 (NIV)
(13) When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. (14) In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. (15) So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. (16) To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (17) His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”[a]

(18) The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

(19) Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

(20) They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” (21) But the temple he had spoken of was his body. (22) After 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.

Nehemiah 13:1-9; 15-22
Nehemiah’s Final Reforms
[13] On that day the Book of Moses was read aloud in the hearing of the people and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into the assembly of God, (2) because they had not met the Israelites with food and water but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. (Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing.) (3) When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent.

(4) Before this, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, (5) and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine and olive oil prescribed for the Levites, musicians and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests.

(6) But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had returned to the king. Some time later I asked his permission (7) and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. (8) I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room. (9) I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God, with the grain offerings and the incense.

(15) In those days I saw people in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day. (16) People from Tyre who lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath to the people of Judah. (17) I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, “What is this wicked thing you are doing—desecrating the Sabbath day? (18) Didn’t your ancestors do the same things, so that our God brought all this calamity on us and on this city? Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath.”
(19) When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. (20) Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. (21) But I warned them and said, “Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will arrest you.” From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. (22) Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy.
Remember me for this also, my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
While the story of Jesus’ cleansing the temple is well known, I believe that it is little understood. What was it that could have made Jesus so angry that he made a whip and beat men, sheep and oxen out of the Temple with it? What so enraged him that he overturned tables, spilling the silver and gold coins all over the ground?

John writes that his disciples remembered that it is written, “The zeal of Thy house did eat me up.” The disciples were referring to Psalm 69:9. For zeal for your house has eaten me up. The insults of those who insult you have fallen upon me.

In Romans 15:3 we find that same language. Here the Apostle writes, “For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The insults and abuses of those who insult and abuse you, fell on me.”

How were these people insulting God? Deut. 5:1-21 gives us the primary arbiter of righteous relationships between God and humankind. Dr. George Mendenhall, Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan’s school of Near Eastern studies wrote in his book Tenth Generation, that these Words were given to protect us from participating in aggression, abuse, conquest, deception, manipulation and oppression, and from those who sought to impose the same on us.

These are the only words that God gave speaking face-to-face with a human being, and hence contain the only commandments that ever came directly from God.

These commands are known in Hebrew as the “Ten Words.” God gave us “Ten Words” to guide all human social relationships.

The first three are foundational to our relationship with God,

Have no other Gods before me. Priority

Make no carved, molded or fashioned images of anything for yourself to worship. Integrity

Remember the Sabbath, the rest of God, and keep it holy. Sanctity.

No graven images. The engraving doesn’t take the form of carved images on rock and metal as much as it now takes place in the form of ideas engraved into our minds, our habits, our socialization processes, which put us at odds with the revealed will of God.

The community of exiles that were engaged in the process of rebuilding Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple under the leadership of Governor Nehemiah had spent seventy years in Babylonian captivity. They had Babylonian ways, customs, social relationships, currency and or course elements of Babylonian religion. So the rebuilding was two dimensional. There was the physical rebuilding, but then there was also the process of spiritual rebuilding. What bothered Jesus was not the gold, the silver, the doves, oxen and sheep. It was the violation of God’s most sacred law in the very temple of God by the very people who were supposed to be setting the example for others. It was compromise with human standards and practices of that rattled him.

Nehemiah had been away for an audience with the king. When he returned he found that one the priests, one who had been entrusted with the spiritual, ethical and moral health of the people, was in collusion with one of their godless enemies, Tobiah. We discover that another priest was married to the daughter of Sanballat. Tobiah was an Ammonite, one of the descendants of those who did not welcome Israel, but sought to prevent it from passing by them on their journey to the land of promise. 

In Nehemiah 4:1-4, we read,
Then Sanballat heard that they were rebuilding the
wall, he was angry and in a great rage, and he
ridiculed the Jews—saying, “Will they revive the
stones out of the heaps of rubbish, seeing they are burned?” Now Tobiah the Ammonite was near saying, “If a fox climbs on it he will break the stone wall down.”

Verses seven and eight of chapter four tell us that Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabians, Ammonites and Ashdoditess plotted together to come fight against Jerusalem and cause confusion and failure. Of course that plan failed, because Israel prayed and watched day and night. The workers on the wall worked with a sword in one hand and their tool in the other. So Sanballat and Tobiah came up with a new tactic. Have them marry our women. Introduce them to our daughters. These young, womenless men were considered easy prey.

Sanballat's Jewish allies, however, kept Sanballat and Tobiah informed as to the progress of the work in Jerusalem. Nehemiah's far-sighted policy and his shrewdness kept him out of the hands of these neighbor-foes. In his reforms, so effectively carried out, he discovered that one of the grandsons of the current high priest Eliashib had married a daughter of this Sanballat, and was thus son-in-law of the chief enemy of the Jews.[13] Nehemiah also found that Eliashib had leased the storerooms of the temple to Tobiah, thus depriving the Levites of their share of the offerings in Nehemiah’s absence. The high priest (and/or possibly his son Jehoida and the unnamed grandson) was driven out of Jerusalem on the ground that he had defiled the priesthood (Neh.13:28).

Who and what is leasing space in our souls today—in the temples bought and paid for with the precious blood of Jesus? What Gods and ideologies and cultural practices have we latched on to that violate the sanctity of our relationship with God and rob us of the peace and joy and creativity that is ours through Christ?

Our temple, our soul-life, housed in our physical human bodies, is that which the resurrected Christ in us, “the hope of glory,” seeks to cleanse. As with Eliashib, there are associations with people, ideas, practices, loyalties, that interfere with the first Word, priority—“You shall have no other Gods before me.” There are experiences that have formed our consciousness and desires in opposition to that which God would have for us, and that deprive us of the full benefits of our salvation in Christ.

Genesis 8:1 tells us ,”God remembered Noah.” God remembers that we are but flesh. God remembers that we too often choose the way that seems easiest. God remembers that we are often blinded by our experiences, what we think is right, what we think we know, what our feelings tell us—and by our associations, who we hold in high esteem, whom we look up to, who we listen to, who we are intimate with. This is why God remembers us and invites us to rest, through priority, through integrity, through love. God is available to continually cleanse us through Christ our resurrection hope and life.

Amen.