Jesus on the Temple Mount
We need to stop calling this episode in John 2:13-22, also reported
in the other three gospels, “The Cleansing of the Temple.” It suggests that
Jesus thought that something terrible and dirty and wrong was going on there. As
has been pointed out by Amy Jill Levine in her book, Entering the Passion of
Jesus [Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2018], Jesus did not hate, nor did he
reject, the Temple. Since he was a boy he and his family had been going to Jerusalem
and the Temple for many if not all the appointed pilgrim feast days: Sukkot,
the feast of Booths; Shavuot or Pentecost, the Giving of Torah; and Passover,
the Feast of Freedom from slavery. It is this last that brings him there a few
days after his generous gift of wine, good wine at that, at a wedding reception
in Cana of Galilee. He likes going to the Temple. He even calls it “my Father’s
house”! He is there to stake a claim and
to let people know who he is.
Nor is Jesus there because he is opposed to the purity laws
that allow one to participate in the Temple Sacrifices. Over and over again, he
restores people to ritual purity and even instructs them to go to see the
priests at the Temple!
Nor does Jesus say anything about the Temple exploiting the
population. Rather, he is more concerned about the people who go there: are they
generous like the poor widow with two coins? Or, humble like the Tax Collector?
Or, self-righteous like the Pharisee? Further, people making a long trip to the
Temple to make a sacrifice cannot risk taking a ritually acceptable animal all
the way to Jerusalem as it may somehow become injured along the way. And one
could not use coins of the Roman Empire with the image of Caesar as God for a
Temple offering, but rather had to exchange such coins for the acceptable Tyrian
shekels. There is no evidence suggesting that the vendors and the currency
exchangers, not “lenders,” were overcharging anyone. The services were
necessary for Israel’s worship. He was not there to protest Temple
exploitation.
Some Christians claim that the Temple banned Gentiles and
foreigners. Yet, the Temple had an outer court where Gentiles and foreigners
were welcome to worship. They were also welcome in the synagogues of Jesus’s
time as they are today. They may not have all the same rights and
responsibilities as do Jews, and this makes sense. I cannot receive Holy
Communion in a Catholic Church, but I am welcome to worship there. Just like
Canadians cannot vote for President in the U.S., and I cannot vote in Canada!
Furthermore, the scene as depicted in Hollywood movies and
two millennia of sermons, seems very disruptive and dramatic. Consider, however,
that the Temple was the length of 12 soccer fields end-to-end, consisting of
the Holy of Holies at one end (which only the high priest entered once a year
on Yom Kippur), the Court of the Priests, the Court of Israel, the Court of
Women, and then the Court of the Gentiles at the other end, where the vendors
were located and this incident took place. It was a noisy place. Along with the
noise of the marketplace, the sounds of animals and ongoing sacrifices, and people
from all over the ancient world celebrating the Passover in their own
languages, who would notice a few tables being turned over, coins tumbling to
the floor and animals being driven out?
Which leads one to think that Jesus’s actions were symbolic.
Symbolic of what is the question? Especially since there is clearly risk
involved in what he does do. As we hear, some people notice. And the Temple has
police. How well I know, as the only time I was ever on the Temple mount I was surrounded
by several Jordanian police with Uzis asking why I was up on the Ramparts of
the Old City with two cameras hanging around my neck! Like I almost was, Jesus
could have been arrested right then and there, which would have greatly
shortened John’s gospel which tells of Jesus visiting Jerusalem two more times
for Passover. So, what’s he doing?
First, Jesus is there to make an announcement: This is my
Father’s House! To which some in the crowd demand that he “show them a sign”
for causing this minor disturbance. He might have said, “I already have. Don’t
you get it? This is the kind of thing prophets have always done!” But instead,
he answers them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!”
Pointing out the obvious, they remind him that Herod Antipas had been
rebuilding the shabby old place for 46 years and was not finished yet. One
might begin to sense his mounting frustration with them not getting the difference
between Temple, with a capital “T,” and “temple” with a lower case “t.” I’m
talking about my body. My body is the new Temple. This one is going to be
destroyed by Rome, mark my words, and presence of God that has resided in this
and the First Temple and all the way back to the Tabernacle now resides in me –
flesh and blood just like you!.
Instead, at this point narrator John offers the aside, “But
he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead,
his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture
and the word that Jesus had spoken.” That is, all the business with the animals
and the tables was a way of announcing who Jesus is, foreshadows his impending
death and resurrection, and points to the day when none of this commerce going
on in his Father’s House will be necessary because Rome will burn it to the ground.
And we are those people who, like narrator John, know it has not been rebuilt
ever since.
Further, the narrator wants the readers to know that we
reflect on the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus from the very
same perspective as the disciples: that it is from the point of view of after
the resurrection that the disciples and we “remember” what he announces that
day on the Temple mount, which the narrator John hopes will lead us, like the disciples,
“to believe.” To believe the word that Jesus had spoken that day on the Temple
Mount: this is my Father’s House, and the presence of God now resides in flesh
and blood – like you.
The narrator wants the meaning of the Jesus story to come
alive for the for everyone who hears these stories that have been chosen from
among “many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written
down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be
written!” [John 21:25] These are the last words of the Gospel of John.
The question for all of us during this season of Lent is: How
does our hearing of this story deepen our experience of the Word made flesh,
the “new Temple” in which God’s presence dwells? Our answers to this question
have the power to transform our lives and change the world around us. It did
for the disciples. It did for Paul. It will for you. Amen. It is truth. It is
so.
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