25 Purging the Perverted Temple (21:12-17)
And Jesus entered the temple and cast out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a robbers’ den.” And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that He had done, and the children who were crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became indignant, and said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself?” And He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and lodged there. (21:12-17)
The triumphal entry on Monday had begun outside Jerusalem’s East Gate, where a multitude followed Jesus into the city and another large group came out of the city to meet Him and then led the way before Him, spreading clothes and palm branches in the road as they went (vv. 8-9; cf. John 12:12-13). “He entered Jerusalem and came into the temple,” Mark tells us; “and after looking all around, He departed for Bethany with the twelve, since it was already late” (Mark 11:11). On Tuesday morning, after spending Monday night in Bethany, He went back into Jerusalem.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, at Passover time the city of Jerusalem swelled to perhaps four or five times its normal size because of the Jewish pilgrims who came from all over the known world to celebrate this great feast. Tradition had long dictated that Passover could be celebrated properly only in Jerusalem. But because the city could not accommodate the increased multitudes that came for that occasion, the religious leaders declared a special edict each year that temporarily extended the city boundaries to include a sizable area outside the walls, including several small villages such as Bethphage and Bethany. Like many other visitors, Jesus and His disciples spent the day within the walled city proper but spent the night in a nearby community. Those who could not find rental lodging and who had no friends living in the area often camped in the open air.
While they were in Jerusalem, many Jews went to the Temple to pray, to offer sacrifices, to perform rites of ritual cleaning and purification, and to present offerings in the large trumpet-shaped receptacles located in the Court of the Women.
But as Jesus came into the Temple on this Monday of Passover week, He came for a unique purpose: to give further demonstration of His messianic credentials. To the thousands of celebrants, to the religious leaders, and most specifically to the chief priests and scribes (see Matt. 20:18; 21:15), He again offered clear testimony to the nature of His kingliness and of His kingdom.
From the first dramatic demonstrations of His miracle-working power, the crowds had wanted to take Him by force and make Him king (John 6:15). Their intent, of course, was for Him to be a king of their own liking who would fulfill their aspirations of deliverance from the yoke of Rome. But the Lord consistently refused to be that kind of king and perform that kind of deliverance. His coronation processional into Jerusalem the day before was marked by simplicity rather than pomp and by humility rather than splendor. He was not accompanied by influential dignitaries and a powerful army but by unarmed, powerless nobodies. And as He had predicted (20:18-19) and would soon demonstrate, He had come not to reign but to die, not to be crowned but to be crucified, and not for the purpose of delivering Israel from the power of Rome but of delivering men from all nations from the power of sin.
But Jesus now gave a demonstration of kingliness that was in marked contrast to His humble inauguration the previous day.
HE SHOWED HE WAS ON A DIVINE MISSION
And Jesus entered the temple (21:12a)
Some ancient manuscripts of Matthew contain the words “of God” after the temple, and that reading would seem to be authentic. As R. C. H. Lenski has commented, “The temple of God is never used in the New Testament as a phrase anywhere but here, so it seems unlikely that some scribe would put it in. But if you understand what Jesus is about to do, it makes all the sense in the world that [Matthew] would have affirmed that this was the temple of God when he is about to describe the utter ungodliness of its activities.” Still, the phrase “of God” adds nothing to the basic teaching of the passage, because the temple in Jerusalem obviously belonged to the God of the Jews. But those two words do serve to sharpen the focus and intensify the emphasis, by highlighting the fact that Jesus was dealing with the holy earthly symbol of the presence of His heavenly Father.
If Jesus had been the military Messiah the people wanted, He would have brought an army into Jerusalem and attacked the main Roman garrison at Fort Antonius. Instead, alone and weaponless, He attacked a group of His fellow countrymen who were profaning the temple. The supreme issue for Jesus was not Rome’s army but God’s Temple. The Messiah did not come as a military, economic, political, or social savior from injustice and oppression but as a spiritual Savior from sin and death. At His second coming He will indeed make right the injustices and inequities that plague mankind. But before He comes again as King of kings and Lord of lords to establish His glorious millennial kingdom and to resolve all the conflicts of fallen mankind, He first had to come as Savior to establish His spiritual kingdom within those who trust in Him.
