Cleansing the Temple

The Eschatology of John Part 8: John 2

If we needed a harmonized account of the life of Jesus, God would have given us one gospel account, not four.

Different Accounts, One Gospel

A few years ago, I was listening to a debate between James White and John Dominic Crossan on Scripture. Both men are Christians, but both men have very different takes on how the Bible is inspired and what makes the Bible “true.” In the debate, I thought Crossan made a good point. White kept using the expression “the gospels,” which is an expression I regularly used. In response to this, Crossan spoke up and said something like “there are not multiple gospels; there are multiple accounts of the one gospel.”

Undoubtedly, White believes this, but I appreciated the precision of Corssan’s language and have sought to adopt it in my own writings and preaching, but I do slip up from time to time.

I say all of this because the passage we will be looking at today has confused Bible readers for quite sometime. At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in John’s gospel, Jesus cleansed the temple, but in the synoptic gospels, Jesus cleanses the temple right before his death. Which one got it “right”? Did Jesus cleanse the temple twice? No gospel account contains two temple cleansings, so this position seems a little odd.

I agree with Borchert who argued that our problem with this passages lies within our expectations for how the Bible actually works. I’ll let him take it from here:

Given this dilemma, then, readers of John need to consider that the problem may be one of perspective and false expectation. Why should John have to write his Gospel as a modern newspaper reporter? His purpose was not to report but to proclaim and persuade (20:30–31). He was a great inspired artist and theologian who organized his episodes from the life of Jesus in such a way as to bring people to faith in Jesus as the Son of God. What is more, the evangelist viewed the story of Jesus in its entirety from a postresurrection perspective. The evangelist even told us what he was doing in this very pericope (2:22). At the time of writing, Jesus was not then living on earth and facing death; he was reigning in power with God.¹ (emphasis mine—bold)

I believe our custom of “harmonizing” the gospel accounts has given us false expectations for how they are to behave. John’s account of the cleansing of the temple is placed at the beginning of the gospel to put the theme of “covenant eschatology” at the forefront of our mind. As we read John’s account of the gospel, we need to remember that everything he talks about is related to the fall of the temple and the construction of a new kind of temple.

John isn’t presenting a secret first cleaning of the temple that the other writers are unaware of, nor is he attempting to correct a differing chronology of Jesus’s life and ministry. He is simply framing his gospel in terms of the role of Christ in bringing about a new creation.

Note: I don’t think holding one opinion or another ultimately matters. Matthew and Luke contain different orderings of the temptations in the wilderness, and John includes the teaching of Jesus that most resembles the eucharistic sayings outside of a last supper context. At the same time, I empathize with those who hold to two temple cleansings even if I do not feel threatened by the rearrangement.

The connection between new creation and a new temple may seem odd, but check out this passage from Hebrews before we continue:

But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the holy place, not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. Hebrews 9:11–12

You might also consider Revelation 21-22 and how Jesus is pictured as the new temple in the new heavens and earth in which the saints dwell and worship God:

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. Revelation 21:22

Let’s jump right into John 2:13-22.

Destroy This Temple (John 2:13-22)

Jesus Made a Whip?

As Passover drew near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. There he found people selling livestock for sacrifices in the temple. He also found money changers seated at their tables. Moses prescribed Passover as a way for his people to remember their former bondage in Egypt and how God answered their cries for freedom. This holiday had been transformed into an opportunity for some salesmen to take advantage of the weary pilgrims.

Imagine that you’ve just arrived in Jerusalem, and before you find a place to stay, you head to the temple to pray, which is something you’ve been thinking about doing since the last time you were here. As you approach that part of the city you hear a stampede, you see a cloud of dust, and you make out shapes of cattle, sheep, and men all fleeing in the same direction. You hear the shouts of the men as they run after the animals, screaming over their shoulders as they go.

Through the dust you hear coins cascading to the floor and several tables being flipped over. A coin rolls past your foot.

As the dust clears, you see a man standing there with a crude whip next to his feet. He turns to the people selling doves and says, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”

The leaders in the temple run over to him, some with hands on head and others waving their arms frantically. “What sign can you show us for doing this?”

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

I’ve tried to follow the text as closely as possible in recreating this narrative for you from the perspective of a bystander. I’ve actually had to rewrite parts of it a few times as my preconceived ideas about the text begin to fall away as I picture this scene in my head.

First, notice that Jesus doesn’t use his whip to run the money changers, the ones selling doves, or the doves out of the temple. He poured out their money and flipped over the tables of the money changers after he drove out the livestock. Only then does he turn and speak to the ones selling doves.

