When Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem it was raucous as always – a cacophony of sound – prayers and song, animals bleating, different languages blending into one holy din. Maybe the smell of incense and burning wood and roasting animal flesh wafting upwards hit Jesus’ nose first.
Tens of thousands of people were gathering for Passover – the celebration of God’s freeing the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, and I wonder if anyone noticed Jesus as he walked into the outer court of the Temple – a huge area like soccer pitch after soccer pitch stretching out, where Gentiles and peoples from all over the world gathered, the space where animals were being sold and money changing was happening for pilgrims who’d made a trek to be here, grateful to offer a sacrifice to God.
I imagine that this story of Jesus flipping tables in the Temple is a familiar one to most of us here. All four gospels contain a version of it. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus enters the temple right after he has triumphantly entered Jerusalem to cries of Hosanna…and his symbolic action in the temple precipitates a conflict with the religious and political powers that will lead to his death. I don’t know how you all make sense of Jesus’ righteous indignation and protest in the temple space – but the interpretations I’ve most often heard usually go something like this:
This action of Jesus is a fierce critique of exploitation where he disrupts the economic and religious order of the temple. The temple establishment with its economic activity becomes a metaphor for any kind of injustice and religious exclusion we’re called to resist and overturn. Flip the tables, scatter the coins, crack the whip! Be like Jesus!
While we certainly see a righteous indignation, a holy zeal in Jesus here – and I do think Jesus calls us to creative and bold action for justice – I’m persuaded by scholars who caution us not to make the Temple and its business into a symbol of everything Jesus opposed. We don’t have to make Judaism look bad to make Jesus look good. And we don’t have to caricature what was happening at the Temple to understand what a Jewish Jesus and his Jewish followers were up to. Amy Jill-Levine, a New Testament scholar who is Jewish, notes that nowhere are we told in our texts that the temple was a place of exploitation and exclusion.1
Jesus’ action takes place in the court of the Gentiles, where all were welcome. Economic activity – the selling of animals for sacrifice and the exchange of money – would have been a necessary and normal part of how the Temple functioned. In Luke 2 we’re reminded that Mary and Joseph offered a pair of doves to be sacrificed in the Temple – a provision for poorer folks to offer something to God.
Also in Luke, when the 12-year old Jesus is left behind in the Temple, he tells his parents, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house.” In Acts, after Jesus’ death and resurrection and the outpouring of his Spirit at Pentecost, Jesus’ followers are sharing possessions in common and caring for the needy and spending “much time together in the Temple.” The Temple was a beloved and sacred place for Jesus and his followers.
So if Jesus’ symbolic action in the Temple wasn’t about overthrowing it or condemning its purpose, then why was he so angry? What was the point of his words and bold demonstration?
In the Gospel of John – this story comes right at the beginning in chapter two. Jesus has just called his disciples and just performed his first sign by turning water into wine at a wedding that must have been a good time. While the other gospels frame this scene as part of Jesus’ final days – in John it comes at the beginning, when we’re just first glimpsing all of who Jesus is and the glory and love of God that he’s come to embody. In John, Jesus is God’s holy Word made Flesh, who was present at the beginning of creation and whose light shines into all the world.
So what is Jesus doing when he makes a whip out of straw or other stuff lying around because you can’t bring weapons into the Temple, and starts driving out the sheep and cattle onto the streets? What is he doing flipping tables and sending coins clanging? What does Jesus mean when he says to the folks selling doves – “Take these out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” It’s a strange request because Jesus knows that the temple is a place of exchange and economy where animals and money flow. That’s part of its very function. He and his disciples have and will continue to participate in these systems.
But when Jesus says- “Take these out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” He is referencing the final verses of the prophet Zechariah. In Zechariah on the day of the Lord, the scattered nations of the world will all gather in Jerusalem for the festival of the booths, and God will have altered the very topography of the earth, so that Jerusalem stands above all other places, and the last two verses close with a proclamation that the holiness of the temple will extend to all:
“On that day there shall be inscribed on the bells of the horses, “Holy to the Lord.” And the cooking pots in the house of the Lord shall be as holy as the bowls in front of the altar; and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them to boil the flesh of the sacrifice. And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.” (Zech 14:20-21).
So when Jesus with fire in his belly to “Take these out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” – his words are not a condemnation of the system of sacrifices that faithful pilgrims are offering to God. Instead Jesus is saying, “Take these out of here!”