Jesus began His ministry at a Passover just as He now ended it at a Passover. Just as at the present time, “He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers seated.” And just as He was about to do again, He had done before, when He “drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, ‘Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a house of merchandise’” (John 2:14-16).
During the hidden years of His adolescence and young adulthood, and certainly during His ministry, Jesus had seen much social injustice, much economic inequity, much deprivation and poverty, and much oppression and cruelty by the Romans. But His mission never focused on those things, because they are not man’s greatest problems. It was the far more severe problem of sin that Jesus had come to conquer. Men’s problem with God is infinitely greater than their problems with other men. They cannot, in fact, solve their problems with each other until their problem with Him is solved through faith and obedience.
It was in the Temple erected in His own name and by the people He had chosen for Himself that the Lord was most offended and denied. It was therefore in His own house that cleansing began. As long as things were wrong with Israel’s worship, things could not be right in the nation. Worship is always the focal point. The great problem with society is not injustice, inequity, crime, or even immorality—pervasive and destructive as those evils might be. Society’s evil of evils has always been its abandonment of God. And it is as true today as it was in ancient Israel that the people of God must themselves be revived and renewed before they can be His instruments for changing the world around them.
Jesus had cleansed the Temple three years earlier, yet it was now probably more profane and corrupted than ever. Why, then, would He again bother to make this seemingly futile gesture? He knew that His act of cleansing would be temporary and would not change the hearts of the religious leaders. But He was compelled to make that clear testimony to God’s holiness and to God’s judgment against desecration and false religion.
God had repeatedly sent prophets to warn His people of their idolatry and other sins and to call them back to Himself. Sometimes there would be reform, but the reform almost invariably would degenerate into even worse idolatry than before. Yet He sent His prophets again and again to declare His truth, His holiness, and His judgment. The Lord never stops declaring His will to His people, no matter how often or how wickedly they reject it. Revealed truth that does not result in repentance becomes the source of greater condemnation.
As Jesus entered the temple, it was doubtlessly filled with thousands of Jewish worshipers, milling about the outer Court of the Gentiles, where everyone was allowed to enter. Perhaps the Jewish leaders reasoned that if Gentiles could be there so could anything else. Within the past several decades the area had come to be used as a religious marketplace, operated under the auspices of the high priest, Annas. He was a corrupt and vile man, who saw the Temple and his exalted position only as means to personal power and wealth. The business enterprises in the Court of the Gentiles came to be known as the “Bazaar of Annas,” whose chief priests and other associates oversaw the Temple franchises. Merchants would buy rights to a concession for selling sacrificial animals, wine, oil, or salt, or for exchanging money into the proper currency and denominations used in Temple offerings. In addition to the franchise fees the operators would often be required to pay a certain percentage of their profits to Annas.
According to levitical law, any animal approved by the priests could be offered in the Temple. But the chief priests made certain that animals not bought in one of their franchises would be judged unacceptable, giving their concessionaires the de facto right to provide all the animals. According to the Jewish-Christian historian Alfred Edersheim, a person would often have to pay as much as ten times what an animal normally cost. As if that extortion were not enough, those who needed to have foreign currency exchanged or who had to have their money converted into the exact amount for an offering were charged a twenty-five percent fee. Jesus was therefore speaking quite literally when He called the Temple marketplace “a robbers’ den” (v. 13).
When He was compelled to cleanse His Father’s house of sacrilege, Christ demonstrated He was on a divine mission for His heavenly Father.
HE DEMONSTRATED DIVINE AUTHORITY
and cast out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who were selling doves. (21:12b)
The temple was the supreme place of Jewish worship, and the high priest and chief priests were therefore the most powerful religious leaders in Israel. Within the confines of the Temple, the guards of the high priest had extraordinary power. Because Jewish law required death for any non-Jew who went further into the Temple than the Court of the Gentiles, the Romans had given approval for the Temple guards to slay an offender on the spot.
