Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me. (John 2.13-17)
As we will see as we move through the liturgical year, the Gospel of John will pop up regularly, although the year is generally known as the year of Mark. The reason is simple. Because the Gospel of Mark is truncated, at least in comparison to the other gospels, John is used as a filler to give heft to the slim pickings of Mark. Also, bringing John’s gospel into the year allows us a chance to study his text, especially since no year is specifically dedicated to his gospel, as is the case with the three synoptics.
So, today we have John’s version of the cleansing of the temple, a story that appears in all four gospels,
Indicating its importance to the gospel writers and to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. However, as often is the case, there are discrepancies among the texts. The biggest one is John’s insertion of the story near to the start of his gospel, immediately after the wedding of Cana, while the writers of the synoptics place it near the end of their texts.
Scholars hypothesize as to where it historically belongs and most agree that it came near the end of Jesus’ life, the synoptics emphasizing that the cleansing of the temple was the immediate cause of the religious leaders’ decision to rid themselves and the world of this troublemaker from Galilee. So why does John place an historical event out of sequence? Again, it’s guesswork, but many think he wants to emphasize right here at the start the passover theme that will play a big role in his gospel.
In fact, John provides three different passover celebrations that Jesus of Nazareth will participate in, a contradistinction to the synoptic writers who reference only one, their texts using the singular passover event at the end of their gospels as a magnetic pull that moves the story along to its conclusion in Jerusalem. For readers interested in nitty-gritty details, the three passover celebrations in John’s gospel become the hat rack for the supposition that the public ministry of Jesus had a three-year duration.
Equally plausible, perhaps John wants to put before us early on the conflict between Jesus and “the Jews,” as John habitually refers to the religious leaders in Jerusalem. This is the first appearance of the group in the gospel and, as we see soon enough, their response is one of unbelief and rejection of Jesus, the opposite of his mother in the previous story of Cana who believes in her son and tells the wine servers to “do as he says.”
Enough with the academic debate. What does the story of the cleansing of the temple offer us as a spiritual lesson? The most obvious, of course, comes from Jesus’ own explanation for his actions. As we heard, he tells the men selling doves in the temple, “Take these things out of here! Don’t make my Father’s house a marketplace!” So, he seems particularly incensed that the temple, traditionally understood as the place where the Divine Presence abided, should become a commercial venue. By extension, we may want to keep our holy places free of all commercialism, money-making, or hucksterism. As communities where the divine presence is housed, we should exemplify generosity, not money-grabbing; hospitality, not marketing; humility, not high-handedness.
Interestingly, only in John’s version does Jesus refer to the temple as “my Father’s house.” In the synoptics, he says to the moneychangers and merchants, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” The dual emphases are important. First, Jesus calls the temple “my house,” implying that the presence of God will henceforth be found in his person, and referring to the merchants as “a den of thieves” is a direct hit on their unethical practices.
For John, it is important that Jesus calls the temple “my Father’s house” because it is the first time that Jesus identifies God as his Father, a strong theological statement if there ever was one; but equally important, nobody in the crowd seems to pick up on it. Either way, it is clear that Jesus is displeased with what the temple has become, filled now with the noise of animals and merchants, making it more like a 4-H show than the abode of the divine presence in the world.
The more interesting thing to me as I unravel a spiritual message over and beyond the obvious one of treating the temple as a holy place is found in the description that John gives us as Jesus rids the area of barn animals and slick salesmen. John writes, “He made a whip of cords, and threw all out of the temple, both the sheep and the oxen.”
Admittedly, it is a vivid description and doubtlessly made quite the scene, shocking both man and beast as he expels them from the courtyard, each trying to escape a beating by his hastily constructed whip. The animals, for their part, probably made less of it, more used to being corralled, than the merchants, more accustomed to being respected. We can only imagine the sight of the merchants ducking under the tables and scurrying to pick up the loose change that has been scattered across the floor, a stampede as hasty as the hightailing of the sheep and the oxen.
I find it interesting that John uses the same word for driving out the sheep and the oxen and merchants as the synoptic writers use when they describe Jesus of Nazareth driving out demons from possessed people. I like to think it is more than a coincidence. Even if not, it still offers an intriguing lens through which to view the episode. It is not a far stretch to overlay the two expulsions, both of them bearing striking similarities, each showing the heisting of something holy by something unholy, both needing a thorough cleansing.