In my mind’s recounting of this story, I always picture Jesus using the whip on everyone, man and beast, but John’s detailed account presents a different story. To be honest with you, this story has been challenging to me in light of Jesus’s nonviolent teaching and practice. Had he whipped the ones selling livestock, then there would have been a reason to persecute him as “a thief, a criminal, or a mischief maker” (1 Peter 4:15).

But upon closer inspection, I have to agree with the Ernst Haenchen who says, “On this view, Jesus—and this is important—does not attack the money changers with his whip (as some artists and also commentators have represented it), but put a stop only to the exchange of money.”²

Why do you think Jesus drove out the livestock but not the doves? I think there are two possible reasons: (1) Jesus ins’t a trouble maker or a thief; had he driven out the doves with a whip, he could have killed them or made it impossible for the merchants to recover their property, and (2) the doves were intended for the poorest among the people, and Jesus always demonstrates great care for the less fortunate (cf. Leviticus 5:7).³

Zeal for God’s House

In response to Jesus’s actions, a psalm came to the disciples’ mind:

It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me. Psalm 69:9

According to Logos Bible Software’s New Testament Use of the Old Testament tool, Psalm 69 is cited, echoed, or alluded to three times. Compare Psalm 69:4 with John 15:25, Psalm 69:9 with John 2:17, and Psalm 69:21 with John 19:29.

Each of these connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament take place in a Passover context, but, to be fair, much of John does. I think the greater point, though, is that John saw this psalm of a righteous person suffering as a prophecy or a type of Jesus. Craig Keener said,

The disciples recall Psalm 69:9, a psalm of a righteous sufferer. Psalm 69:21 speaks of vinegar being given him to drink (cf. Jn 19:29). In the context of John, Jesus’ zeal “consumes” him by bringing about his death for the world (cf. 6:51).⁴

The temple was holy and good, and Jesus had great respect for it because of what it represented to the people. If you call something the house of God, you better treat it as such. Later Jesus would teach that the true presence of God could be accessed anywhere at anytime (cf. John 4:21). This shift wasn’t because the temple had lost value; it’s because it was never meant to be the only Way to the Father; Jesus is that Way and Jesus is that temple.

The universal needs a particular, and the tabernacle was literally designed by God to be a symbol of cosmic beauty to remind the people that “heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; so what kind of house could you build for me, what sort of place for me to rest…” (Isaiah 66:1). When the particular is universalized, though, people lose sight of the greater message.

If we don’t understand this and put all of our trust into the particular, then we won’t be able to exist within the universal without the outward symbol. Consider, for instance, the Sunday worship assembly. This gathering of the saints is supposed to be a weekly reminder that we are always worshipping, that God is always with us. When it’s seen as a divine mandate with accompanying ritualistic acts which must be performed weekly, though, it makes sense why many couldn’t cope with churches shutting their doors during the outbreak of COVID.

Of course, this wording is confusing because the church cannot close its doors. The gates of the new Jerusalem are always open, and when we conflate the Sunday assembly or, even worse, the building we meet in with “the church,” then we end up having zeal for the wrong house!

God is always with us. Worship is always in session. We dwell in the most holy place. We pray without ceasing. We are priests in the kingdom of God.

Understanding this doesn't eliminate the purpose or usefulness of Sunday congregational worship; instead it magnifies its importance by putting it in its proper place.

Which brings us to one more point of application before we continue with our study: how have we turned God’s house into a marketplace. We may not be setting up tables to sell communion bread and wine in the foyer, but are we selling ourselves to consumer-oriented worship? Are we selling ourselves to gods of comfort? Are we selling ourselves to the gods of progress? Are we selling ourselves to the gods of tradition? of conservatism? of liberalism? of socially acceptable Jesus? of socially radical Jesus?

Often these latter expressions and labels are ways of making God in our image and according to our personal agendas.

May the zeal for God’s house consume us.

The Temple of His Body

Herod’s Temple

After Jesus’s demonstration, the Jewish leaders wanted to know if Jesus could perform a sign that would confirm Jesus had the authority to take such radical action. Jesus’s response sets the stage for the rest of John’s gospel: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

Let’s talk about the expression “the Jews” for a moment. John uses this expression throughout his gospel to refer to the Jewish leaders (cf. Matthew 21:23). Since the phrase “the Jews” has been used in antisemitic contexts, I have avoided using it thus far and will continue to avoid using it in future articles. John, of course, was Jewish, just as almost every other character in these earliest stories was Jewish. So it is obvious that not all of “the Jews” came up to Jesus in this story; it was specifically the leaders. I have no animosity towards all Jewish people of any age, and I have the same opinion of the Jewish leaders as Jesus did when, with tear filled eyes, he expressed his desire to gather them under his wings (Luke 19:41-44).