Yet Jesus confronted the high priest, the chief priests, the Temple guards, and the Temple merchants with impunity. They were about to meet someone over whom they had absolutely no power. Although many of those men would later be instrumental in Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion, they were able to exert that power only by the Father’s allowance. Like Pilate, they had no authority over Jesus that had not “been given . . . from above” (John 19:11). As Jesus had declared to the unbelieving Pharisees on an earlier occasion in Jerusalem, He alone had power over His life. “For this reason the Father loves Me,” He said, “because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:17-18).
In a few days Jesus would submit Himself into the hands of the Jewish religious leaders for them to do with as they pleased. But on this occasion they were powerless to prevent Him from making a final demonstration of His divine authority. Without warning and without resistance, Jesus cast out both the merchants and their customers and overturned the tables of the moneychangers. Before the thousands of worshipers, the bewildered merchants, and the priests who happened to be present, Jesus made a shambles of the bazaar and declared the shame of those who profited from it. The whole arena was in confusion and disarray, with animals running loose, doves flying around, and money of all kinds rolling across the courtyard. But at that time the merchants, moneychangers, and priests did not and could not raise a hand or even a voice against Him, anymore than the lions could bite the prophet Daniel.
There were also human reasons why Jesus was not resisted. The priests and other religious leaders were fearful of the Jewish populace, many of whom had just proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah (see Luke 19:48). The merchants were also afraid of the people, whom they had cheated and extorted for so many years. Historical records reveal that several decades later the people did indeed riot against their mercenary Temple exploiters. But those reasons fall short of fully explaining what happened to those who were desecrating the Temple. They were not merely intimidated but were powerless and speechless before the authority of this Galilean Teacher whom they despised and refused to recognize as the Messiah.
Mark reports that Jesus was in such powerful control that He would not even “permit anyone to carry goods through the temple” (Mark 11:16). Because the Temple was near the East Gate, the Court of the Gentiles was often used as a thoroughfare by those travelling to or from the southwest side of the city. Jesus also put an immediate halt to that contempt for the sanctity of God’s house. The implication seems to be that He made the people drop what they were carrying and leave empty-handed. Here, too, we see no hint of resistance or opposition. Jesus’ commanding presence was such that it instilled fear and submission in every person there, regardless of what they thought of Him or of what He was doing.
Jesus came to earth in humiliation as the incarnate Son of God, but on this occasion, as on several others, He forcefully manifested divine hatred against sin, especially sin that profanes God’s name and sullies His holiness. By this mighty unresistable display of power He made the Temple symbolically clean. With the great clutter of animals, tables, chairs, money, and frightened people, it was far from tidy; but it was for a brief time cleansed of overt moral defilement.
It was in part out of Martin Luther’s great hatred of indulgences, the supposed buying of God’s grace for money, that the Protestant Reformation was born. Believers today should cry out as Luther did for Christ to cleanse the church of its many modern defilements, including making merchandise of the gospel. Judgment still must “begin with the household of God” (1 Pet. 4:17).
HE REVEALED COMMITMENT TO DIVINE SCRIPTURE
And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a robbers’ den.” (21:13)
As He often did, Jesus vindicated what He was doing by appealing to the Old Testament, here quoting from Isaiah 56:7, “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” Following the full Isaiah text, Mark’s quotation includes the phrase “for all the nations” (Mark 11:17). Matthew omits those words probably because he was writing primarily to Jews. But the major point in both in both accounts is that Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple was consistent with the Word of God.
The Temple was to be a place of worship, quiet meditation, contemplation, praise, and devotion, a place where God’s people could draw close to Him in worship, sacrifice, and offerings and could seek His will and blessing. It was not meant to be a combination marketplace, stockyard, and bank, where hucksters and charlatans carried on their greedy enterprises under the guise of serving and worshiping the Lord.
At the dedication of the Temple of his day, Solomon prayed, “O Lord my God, . . . listen to the cry and to the prayer which Thy servant prays before Thee today; that Thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, toward the place of which Thou hast said, ‘My name shall be there,’ to listen to the prayer which Thy servant shall pray toward this place. And listen to the supplication of Thy servant and of Thy people Israel, when they pray toward this place; hear Thou in heaven Thy dwelling place;hear and forgive” (1 Kings 8:28-30).
