No wisdom here today, I’m tired.
John 2:13-22; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Psalm 19; Exodus 20:1-17
Have you ever been to a street market? There are a few of them here in the states, but the ones in other country put ours to shame. They are concentrated pits of mercantile chaos. I remember when I was in Russia, there were counterfeit versions of just about everything imaginable at these markets, from purses to watches to computer software to random trinkets and jewelry. The shopkeepers would always be yelling at the visitors all the reasons why his or her shop was the best one to get whatever it was you were looking for, especially if you’re not looking for whatever his or her shop carried. And of course all the shopkeepers would be happy to take your American dollars, especially since they’ll usually give you quite a bit poorer exchange rate than you would otherwise.
It really is a chaotic scene; it’s noisy, not exactly clean, and all in all the last thing you’d expect to see in, say, church. Yet I imagine the marketplace Jesus saw in the temple courts is not unlike those street markets. Now to be clear, the actual marketplace is just kind of natural around the temple. Say you’re coming from Rome to Jerusalem, a significant distance, to make a sacrifice at the temple. It wouldn’t exactly be cost-effective to ship cattle, sheep, or doves with you as you travel. And, of course, if you’re coming from Rome to Jerusalem, you likely wouldn’t have the same kind of coinage so you’d need a moneychanger to be able to buy the sacrifice.
So the issue Jesus was upset about wasn’t that there were people at the temple selling sacrifices and exchanging money. The issue was that these people were doing their business inside the temple. The way the temple was laid out was kind of in increasingly restrictive zones. The first zone was called the “Court of the Gentiles”, where anyone who wasn’t Jewish could go to pray. Inside that was the “Court of Israel”, the place where Jews could enter and offer sacrifices to the priests, who did their work in the “Court of the Priests”. Inside that was the temple itself, reserved for certain priests, and inside that the Holy of Holies, reserved only for the priest who happened to be on duty.
Had the merchants been doing their selling outside the temple walls, I don’t really think there would have been any reason for Jesus to have been upset. But the merchants weren’t outside the temple walls, they were doing their selling and money-changing in the “Court of the Gentiles”, supposedly a place for any who wanted to come and pray. It would be like someone coming camping out where our ushers are at the door and selling bulletins, hymnals, and the like — things reasonably important for worship.
So Jesus was understandably miffed that His Father’s House had been turned into a marketplace. Now oftentimes Jesus is portrayed as seeing the market, becoming enraged, and spontaneously overthrowing tables. John’s gospel doesn’t support this image. Whatever anger he expressed, was definitely tempered with thought. I mean, he took the time to make a whip. Not buy a whip — make a whip. Then he drove all the cattle and sheep out of the Gentile Court, threw the money changer’s coins all over the place, and sternly told the dove-sellers to get out.
Now at this point, Jesus has a whole lot of people mad at him, not the least of which would be the Jewish leaders who were likely getting a cut of the profits from the merchants. So they come up to him and ask, “Who are you to tear up our temple/market like this?! Show us a miracle to prove it!” Jesus responds, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Of course the Jews, and everyone else at this point, didn’t get what he was talking about. They thought he meant the building, but John tells us parenthetically that he wasn’t talking about the building but about himself.
1 Corinthians 1 expands on this a bit, as Paul writes, “Jews demand miraculous signs… but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews… but to those whom God has called… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Even though the sign the Jews asked for and Jesus promised happened, it was so outside their expectations that they didn’t believe it when they saw it, even to the point of actively fighting against it.
And, in a way, we shouldn’t be surprised. Worshipping a God who let himself be executed for a crime he didn’t commit sounds really silly to someone who doesn’t believe. And yet the very sign that the Jews found so abhorrent is the one that matters — Jesus had the authority to do everything he did because he laid down his life for the world. It’s why we follow him, knowing that the very thing that the world thought would defeat him is in fact his, and our, victory.