The connection becomes stronger when we hear Jesus’ response to the religious leaders when they challenge him on his reasons for cleansing the temple. Here in John’s version, he tells them, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” When they counter that it took forty-six years to build the temple, John explains to us, “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”
Almost everyone concurs that we find an allusion to his death and resurrection wherein his body will be torn down and then raised up. For John the point is clear. Jesus’ body will become the new temple, the place where people come face-to-face with the divine presence, no longer sequestered in the Holy of Holies, but found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen from the dead, now enthroned in heaven beside his Father.
Of course, Paul, writing even earlier than these evangelists, sees the small step that it takes to move from Jesus’ body as the new temple to our bodies as temples where his Spirit dwells within us. He tells the people of Corinth, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3.16)
With that in mind and transferring the temple in Jerusalem to the temple that is the sanctuary of our soul, and realizing that Jesus drove out the moneychangers and merchants just as he drove out demons, we may want to ponder if we also need to drive out anything in our souls that subverts the holy place that our temples also should be. What whip of cords do we need to make to help us to rid ourselves of these evils that pollute our temples?
Generally, it is easy enough to quickly uncover those dark forces in our lives that habitually plague us, dimming the divine presence that should shine brightly upon our persons. The usual culprits such as greed, self-aggrandizement, and gossip don’t hide behind the moneychangers’ tables in our souls. We see signs of their presence often enough to make their faces as easy to recognize as our own. The same with our hypocrisy, hedonism, and dishonesty. They’re as hard to hide as the sheep and oxen in the temple in Jerusalem.
The more pernicious vices–simply another word for the undesirable deeds done by the dark forces inhabiting the temple of our souls–are those that on the surface strike us as acceptable behaviors because, after all, they’re so ordinary and pedestrian that we don’t see them as harming us in any way. For instance, our intolerance of those who are different from us, our prejudice against the poor, our dismissal of others whom we consider beneath us. These vices have leased a place in our souls for so long that they don’t even get our attention, like the people living next door to us in our neighborhood.
Or again, what about the name-calling we do when talking about certain groups we dislike, or the put-downs of others for no good reason except that they don’t measure up to our personalized standards of right and wrong, or the harsh judgments we make on the lives of others without any attempt to better understand their situations?
When we look at the story of the cleansing of the temple in this way, casting light into the dark corners of our own souls, we can see that there are many things that need to be driven out as surely as did the livestock in the temple or the demons that possessed madmen in the gospels. In other words, when Jesus says “don’t make my Father’s house a marketplace,” he may be talking to us, not only to the hucksters in the house of God in Jerusalem.
The bottom line is there are many things, in all likelihood, that we need to drive out of our lives, such as our cynicism, our self-centeredness, and our uncharitableness, if they are to be the temples that Jeus tells us they should be. As his followers, we are expected to be a house for his divine presence, a place where people come to find compassion, understanding, and acceptance. If we are temples where his glory can be found, then the sanctuary of our soul should be filled with justice, mercy, and healing, not with injustice, cruelty, and harshness.
I’m not sure why the story of the cleansing of the temple is put before us on this Third Sunday of Lent. The likely reason is that it is so often seen as the cause of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Or, perhaps it is the reference to three days that makes it a good Lenten choice, foreshadowing the three days that the Crucified Jesus spends in the tomb.
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t take much work on our part to see how the story speaks specifically to us during this season of penance and conversion, aside from those possibilities. During this season of reflection, we may come to realize that it isn’t only the temple in Jerusalem that needs to be cleansed. It’s our own souls as well, temples in their own right, the Spirit breathed into us at our birth, too often made to co-exist with the demons to whom we rent out a place.
The bottom line is that if we want the divine presence to live within us, then we have to make room for it. We can’t have it as cluttered with our demons, large or small, as was the temple with all the cramped stalls and smelly sheep. If our souls have become anything other than a temple for the Spirit of God, then, I suppose, it is time for us to drive out all the stuff that doesn’t belong there. Lent seems a good time for facing the task of returning our souls into something clean instead of a den full of thieves and thugs.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 