3 Challenging the Status Quo: John 2.12–22
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 20th February 2022
History lives on. Today we are looking at a prediction Jesus made, which was so impossible that it had to be a joke, yet it came true, and is still making history. I am talking about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Let me begin by telling you the story of a man who eventually found the grace of God. His name was David Grace. His parents’ marriage was going through a rough spot and he was sent to boarding school. Boarding school is good for some, but for him, in his early teens, it was a disaster. He became withdrawn and barely able to express himself. He turned his back on God. Still people get through these things. Coming from a family of airmen, it’s not surprising he learned to fly, and as a young man flew small aircraft in the jungles of New Guinea. This led to a career with Qantas. When he left on his last international flight he was a step away from his captaincy: Sydney to Los Angeles, with a stop in Honolulu! In his hotel room in Honolulu, bored and miserable, he picked up a Gideon’s Bible and threw it open. He began to read from Luke 21. There was a radio playing music in the background. As he read the part where Jesus says that the temple would be destroyed, and I quote: “Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled,” a news reader interrupted the music to say that Israeli forces had captured East Jerusalem and that the Wailing Wall was in Jewish hands for the first time in 1900 years. It was 1968; the Wailing Wall is part of the foundation of the old temple. David Grace fell on his knees and surrendered his life to Jesus. When he returned to Sydney he resigned from Qantas and spent the rest of his working life flying for Mission Aviation Fellowship in Papua-New Guinea.
When Jesus came to the temple for the Passover of AD 28 it was still under construction, though virtually finished, and already one of the seven wonders of the world.
Herod the Great—the same Herod who ordered the death of all the babes of Bethlehem—ruled Israel from 37 BC until 4 BC. He was a foreigner to the Jews and not popular. In 20 BC, in an effort to put himself in their favour, he launched a building program to enlarge and beautify the temple that had stood for 500 years. To accommodate the structure he envisaged he had to build embankments and fill in part of the valley to enlarge the top of the mountain on which the temple would sit. In 1917 when the British took Jerusalem, General Allenby ordered his engineers to dig a shaft next to what remained of the temple foundation. They went down 50 metres through fill to reach valley floor. If you visit the Wailing Wall today you will see stones weighing 40 tonnes, machined to be laid without mortar, taht you cannot slip a cigarette paper between. The only remains of Herod’s Temple are what was left below ground-level; everything else was burned and broken down by the Roman army, as Jesus said it would be.
In his time it was something to behold. There was the main sanctuary, and surrounding courts and colonnades. Together they covered an area about half a kilometre by 300 metres: 15 hectares. The main shrine was more than double the width of our cathedral, three times its length, and four times it height. We will roof our cathedral with corrugated iron; Herod used gold, with gold spikes to stop birds from landing. Josephus said that when you came to the top of the Mount of Olives and saw the temple on the other side of the valley, your first impression was of a snow-capped mountain in brilliant sunlight, for all that wasn’t gold was white marble. Work went on for 35 years after the time of Jesus. When it stopped a workforce of 18,000 was laid off.
How could they have afforded such a complex? The answer is that every Jewish person in the world paid an annual Temple Tax of half a shekel. The joke is, they didn’t trust their own currency, or Rome’s; it had to be paid in the coin of Tyre, whose silver content was trusted, and that’s where the moneychangers come in.
Every year, four weeks before Passover, the tables of the moneychangers were set up in the Temple to receive the tax. It was compulsory, and force was used on those who didn’t pay. Not everyone agreed with this. Sacrificial animals were also being sold. This was partly a practical measure; at Passover upwards of ten thousand lambs had to be presented for sacrifice, which would then be taken for family Passover celebrations. It also ensured a monopoly on the trade for the High Priest’s family.
When Jesus came to the temple all this business was going on in the Court of the Gentiles, the area where anyone could come and pray. Only Jews were allowed into the main complex. There were signs warning of death for any Gentile who trespassed. Two of these stone inscriptions have been recoevered from the rubble.
Jesus was angered, especially at this encroachment on the area where the Gentiles could pray and make offerings. You can imagine how it would be, trying to pray in the midst of twenty or thirty thousand busy pilgrims, all organizing their Passover celebrations. The needs of Gentiles were not considered important.
What happened next is difficult to imagine. We are used to demonstrations: organize a crowd large enough to be a problem for the authorities, arm them with placards, and get your message across. Here we have one angry man bringing things to a standstill in an area the size of the park across the road, closely watched by temple police and the Roman military, and at the busiest time of the year. Jesus put together some rope for a whip and began to drive out the animals and upend the moneychangers’ tables. And no one stopped him. And none of the New Testament writers bothers to tell us whether he was short or tall.
Jesus’ disciples were not expecting this. The mission of John the Baptist was in progress. They were part of it, and so was Jesus. The Baptizer has called the nation to repentance. He even called out the Governor of Galilee for his illegal marriage. But this, in the capital, at the very centre of Jewish life, at Passover time, when a hundred thousand pilgrims were arriving in Jerusalem—singlehanded Jesus cleared the temple of commerce and restored it for its proper purpose. Many must have wondered, “Who is this man; could he be “the Coming One” the Baptizer speaks about? Could this have anything to do with Malachi’s prophecy?”
