In its splendor, the second temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have seen was far more magnificent than the more modest edifice constructed by those Jewish exiles whose return to Jerusalem from Babylon is retold in the closing chapters of Second Chronicles and in Ezra and Nehemiah. The temple of Jesus’ day was one element of a reconstruction plan of astonishing ambition undertaken by Herod the Great.
From near and far, first-century Jews came to the temple at Passover to sacrifice to the Lord. Impractical as it was to travel significant distances with sacrificial animals, provision was made to allow their acquisition in Jerusalem. Enterprising vendors set up shop in the Court of the Gentiles. The court was filled with merchants selling animals to worshippers and money changers who exchanged Roman coins for shekels that had no image of the emperor on them and thus were fit for payment of the temple tax. Giving us some sense of the scale of the operation, the first-century historian Josephus reports that a quarter-million lambs alone might be sacrificed during the Passover. Exorbitant sums would sometimes be charged for both animals and exchange rates, placing additionally gratuitous burdens on the poor. Because of the activity and the crush of stalls, creatures, and humanity, anyone with any intention of praying in the court would have found the prospect, well, a beast of a challenge. Whether by simple disregard or by design, the merchants, and the temple authorities who allowed their activities, seemed to care nothing for the unhindered worship of neither the destitute Jew nor the devoted gentile. The Messiah wasn’t good with any of this:
“ And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” but you make it a den of robbers.’’’ (Matthew 21:12-13, NIV)
The concerns at play in the temple cleansing are multiple. Among them, the sheer chutzpah of Jesus claiming the authority to judge and purify the activities in the temple would presumably have shocked those who witnessed it. A clear proclamation of messianic purpose, Jesus’ actions would have confirmed the opposition of the Sanhedrin against him. Christ’s demands for pure worship, for the unimpeded witness of the people of God to the gentile world, and for the care of the poor would all have been motivating factors in his kinetic zeal.
First, while it might describe another, earlier, temple clearing, the version of the event written about in the Book of John provides a few interesting details not described in the synoptic gospels:
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple, he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons,
“Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” (John 2:16, ESV)
His disciples remembered that it was written,
“Zeal for your house will consume me.” (John 2:17, ESV)
Possibly, the fact that Jesus took the time to make a whip of cords suggests at least some level of premeditation that dismisses any notion of a purely spontaneous act. While no one should imagine the Messiah at risk of flying off the handle, and while the assembly of a whip made of cords might have been a simple and crude design, the obviously intentional use of force is notable. I only want to emphasize that the Christian use of force is characterized by deliberation, preparation, and control. If it’s right to use necessary, proportionate, and discriminate force, in the last resort, when nothing else is likely successfully to defend the innocent, right wrongs, or punish evil, then it is also right to build the capacities – including materiel, training, and virtue – to do so.
Regardless of the contingency of certain details, what I find most reassuring in the whole temple-clearing narrative, is the simple and obvious fact that we worship a God who is willing to overturn tables when tables need to be overturned and who knows that the controlled application of force is sometimes necessary to protect the innocent and to vindicate justice and to punish wrongdoing. The presence of a similar understanding among those who worship that God is not always quite so obvious. We too often fail to be properly angry at sufficiently gross injustices so as to be moved to action, or we allow our anger to boil over into uncontrollable rage and so cause a disproportionate degree of destruction rather than restoration.
The America I grew up in was formed by the consciousness found in the great Westerns. The convention of the genre is usually some take on the necessary—and typically reluctant—use of force in defense of some great good. Often enough, a weary gunslinger enters into a community struggling to become a civilized place of law and order but hamstrung in doing so by the self-serving ambitions of a remorseless villain. The gunslinger, trying to leave behind a life of violence, avoids getting involved until it is made plain that remaining aloof will mean that the innocent will be destroyed by the violent, and that only the application of a greater and more lethal counter-violence will save them. The greatest Westerns do not celebrate the violence. They only celebrate that which the violence defends. Indeed, the greatest Westerns are nothing like carnage-as-entertainment, rather they meditate on the terrible price exacted by even the just deployment of force – not centrally on those who suffer that violence, but on those who necessarily have to deploy it.
The cleansing of the temple, then, is one small reminder, among many, that Jesus did not save us from the Old Testament God. To be sure, the cleansing does not render plain a great many complex questions – such as discerning the mind of Christ on war. Questions regarding war and peace conceived as social and political issues were never the specific topic of his ministry. The cleansing does display the Messiah’s concern for justice, mercy, and the love and unfettered worship of God. It ought also to put to rest any question, as the theologian DA Carson puts it, of “God as implacably opposed to us and full of wrath, but somehow mollified by Jesus, who loves us.” It is continually important to recall that themes of extraordinary mercy, grace, gentleness, and unabashed love are found throughout the Old Testament in God’s dealing both with those within and those without his Covenant. Additionally, we must observe the aspects of divine wrath found throughout the New Testament – where even a Savior overturns tables. Regarding the divine response to evil, the Testaments are a continuum, Carson notes:
“Both God’s love and God’s wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax – in the cross. Do you wish to see God’s love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God’s wrath? Look at the cross.”
And then rejoice – and tremble – in the zeal of our Lord.
What say you Man of Valor?
Excerpted from The Holy Week Reader – Monday: A Savior Who Overturns Tables, by Marc LiVecche, Dated: 14 April 2023