Let the doves and their gracious peacefulness fly to other places! Let those obnoxious sheep take their wooly wildness to the streets! Let the lumbering cattle pound past, reminding all of you, you bystanders and pilgrims – that this God will make even the bells tied to the necks of the horses holy on that day!2
When Jesus says to “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” he is quoting Zechariah that on the day of the Lord, there shall no longer be traders needed in the house of the Lord to sell animals to be sacrificed…because every house’s cooking pot will be as holy as the special bowls used in the temple. Even the humblest kitchen has an old skillet or kettle that can be used to cook a sacrifice acceptable to God. Even the most ordinary nooks and crannies of your lives are vessels to be used to honor and praise and worship a holy and loving God.
But then Jesus says the hard part – “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!”
Rightly so, other Jews question Jesus: How can that happen, because this current Temple construction project has been dragging on for decades? This is the hard part….The heavy question mark of destruction and death that looms large…
And by the time the gospel of John has been written – the temple in Jerusalem – the one that had been rebuilt a second time and upgraded by the Herods – in the year 70 AD will be desecrated and destroyed by the Romans. And Jesus, as we remember in these coming weeks, will endure his own death on a Roman cross.
The good news we hear tonight and every week – only comes to us passed down by faithful hearers who were sorting out their own trauma – seeking to find meaning in the midst of horror. And that’s why we’re told that his disciples only remembered fully what Jesus had said and done here in the temple after he had died and was raised from the dead. It was only then that they believed what Jesus had said, that he had been talking about the temple of his own body, it was only then that they remembered the scriptures he’d used to talk about the glory and goodness of God’s house extending to the whole world. It was as they were picking up the pieces of their lives and clinging to resurrection hope that they could make sense of those words, “Zeal for your house will consume!”
So if right now you are walking through chaos or uncertainty or you have only questions in the face of trauma, be comforted knowing that Jesus followers are companions with you. Lent is a season when we keep walking with Jesus even if we will never quickly or fully ever find the answers to our questions.
Maybe it feels hard to imagine the holiness of God’s house extending to all the messy, cluttered corners of your life – that’s OK. Your house or apartment or relationships can be overwhelming and noisy, filled with anxieties of money and work and yet this is till the only place where any of us can begin to worship God.
Maybe it’s comforting or maybe it stings to hear Jesus in this passage speak so directly that in three days he will be raised up, because you are still missing your loved one who has died or because you are accompanying a friend or family member right now who is walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
Maybe who feel some of the same fire burning in your bones as Jesus did and you ache at the destruction that continues to gobble up the vulnerable. Maybe you look out at the world and see too many kitchens being used to prepare funeral meals and too many empty pots and pans carried by hungry hands, waiting to be filled with food others choose not to give. Maybe you ask, along with Zechariah and Jesus, when will the day of the Lord come when every home and every hearth will be used for feasting in worship of the God of peace and life.
During these weeks of Lent – carry your questions, carry your aches, carry your hopes as you walk with Jesus. Be gentle with the sharp traumas of your life or the blunt despair that gnaws away. And remember, that though the powers of violence can destroy a temple, or drop a bomb, or crucify a body, it is the power of God’s love that brings life to God’s people. It is God’s word that dwells in the vulnerable flesh of Jesus and it is God’s spirit that make a home of love in our lives.
So even if life seems overwhelming or incomprehensible or traumatic – keep listening to God’s holy words, keep doing justice, keep paying attention, keep being like Jesus as you work to weave a whip of discernment out of whatever straw you find scattered about your life. And give thanks – because God is sending holiness stampeding out onto the streets and grace fluttering up into the air like doves set free.
God in Christ, the Word made Flesh, is unleashing the holy pandemonium of the temple out into every nook and cranny and kitchen of this world and into every cell and synapse of the temple that is your body. So give thanks that the Word became flesh and lived among us, for we have seen God’s glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
- Amy Jill Levine, Entering the Passion of Jesus, “Chapter 2: The Temple: Risking Righteous Anger,” 45-62. Much of my reflection on the role of the Temple here is drawn from Levine. ↩︎
- I was inspired to think more about the roles that the animals play in this passage, after listening to the Feb 23, 2024 “Green Lectionary Podcast” with Dr. Jerusha Neal of Duke Divinity School and Doug Kaufman of the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative. ↩︎