“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Malachi 3)
Later they recognized it as the action of a zealot. A zealot was someone who got so burned up about God’s honour that he took action. Phineas, in the days of the wilderness wanderings, was the original zealot. When he saw an Israelite man bring a Moabite woman to his tent, he put a spear through the both of them. The tradition is alive and well in Islam even today. But no one was hurt on this occasion in the temple. If they had been, you can be sure it would have been brought against him at his trial two years later. And Pilate—he surely received a full report of the incident—would never have tried to release him, if there had been serious violence. It is an interesting touch that when Jesus came to the dove sellers, he simply told them to get them away: “Take these things out of here! Do not make my Father’s house a house of trade!”
The incident made big news in Jerusalem and brought Jesus to the public eye. It gained him popularity with those who were resentful of the High Priest and his family. John tells us that many believed in him, though as we will see next week, Jesus didn’t give much for their loyalty.
It explains the question that is put to him by the authorities:
What sign do you show us that you do these things?
They acknowledge that what he did could have been justified—if he really came from God. So, “Do a miracle and prove it to us!” He replied with a riddle:
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it!
They take him literally and think he is challenging them to destroy what is all around them. That is crazy.
For forty-six years this temple has been under construction, and you—you will raise it in three days?
You can hear the laughter. Most of Jerusalem had a laugh when they heard the story. Two years later at his trial someone came forward with an accusation: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this man-made temple and build another not made with hands.’” (Mark 14) True or false? The court couldn’t find two witnesses to agree on what exactly he had said, so it was dropped. What Jesus Actuallyb said was, “Destroy this temple—you destroy this temple—and in three days I will raise it.” And perhaps, by their actions, that is exactly what they were doing: turning God’s House into a market. “You have made it a den of thieves,” Jesus said at another time. Later, when a wave of anti-Gentile feeling ran through the country, sacrifices for the emperor were stopped. It triggered the war between the Romans and the Jews. The final desecration was when the revolutionary party who called themselves the Zealots seized the temple sanctuary and made it their headquarters. Josephus tells us that a voice was heard in the Holy Place of the temple saying, “We are leaving.” When Jerusalem fell after a grueling five-year war, General Titus ordered the Temple to be burned, and the stones pulled down to ground-level. The impossible happened, as Jesus said it would. The procession through Rome with the giant seven-branched candle stick is carved on the Arch of Titus, and can still to be seen today. The Temple has never been rebuilt.
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it.
What did Jesus mean? John says that the temple Jesus spoke of was his body. Could that have been his meaning? The Temple was the God-given symbol of his presence with his people. But John says the Word, who is God, “became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Not a symbol, but the real thing! The word translated “dwelt” means to pitch a tent. It is the word used of the Tent of Meeting, or Tabernacle Israel had in the wilderness, where from time to time God’s shekinah presence became visible. The Tabernacle grew into the Temple. But, as I said, it was symbolic—made with human hands, even the hands of a pagan king like Herod. But now God has come in person to dwell amongst his people. Jesus’ words have a double meaning and are deeply ironic: “Destroy this temple—go on destroying the man-made temple, as you are doing, and I will build another, not made with hands,” but also, “Destroy this body of mine—and in three days I will raise it.” No one understood his meaning, but after his death and resurrection, his disciples remembered what he had said and believed in him.
Was Jesus just a clever fellow who enjoyed riddles, who joked with the Jews about destroying their own temple, but whose impossible prediction about its destruction coincidentally came true, and whose equally impossible prediction that he would rise from the dead also came true? You can believe that if you like. But it seems more likely that he was knowingly making history. And that is something only God can do. We should believe in him.
We could end it there, but since we are exploring double meanings, let us look at a possible third meaning.
The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
The temple was the symbolic dwelling place of God, but God came to live with his people in a human person, the Messiah, his Son. God is now dwelling with his people in the person of the resurrected Jesus, who will soon come from heaven, and will be the presence of God in our world for ever. But the New Testament also teaches that God dwells in the hearts of his people. When Jesus died the great curtain which closed off the Holy of Holies of God’s presence was torn in two, showing that the way is now open for humans to be reconciled to him. Jesus’ death atoned for sin. God forgives all who believe in his Son. He also gives us his Holy Spirit, God himself dwells inside of us. So, the New Testament teaches that we become a temple of the Holy Spirit, and also that the community of God’s people, the Church, is the temple made without hands, which will be the dwelling place of God for ever. Could Jesus have also been thinking of this, when he said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it”? I think so. Ezekiel prophesied in the days when Solomon’s temple was desecrated and destroyed. God showed him a plan of a new temple in which his glory would dwell forever. At one point in his vision Ezekiel sees water running down the steps of this temple, down into the Kidron Valley, flowing east getting deeper and deeper all the way until it flows into the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea becomes fresh. It is a clue that this temple of the new age is no ordinary stone and timber construction. Jesus stood in the Temple on a later visit and declared, “Whoever believes in me, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.” He spoke of the Holy Spirit; he knew that the temple of the new age would be a kingdom of people each with God in his or her heart.
Now that our border is about to be opened you may want to visit the place where Jesus spoke those words, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it.” Look around at the ruins, and say to yourself, “This was great, but Jesus said he would do something far more wonderful.” The final vision of the Bible is of a new heaven and a new earth, and a new Jerusalem which has no temple, “because its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb;” and the river of life flows from the throne of God:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away … And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Revelation 21)