Scripture Notes: Cleansing the Temple (John 2)

When Jesus entered the Jerusalem Temple’s Court of the Gentiles that day, He was greeted by chaos. The place looked, sounded, and smelled like a cross between a barnyard, a marketplace, and a bank. Salesmen appealed to potential worshipers to buy animals for sacrifice. Money-changers offered to swap out currency that could not be used in the Temple area with acceptable coins, for a fee, of course.  The Temple of God had become just another place for business transactions, buying and selling, and probably more than a bit of cheating.

This was not at all what was supposed to be. Since the Gentiles could go no farther into the Temple, this courtyard was designed as a place where they could pray and worship God. But how could anyone pray with all this racket? The world had crept in and taken over, and that was not all right. 

So Jesus did something about it, something quite dramatic, in fact. He made a whip out of cords, and He drove the animal sellers and the money-changers right out of the Temple area. He knocked over tables, sending coins flying in every direction. He told them to stop making His Father’s house a marketplace. A different kind of chaos erupted as animals dashed about with their owners chasing them, money-changers leaped after their escaping coins, and Jesus laid into all of them about what was and was not right behavior in the very House of God.

This is not an image of Jesus that the modern world is comfortable with. We want to tame Him, to make sure that He is kind and gentle, to see to it that He suits our sensibilities. Jesus is pure love, through and through, but love is often stern and even rather scary, for it wills the good of the other and does what it must to make that good happen. And sometimes what is good for us is the last thing we want, so love does not seem very loving. 

But the fact is that what Jesus did in the Temple area was all about love. Something had gone drastically wrong, and it needed to be corrected. Jesus came and saw and acted. His actions may seem harsh to us, but they were exactly what He needed to do to show love at that moment. What was going on in the Temple was not good, it was not loving toward God or toward other people, so it had to be stopped.

This incident should make us reflect on how we behave in God’s house, in church. Do we act with reverence to God and respect to others by doing our part to maintain a quiet, prayerful atmosphere? Do we remember that we are in the very presence of God and respond accordingly? Food for thought...