It is customary to give a title to today’s reading from Exodus. Usually it is called “The Ten Commandments.” In the Hebrew text they aren’t called “Commandments,” but are simply known as the “Ten Words.” Does that change how we hear and respond to them? Not as laws and regulations, but more as a guide to understanding the will of God. They tell us what God rejects — and what we should as well.
The “Ten Words,” or Decalogue, was celebrated in liturgical settings as a renewal of the covenant with God (Deuteronomy 31:10 ff). God liberated Israel from slavery and made the people a holy nation. The people, on their part, accepted God’s will to be the chosen people and to manifest their holiness and express their gratitude to God by living a just life.
The Ten Commandments don’t cover a lot of everyday life; they are not comprehensive. Instead, they address proper behavior in some marginal situations, like idolatry, murder and violation of property. They are a light to guide our journey. Hence, another translation for “commandment” is “direction” or “teaching.” They reveal the will of God which “directs” our way of life with God and with neighbor. We don’t observe them to earn God’s pleasure. We use them to help us know the direction our lives should take so as to live as God’s holy people.
The first three gospels place the “cleansing of the Temple” at the end of Jesus’ ministry. But John has it at the beginning. Obviously these writers weren’t interested in chronology, but theology, the meaning of the narrative for us. In today’s passage John shows Jesus fulfilling the prophetic hopes of the prophets. Malachi (3:14) and Zechariah (14: 1-21) who had anticipated the messianic age when God would come “suddenly” into the Temple to “purify and cleanse it.”
John is setting up the rest of his narrative. Jesus’ ministry will overturn the religious laws and drive out greed, hypocrisy and legalism in religious practice. He was going to establish a new and holy temple — the temple of his body — where God and humanity would enter into a new relationship.
The scene takes place in the outer courts of the Gentiles. That’s where a variety of animals were sold for the Passover feast to pilgrims who had traveled a distance. The moneychangers would exchange foreign coins for the acceptable Temple ones. They were known to defraud people in the exchange. In a subtle touch by John, Jesus shows a milder attitude towards the sellers of doves which were the offerings of the poor. Perhaps he remembered his own parents only being able to afford doves when they went to the temple to offer sacrifice.
Prophets like Jeremiah and Zachariah had warned against corrupting the Temple. They envisioned a purified, ideal Temple, where there would be no commerce. This purified Temple would have open access to all peoples. Just previous to this passage Jesus replaced water with wine at Cana. Now he is replacing the Temple with himself. Where will people go for a full and welcome reception by God? To Jesus, whose resurrected body will be that new temple.
Later Jesus will tell the Samaritan woman (John 4) that true worship of God is not in one place, but in “spirit and truth.” The way to this true worship will be opened up by Jesus’ death and resurrection. The authorities want a “sign” to back up what he is doing and saying. The miracles in John’s Gospel are signs, meant to reveal Jesus’ glory and show that he has come from God.
Signs can be ambiguous: they can prompt genuine faith, but they can also present Jesus merely as a wonder worker. This is an inadequate response to who he is — the one who reveals God. Later, Jesus will say about the signs he performed before his disciples, “Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed” (20:29). Jesus is weary of those who will give themselves to him based on his performing spectacles. They cannot be faithful disciples, especially when the wonderful signs cease and the sign of his death takes their place.
Jesus has not eliminated cult and worship. We are a sacramental church, but we need him to cleanse our worship. Later in the gospel Jesus will again be asked for a sign and he will offer himself as living bread, the meal through which we share in his resurrection (6:30ff). When we eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord we are aware of our need for forgiveness and the cleansing Jesus’ resurrected body brings to us.
The risen Lord enters our lives, forgives our sins, cleansing us so that we can give fitting worship to our God. We become a cleansed temple. Through Jesus, the “temple raised up” in three days, we have been given forgiveness and freedom. We don’t receive them because we have followed detailed and perfect rituals, but through the gift we have received in Christ.
Jesus doesn’t just drive out the merchants and cleanse the temple. John tells us that it was preparation time for Passover. Another, more perfect Passover sacrifice is being prepared and Jesus’ death will replace the former sacrifices offered in God’s house.
Jesus’ angry actions might make some of us uncomfortable. Someone described the Jesus depicted in today’s story as “the muscular Jesus.” Sometimes the gentle images of Jesus risk making him seem too soft. But today’s depiction shows us how the wild and convicted Jesus could ruffle the religious niceties of the Temple staff and cause the Romans to begin to wonder about this brash prophet from up north. The Jesus we heard about a few weeks ago who reached out and touched the leper, is the same one who wrestled with Satan in the desert and won. This is also the Jesus who will accept and bear his cross with the same zeal for God he shows us in today’s gospel. Perhaps we do meet today “the muscular Jesus.”
What was it, besides the merchants’ dishonest practices, that stirred Jesus’ anger? Perhaps it meant that the Temple wasn’t open equally to all people. What was wrong with the coinage of foreigners? Why couldn’t foreigners and their money also praise God in the same way the local Jewish population did? Doesn’t that challenge the openness and hospitality of our places of worship?
Maybe we lack “zeal” for our own temple, our parish church, and attend worship merely to receive. Do we consider how we might serve and promote the gospel through our service as ministers at the altar and as representatives of our “temple” to the community? According to our gifts, our goal should be to make our “house of prayer” a welcome place for all peoples, as the zealous Jesus desires.