It was to the Tabernacle, which preceded the Temple as Israel’s central place of worship, that Hannah went when she was grieving bitterly over her childlessness. In that holy place the Lord graciously granted her request for a son, whose name was Samuel and who became one of God’s choice servants (1 Sam. 1:9-20). David declared, “One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to meditate in His temple” (Ps. 27:4).
In charging that the chief priests and their cohorts had made the Temple into a robbers’ den, Jesus again quoted from Scripture, this time from Jeremiah 7:11. Instead of being a place where God’s faithful people could come and worship unmolested and protected, the Temple had become a place where they were extorted and their extortioners were protected. Those religiously-connected thieves found refuge in the Temple as highwaymen found refuge in a robbers’ den. But unlike normal thieves, their robbery was public, and they stole and took refuge in the same place. The sanctuary of God had become a sanctuary for robbers.
HE MANIFESTED DIVINE COMPASSION AND POWER
And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. (21:14)
Fearful of Jesus, and unable to resist Him, the priests, merchants, moneychangers, sacrifice-buyers, and travelers using the Court of the Gentiles as a short cut through the city apparently had all dispersed. But the blind and the lame, though surely awed by Jesus, were not afraid of Him. Even immediately after His dramatic display of divine indignation, those needy souls correctly sensed that the Lord’s fury was in no way directed at them. Just as the wicked and unrepentant can expect God’s anger, those who humbly seek for His truth and His help can expect His compassion.
The diseased and the crippled, most of whom were necessarily beggars, continually gathered at the Temple, hoping at the least for the gift of a few denarii and at the most for a miracle of healing. They were despised and ignored by most of their countrymen, in great part because they were considered to be suffering as the direct result of sins either they or their parents had committed (see John 9:2). The selfish leaders of the Temple had little compassion for them (see Matt. 23:4).
Had it not been for the countless thousands of sick, diseased, blind, deaf, and other suffering people in Palestine, both Jesus’ great compassion and His great power of healing would be unknown to us. Compared with the length of eternity, all earthly afflictions are temporary. But in this life they are very real and very trying, and the Lord does not minimize them. It was to alleviate suffering as well as to demonstrate His divine power and authority that Jesus compassionately healed those who came to Him and never turned them away or chided them.
Jesus’ compassion was a supreme credential of His divine kingship, not only because of the power it demonstrated but because of the gracious love it demonstrated that is so characteristic of God but so uncharacteristic of fallen man. When John the Baptist was in prison and had doubts about Jesus’ messiahship, Jesus told John’s disciples, “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt. 11:4-5).
Believers know that Jesus Christ some day is going to come to this world in devastating judgment, that all judgment has been given to Him by the Father, and that He alone holds the keys to death and hell. They know He controls the destiny of every soul, and that He has the sovereign and just right to send unbelieving men and women to hell forever. But, like the blind and the lame who came to Jesus in the Temple, Christians come to the Lord with awe but also with perfect confidence, knowing that He will not turn them away or condemn them. They know He loves His children and will never do them harm but always do them good, even when they experience that good through His hand of discipline (Heb. 12:6).
Jesus’ majestic display of divine compassion was accompanied by a mighty expression of divine power. No sooner had the blind and the lame approached Him for help than He healed them. Only God can restore sight to eyes totally destroyed by disease, as many blind eyes were in that day. And only God can replace limbs that are shattered or diseased beyond repair or are even missing.
HE ACCEPTED DIVINE WORSHIP AND HUMAN REJECTION
But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that He had done, and the children who were crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became indignant, and said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself’?” And He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and lodged there. (21:15-17)
Along with everyone else present on that occasion, the ungodly chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that Jesus had done. They heard the children who were crying out in the temple saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” just as their parents had done the day before (v. 9). They well knew that Son of David was a messianic title and that the Messiah would perform such miracles and wonders as Jesus had been performing. But their reaction was far different from that of the children and adults who praised and glorified Jesus.
Children is literally “boys” and probably refers to the many young teenaged boys who had passed their bar mitzvahs and had come to Jerusalem to celebrate their first Passover as a man, just as Jesus Himself had done many years earlier (Luke 2:41-42).