In repose to Jesus’s challenge to the people to “destroy this temple” so that Jesus may rebuild it, the people said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”

Babylon destroyed the original temple in 587/6 BC. After seventy years of captivity, the temple was rebuilt under Zerubbabel in 518/7 BC. The Lexham Bible dictionary says, “Although the temple was fitted with implements restored after Nebuchadnezzar’s plundering (Ezra 1:5–11), it likely did not reflect its original glory and elaborate design.”⁵ Haggai 2:3 similarly states, “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?”

Thus, several figures desired to renovate the temple to bring it to its former glory; Herod was the most successful of these. Herod began his work around 20 BC, a work that wasn’t finished until AD 63.

Jesus’s Intended Meaning

This misunderstanding of Jesus’s words marks the first of several similar misunderstandings in John. According to my count, there are seven instances of these misunderstandings:

1. How could you possibly rebuild this temple in three days? John 2:19-22

2. How can one be born when he is old? John 3:1-8

3. How can you give me water when you don’t have a bucket? John 4:7-14

4. How can you eat when you don’t have food? John 4:31-38

5. How can he say “I have come down from heaven” when we know his parents and how can he give us his flesh to eat? John 6:26-65

6. How can we be made free when we’ve never been subject to anyone? John 8:12-59

7. How does Lazarus’s last day resurrection help me here and now when my brother would have lived had you been here? John 11:1-27

These misunderstandings are all understandable, of course. How else would one react to Jesus saying “destroy this temple” when the conversation was taking place in the temple?

When Jesus speaks in this way, it is not to create confusion for the purpose of creating confusion; he was intending to create confusion to challenge people’s perceptions of God and how the kingdom works. These radical statements invited Jesus’s audience into a deeper understanding; of course, as readers of John, we are invited on this journey as well.

According to John, Jesus was “speaking of the temple of his body” (John 2:21). This is something even the disciples only remembered in retrospect, and, even then, probably only with the help of the Spirit.

By speaking this way, Jesus is working on several levels here.

First, we might just take this at face value: Jesus is predicting his death and resurrection.

Next, we can go a little deeper and consider that the “third day” imagery could come from Hosea 6:2. This connection may seem odd, but there are several times when New Testament authors cite passages that, in their original contexts, were about Israel to talk about Jesus. Jesus represented Israel as the fulfillment of the seed promise and as her king. What is true of Jesus is true for Israel, and what was true of Israel was true for Jesus; he took on her exile, her predicament, and even her rejection in order that he might redeem her and lead her into a new covenant relationship as his bride.

Finally, we must also consider that this confusion is intended by Jesus and by John in order to conflate the physical temple and the body of Christ. By placing the temple cleansing at the beginning of his gospel, John wants us to think of all of his gospel as reveling the true nature of the temple of God.

In John 14, for instance, when Jesus says, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places…” (mansions—KJV) he is referring to the new temple. We already know, or we should know, from John 2 that the “Father’s house” is the temple of Jesus’s body. This makes the whole theme of mutual indwelling throughout these latter chapters come alive. When Jesus says “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” he is speaking of the new temple (John 14:20).

We dwell with Jesus in the Father’s house (the temple of Jesus’s body); this is what is means to be “in Christ.”

In John 14:23, Jesus reuses the word “dwelling places,” but notice the direction of this passage: Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. John 14:23

When we think of the place prepared by Jesus, we think of flying away to those mansions above, but when Jesus uses the same word in the same chapter in his explanation of that passage, he uses it to say that God makes his dwelling place with us. We are in those mansions now because we are in Christ and Christ is in us.

The temple of Jesus’s body has been rebuilt. He had the power to lay down his life, and he had the power to take it up again. As he said himself, he would be the one to rebuild that temple. God raised Jesus from the dead, but God’s power and Jesus’s power are the same. Just as God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, Christ was in God as the stone rolled away and the dead came to life.

In the next article, we’ll look at the eschatology of John 3.

If you want this series to continue, please like, comment, or message me to let me know of your continued interest. Also, ask questions, point out typos, and engage in kind discussion.

1. Borchert, Gerald L. John 1–11. Vol. 25A. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996. Print. The New American Commentary.

2. Haenchen, Ernst, Robert Walter Funk, and Ulrich Busse. John: A Commentary on the Gospel of John. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Print. Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible.

3. See Samuel Balentine’s comments on Leviticus 1:14—Balentine, Samuel E. Leviticus. Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 2002.

4. Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993. Print.

5. Hauser, Alan J., and Earl Kellett. “Temple, Herod’s.” Ed. John D. Barry et al. The Lexham Bible Dictionary 2016: n. pag. Print.