Cleansing the Temple—Luke 19:45-47

(Image courtesy of http://www.lavistachurchofchrist.org/)

Today's passage can be read here: Luke 19:45-47


According to Luke, the first thing Jesus did after entering the Holy City for the last time before his death was to go to the House of God to pray. Jerusalem was the City of God, the true God's only earthly "residence". When a guest enters a home, the first thing he must do is to pay respects to the home's owner. Remember also that it was Luke's gospel alone that told of the visit to the Jerusalem temple by Jesus' family when he was only a boy, and how he lingered there even after his parents had left town, just to be able to hear the learned scholars discuss the Holy Scripture in the Temple. When his parents finally found him, he expressed surprise that they didn't know where he would be—in his Father's House. Although he grew up a Galilean, Jesus clearly loved being in his Father's House in Jerusalem.

For that very reason he was truly incensed by the loud noise created by the buying and selling of sacrificial animals that took place in the Court of the Gentiles, one of the outer courts. Although the noise chiefly distracted the worship of Gentiles, who could penetrate no further into the Temple's interior, was it not said by God through Isaiah the Prophet: "My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7; Mark 11:17)? Peace and tranquility for prayer should not be just for the Jewish worshipers!

We do not know if the money-changers were actually cheating the worshipers who had to exchange foreign currency for the Syrian shekels required to buy sacrificial lambs and doves. That may or may not have been the reason for Jesus' choice of the phrase: "You have made it a den of robbers", which he quoted from Jeremiah 7:9-11

"Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, 'We are safe'—safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the LORD."

In their original context, these words were a criticism of Israelites who robbed and defrauded their fellow men all week long and then came to worship in the Temple, thinking that God's physical presence among them (symbolized by the Temple in Jerusalem) would keep them immune from His judgment. It was the den in which they hid from pursuing justice. Jeremiah ("the weeping prophet") had bad news for them. The presence of the Temple in Jerusalem and the regular offerings there would not prevent God from judging their sins that had gone unpunished for so many decades. The approaching Babylonian army would raze Solomon's beautiful temple to the ground!

I believe that this is why Jesus quoted this passage from Jeremiah. Not because there was cheating going on in the Temple courts, but because Israel was long overdue for judgment: for killing the prophets, the last of which was John the Baptizer, and for killing the Son of God—which was to transpire very soon now. The lesson of Jeremiah 7 must not be lost on that generation. For in a matter of forty more years (AD 70) the Roman general Titus' legions would torch Herod's temple, the very temple where Jesus now worshiped, and would leave it as underground ruins until this very day. All this because they refused God's final call to repentance and his offer of His Son to be their true King. Now the "den" would not save them.

These were Jesus' words. His action was to drive out the money-changers. Again, not because they alone were the offenders. They merely symbolized the whole religious hierarchy of Israel at the time. Blind leaders, leading a whole people astray. What Jesus did now to the money-changers, God would do by Titus to all the Jews in Jerusalem in AD 70.

But are we Gentiles better than they? St. Paul reminds us in Romans 11 that we Gentiles owe to the Jews our opportunity to know God and find His forgiveness. We avail ourselves of that opportunity by putting our faith in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus. And if we lose faith in him, if we begin to disobey his teachings and discredit God's Holy Word, we can expect the same treatment. Paul wrote to the church in Rome:

"Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!

I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not think you are superior: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written: "The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins."

As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable. Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you. For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all."