“She came in like she owned the place,” is what you or I might say about a guest who entered our home and began to rearrange the furniture or the dishes in the kitchen cupboards. That is how Jesus strode into the temple, just after the Palm Sunday “triumphal entry,” as recorded in Matthew 21:12-17. His actions there demonstrate an ownership of this “house of prayer,” as He names it in verse 13, quoting Isaiah 56:7.
I decided to extend the Palm Sunday text (Matthew 21:1-11) this year to include the “cleansing of the temple,” because, while the common lectionary gives us John’s account (John 2:13-22, in Lent of Year B) of Jesus cleansing the temple early in His ministry, the lectionary totally omits the second cleansing recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke, occurring in Holy Week. Since what Jesus says upon cleansing the temple the second time is completely different from what John records for the first cleansing, it seems worth our attention.
I’ve learned from Don Carson’s commentary on Matthew that the quotation of Isaiah and the word Jesus uses to condemn the merchants and moneychangers doing business in the temple court shows us something of significance for the church in regard to our mission and purpose in relation to the world around us.
Let’s begin with Jesus’ charge that the offenders He chases out have made the place a “den of robbers.” The word for “robber” is the same one used to describe the two men crucified on either side of Jesus in Matthew 27:38, though the NRSV chooses to translate it “bandits” at that point.
As I preached about the parallel crucifixion text in Luke last fall on Christ the King, “robbers” or “bandits” is a bit misleading. Though the word literally means something like “those who seize” or “plunderers,” in Jesus day it was regularly and most frequently associated with the Zealots, a nationalist group of Jewish rebels opposed to Roman domination. We might call them “terrorists” or perhaps “freedom fighters,” depending on one’s point of view, today.
In any case, it is very possible that Jesus is not so much condemning the larcenous practices of those who changed money and sold sacrificial animals, as He is condemning a Jewish nationalist spirit. That is further supported when we take account of the actual location of the commerce going on in the temple. It must have been in the outer court of the temple, the court of the Gentiles, the one part of the temple which a non-Jew might enter in order to worship God.
Moreover, that quotation from Isaiah 56:7 is truncated in Matthew, but in Mark 11:17 it is completed, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” Jesus’ complaint is that this temple, this house of God, is meant to be a place where all people can come and speak to and meet God, but that the noise of a marketplace and a Jewish exclusivism has ruined the provision for the non-Jew to have a point of entry into true worship.
And to return to where I started, Jesus states this claim on the original purpose of the house as its true owner. He can “rearrange the furniture” to make room for those seeking God because this is His house.
You and I might want to look at how we behave in the “house of God” today, whether that is a physical place of worship or the spiritual house of God in the community of the Church. Have we made our physical acts of worship and our Christian community a “house of prayer” where people may come and meet God, or have we excluded them with all the “business” and other transactions in which we engage, shutting off the opportunity for genuine communion with God?