Video is shown of Jesus’ throwing the Money-Changers out of the Temple before sermon.
This is three month long study of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. This is greatest week in history. Bracketed by Palm Sunday on one end and Easter Sunday on the other, this is the most important week in history. On Friday, Jesus will die. On Thursday, Judas will betray Him. Today’s focus is Monday of the Greatest Week in History.
And before we read our passage, allow me to set the scene. It’s Monday, just ninety six hours away from His death and about eighty hours away from Judas’ kiss on Jesus’ cheek. Jesus does three items on Monday:
1) Jesus curses a barren fig tree;
2) Jesus cleanses the Temple;
and 3) Jesus returns to Bethany (Mark 11:19).
Today’s Scripture Passage
“Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. 43 And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, 44 but supposing him to be in the group they went a day's journey, but then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, 45 and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” 49 And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house” (Luke 2:41-49)?
And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, 46 saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers. 47 And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, 48 but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words” (Luke 19:45-48).
The Temple
It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of the Temple in Jesus’ day. Work on rebuilding the Temple begin a half century before Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. And history tells us some 11,000 were working on the Temple at the time of his construction. The rebuilding process was not complete in Jesus’ day for it would go on another three decades before it was finished.
To get a size of the Temple and its surrounding complex, consider this… The Temple complex would have roughly been the equivalent of thirty-five football fields. Much of the outside façade of the Temple was covered with gold plates so when the sun rose the reflection was nearly blinding. On a clear day the brilliance of the Temple was visible from a considerable distance outside Jerusalem. And this brilliance was not due to gold alone; the upper parts of the Temple were pure white, probably marble. Once a year the priests applied whitewash to the upper sections. At the very top gold spikes lined the roof designed to keep birds from perching on top of the Temple. No expense was spared. The Temple was widely considered to be the very dwelling place of God unlike no other place on earth.
The Outer Court
Now if you walked into the temple, when you walked through the first door of a series of doors, the first area you got to was the court of the Gentiles, or Court of the Nations. It was the only place where the non-Jews could go. It was the biggest of the divisions of the temple. This was the place where all the business operations of the temple were set up. Oh my goodness. What an operation it was! When Jesus walked in, he would immediately have seen (I’m not exaggerating) thousands of people buying and selling animals at hundreds of locations, and hundreds of foreign currency moneychangers. The historian Josephus tells us in one Passover week one year, 25,000 lambs were bought, sold, and sacrificed in the temple courts. If you’ve seen photos of our financial trading floors then you know how tumultuous and loud they are. It was very inconvenient for many pilgrims to carry livestock with them on a long and arduous journey and so they would wait until they arrived in Jerusalem to purchase their sacrifices.
Also, there grew around the Temple a cottage industry where they would take your currency and convert it to the currency accepted by the Temple. Neither of these practices was inherently evil, but these practices became opportunities for corruption.
1. Hear Jesus’ Point
The problem wasn’t the currency or the purchase of the animals but where it was taking place. This was the place where the Gentiles are supposed to find God. This is where they’re supposed to be praying. This is the place where worship was supposed to take place. In years before Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, the tables were placed over on the Mount of Olives where money was exchanged. But in Jesus’ day, all this had been moved to the house of God. And remember the purpose of the Temple. It’s a place between heaven and earth. The Temple was to be the most sacred place, that connecting place between God and humanity. Even today, 2,000 years later you can go underneath a tunnel of the Temple Complex. There you’ll find woman praying at a place that it is believed to be the closest location to what was the Holy of Holies. 2,000 years later and people still go there in an effort to be close to God.
Remember, on Sunday evening Jesus had entered into Jerusalem and surveyed the scene at the Temple: “And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (Mark 11:11). He’s had all night to think over what He has witnessed at His Father’s House.
1.1 Jesus at Twelve Years Old
Remember for a moment when Jesus at twelve years of age in the Temple. Perhaps He had come in on Sunday afternoon to look over what was happening and His mind traveled back to the first time His step-father walked Him in the Temple. The year you turned twelve, your father would take his son and initiate him into his adult life. It’s like your bar mitzvah, of course, only this was probably before there were bar mitzvahs. This was his coming-of-age time. Joseph would have taken Jesus into the Temple on the Passover to show him how their religion worked. He would have taken Jesus around and said, “Here’s the temple. This is where we meet God. Here’s the priest. See that priest? The priest is the holy one who mediates the presence of God. Do you see the sacrifices? Do you see the altar? That’s where our sins are being atoned for.” So perhaps His mind drifted back all those years to when He was a child when He witnessed the carnival in front of Him.
Jesus understood the purpose of the Temple was to be a place to draw near to God: “And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, ‘It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers’” (Luke 19:45-46). Jesus calls everyone back to the original purpose of the Temple by going back to two Old Testament Scriptures. “these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7). “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:11).
Again, Jesus’ problem was that outer court of the Temple had become the equivalent of the New York City Trading Floor. No one could worship with the equivalent of a marching band playing in the middle of Temple. Jesus even stopped people from making the outer courts of the Temple a shortcut: “And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mark 11:16). Whether it was commerce or shaving a few minutes off your daily commute by walking through the Temple, both we’re distracting from people’s time of worship. Jesus doesn’t have a problem with the selling of animals to make it convenient for worshippers to make their annual sacrifices. It’s just that the commercial side of it shouldn’t take place inside the Temple.