But instead of joining in the worship of the Messiah, the Temple leaders became indignant. The term behind indignant carries the idea of fury and wrath. To those men, Jesus’ healing of the blind and lame, though incontestably amazing, was repugnant. The Pharisees had charged Jesus with casting out demons by the power of “Beelzebub the ruler of the demons” (Matt. 12:24). The chief priests and the scribes now perhaps thought the same thing about His healing. Not only did He oppose them as the rulers of the Temple, but in their eyes He actually worked against God by arbitrarily healing those they thought were being divinely punished for their sins.
Like the Pharisees, the chief priests and the scribes felt so self-righteously superior to the common man, especially to the afflicted and poor who were thought to deserve their fate, that witnessing no amount of suffering could elicit compassion in them. And they were so adamant in their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah that no amount of evidence could elicit belief in them.
Instead of recognizing their authority, Jesus condemned their self-righteousness. Instead of praising their holiness, He condemned their hypocrisy. Instead of acknowledging their religious works as pleasing to god, He condemned them as offensive to God and worthless. Consequently, those men refused to recognize Jesus even as a legitimate rabbi, much less as the promised Son of David. What was perfectly clear to most of the common Jewish people in Jerusalem was perfect nonsense to the erudite and self-satisfied Temple elite.
They therefore said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?” They said, in effect, “Don’t You realize that these children, like the rabble yesterday, are calling You the Messiah? Why don’t You stop them? How can You stand there accepting acclaim that belongs only to God? How can You tolerate such blasphemy?” The true problem, of course, was that they could not tolerate Jesus’ compassionate godliness, because it was a scathing indictment of their hardened ungodliness.
Letting His accusers know that He was not oblivious to what was going on, Jesus first replied simply Yes. He was fully aware of what was being said, and He was fully aware of its meaning and significance. “But,” He went on to ask the learned men, “have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself’?” As he did on numerous occasions, Jesus nettled the Jewish leaders by quoting the Old Testament against them, the accepted experts in Scripture.
Jesus was quoting from Psalm 8:2, and the two Hebrew words for infants and nursing babes refer to children under three years, the age at which Jewish children were normally weaned. As already noted, the children who hailed Jesus in the Temple were far past the age for weaning. Jesus’ point was that if even tiny infants and nursing babes would be prepared by the Lord to give praise to Himself, how much more could older children be expected to praise Him? Christ will be praised, and if men will not praise Him, He had declared to the Pharisees, “The stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40).
Even Jesus’ rejection by the chief priests and scribes and His willing acceptance of that rejection demonstrated His divine kingship. God knew that wicked mankind would reject His Son, and it was integral to the divine plan that the Messiah would be “despised and forsaken of men” (Isa. 53:3). At any time Christ could have thwarted the evil men who sought to kill Him. When He was being arrested in the Garden a few nights later, He explained to Peter, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matt. 26:53).
In the simple but haunting words He left them there is a volume of truth. Jesus left the unbelieving priests and scribes because they would not come to Him. They challenged Him again the next day, asking, “By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” He responded by asking them, “‘The baptism of John was from what source, from heaven or from men?’ And they began reasoning among themselves, saying, If we say, “From heaven,” He will say to us, “Then why did you not believe him?” But if we say, “From men,” we fear the multitude; for they all hold John to be a prophet.’ And answering Jesus, they said, ‘We do not know.’ He also said to them, ‘Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things’” (Matt. 21:23-27).
Instead of attacking Rome, Jesus attacked Judaism. Instead of being a conqueror, He was a confronter. Instead of promoting revolution, He preached righteousness. And instead of clearing out the enemy without, He cleaned out the enemy within.
This was not the kind of Messiah Judaism was looking for then or is looking for today. The majority of Jews, religious or irreligious, have no interest in the Son of righteousness. Those who look for a Messiah at all are looking for the same kind their forefathers looked for in Jesus’ day. They are still looking for a military, political, and economic savior who will change the world in their behalf but who will not change them.
Jesus will not remain where He is unwanted. Although every man is accountable to God, He forces Himself on no one. And although salvation is first of all by God’s sovereign initiative and power, no person is saved unwillingly. Because the unbelieving chief priests and scribes would not receive Him, He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and lodged there, to be with His dear friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and the other faithful disciples who trusted in and loved Him.