Zeal for My Father's House

The crash of a table hitting stone. Coins spinning and rolling across the pavement. Sheep scattering, cattle lowing, doves fluttering in their cages. And one voice, clear above the noise. “Get these out of here!”

It is Passover, and Jesus has come up to Jerusalem with the crowds of pilgrims. John tells this story near the start of Jesus' ministry. Matthew, Mark and Luke describe a temple clearing in his last week, and Christians have long discussed whether these are one event or two. Either way, the scene is the same. Jesus walks into the temple, the house where God's people come to pray and worship. But the great outer courtyard sounds more like a market. Traders are selling cattle, sheep and doves for the sacrifices. Money changers sit at their tables, swapping coins.

Jesus takes some cords and twists them together into a whip. Then he drives the sheep and the cattle out of the temple courts, and everyone selling them goes too, hurrying after the animals in the noise and dust. He strides to the money changers' tables, tips their coins onto the ground, and turns the tables over. To the people selling doves he says, “Take these things away! Stop making my Father's house a house of trade!”

His disciples are watching too. Some of them may be shocked. But John tells us that a verse from the Psalms came into their minds, words written long before by someone who loved God's house. “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Zeal means a burning, passionate love. Jesus cares about his Father's house so deeply that he cannot stand by while it is turned into a marketplace. He calls God my Father. Not just our God, or the God of Israel. My Father. And this is his Father's house.

The temple leaders hurry over. They want to know what right he has to do this. “What sign can you show us,” they demand, “to prove your authority?” Jesus gives them an answer they don't expect. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They stare at him. “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,” they say, “and you will raise it up in three days?” They look up at the great stone walls and think he must be talking nonsense.

But John lets us in on the secret. Jesus wasn't talking about the stone building. He was speaking about the temple of his body. Nobody understood it then, not even his disciples. It was only much later, after Jesus was raised from the dead, that they remembered what he had said that day. And John says that then, they believed the Scripture and the words Jesus had spoken. Sometimes the meaning of what Jesus says only becomes clear afterwards.

Those forty-six years were real. The temple in Jesus' day had been rebuilt and enlarged by King Herod the Great. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century, says Herod began the work in the eighteenth year of his reign, around 20 or 19 BC. Count forward forty-six years and you land in the late 20s AD, just when Jesus' ministry began. And the work wasn't finished then. Building carried on for decades more. The animal sellers were there for a reason too: the law allowed pilgrims who lived far away to buy what they needed for sacrifice once they arrived.

Zeal for My Father's House. You'll find it in John chapter 2, verses 13 to 22. Jesus cleared a space so people could meet with God. So here's the question to carry with you. What clutter in your life gets in the way of meeting with God?