1.2 Worship Resumes
Immediately upon clearing the Temple, Jesus began teaching: “And he was teaching daily in the temple” (Luke 19:47). Matthew records that Jesus ran people out so that the people’s needs were cared for: “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them” (Matthew 21:14). Problem solved and worship had resumed.
I wonder if Jesus were to enter your Temple, the place designated as your place of worship, what would He think? Would He see your Temple had been replaced by thoughts of business and making a buck? What do you daydream about during worship? Or would He see you cutting through your time of worship to shave a few minutes off your day? When billionaire Bill Gates was asked why he didn’t believe in God, he said, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning.” For many people, worshipping God can be a royal waste of time. Would Jesus enter your life and throw the moneychangers out of your place of worship? Each of us must make space for a personal time of prayer, Bible reading, singing, and instruction. And each of us must make space for a corporate time of prayer, Bible reading, and singing.
2. Feel Jesus’ Anger
Why was Jesus so angry? An injustice was happening: “And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, 46 saying to them, ‘It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers’” (Luke 19:45-46). Injustice makes us anger. Injustice naturally makes us angry. The temple represented the sacrificial system where animals were sacrificed. A blood payment was payment in order for the people to come into the presence of God. Because of your sin and your wrongdoing, the Temple stood as a visible reminder that you couldn’t approach God in any old way. The sacrifice of blood was made to atone for your son. For many modern people, all of this talk of sacrifice just seems as if God is cranky. We think it is primitive and we have advanced beyond this.
2.1 An Orphan Girl
Let’s just say you have adopted an orphan girl as a little child and you’ve raised her up. You know it’s a lot of work to raise a child and there’s a tremendous cost. You just put your whole life into the effort of raising her. As she got to be of college age, you give her your life savings to go off to college with. Everything you’ve earned will get her through college, so off she goes, but she soon disappears. Soon the phone calls stop and the text messages vanish. She never shows up at college. She draws all the money out of the bank, and she goes off. You discover, over the next few months, she has gone off into another city where she is living a high life. She’s living irresponsibly and she’s spending all the money on a number of luxuries. She has squandering your life’s savings away. What would happen if a year or so later suddenly she shows up and she just walks on into your place and she sits down and starts chatting? “Hi. How are you? I haven’t seen you. What’s going on?” What would you say? You’d say, “Wait a minute! You can’t start talking as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing happened. What about what you’ve done? You have to talk to me about that. You have to deal with the betrayal, with the injustice of it all.” What is she going to say? She might say, “Well, you’re awfully cranky. I’m just trying to be friendly.” You would say, “No, I’m not being cranky. I love you, and I’ve loved you, and I still love you, and as a result we have to do something about your betrayal. You can’t just come on in here any old way. You can’t just approach me casually. Something has to be done if you want to come into my presence.” The Bible says we are in the same situation.
Unless you’re a meaningless accident, you have a Creator, and if you have a Creator, then every grain of your strength, every molecule of your abilities and your talents and your money and every gift you have and everything you have and are, you owe to Him. Do you honor God this way? Do you treat Him as if He owns you? Do you treat Him with the gratitude with which you should treat Him? Do you give him the honor you should give Him? We act as if all we’ve gotten from Him is ours to do anything we want with. To one degree or another, we all want to be our own masters. We take our own money, we take our own talents, we take our own time, we take our own sexuality, we take our own gifts, we take our own intellect, and we do what we want with them instead of honoring Him with them.
3. See Jesus’ Worth
The cleansing of the Temple sealed Jesus’ fate: “And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words” (Luke 19:47-48). Jesus’ actions on this Monday pressed the accelerator down for His death in just ninety six hours. Events are set in motion… Judas’ greed has kicked in and he is considering the silver. Jesus seals His fate with His actions on this day. Jesus was always talking about the Temple. Jesus was continually talking about destroying the Temple:
On Tuesday of this week: “And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down’” (Luke 21:5-6). At Jesus’ Trial: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’” (Mark 14:58). On the Cross, the people remembered His word: “And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross’” (Mark 15:29-30)! And lastly, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6). What’s the temple? It’s God’s house. He walks into the God’s house, and he says, “My house shall not be …” and He begins to rearrange the furniture in the way only an owner has the right to do. How can you go into God’s house and say, “It’s my house”? He’s saying He’s God. You see, Jesus replaces the Temple. God is doing something that makes this system redundant.
Prayer
Thank you, Father, for giving us your Son not just as an example for us, but as our sacrifice. Thank you, Father, for giving us your Son not just as an counselor to us, but as our King. I pray today that you show us that we cannot enter into your presence in just “any old way.” Show us the power of your Son’s sacrifice for us and rid us of any deceptive thought that we are acceptable on our efforts. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Conclusion
Jesus’ actions may have stopped the sacrifices for thirty minutes or maybe even an hour on that day. But the Bible records Jesus went back to Bethany later that Monday evening. And no doubt, the moneychangers set up shop back in the Temple again. No matter how long it stopped, it was a preview of things to come. “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45 while the sun's light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two” (Luke 23:44-45). The Temple was a signpost to the reality but now Reality is here.
