A FEW facts go a good distance when reading the Bible. For this episode, it helps to know that the holy city is on a hill; thus, Bible characters all the time go “up” to Jerusalem. Knowing that Jewish people considered it illegal to pay their temple tax in Roman coin explains why moneychangers were needed.
Knowing that animals were being sold reminds us that blood sacrifice was how people routinely sought access to God, and that the worth of offerings might rely on a person’s circumstances. When Mary and Joseph presented Christ within the temple, for instance, they made a low-value offering (2.25). Sheep and oxen are for wealthy people to purchase.
Throughout this passage, NRSV refers only to “the temple”. That obscures one other fact. Jesus encounters the livestock dealers and moneychangers, not in the guts of the temple (naos in Greek, as in v. 20), but within the outer court (hieron, as in vv. 14-15), which was often known as the Court of the Gentiles. When he speaks in parables of the temple that’s his body, it’s the word naos — not hieron — that John uses. Applying the identical English word to each locations obscures this completely.
If NRSV had made clear the difference between these two areas, as NIV does (by translating hieron as “temple courts”), it could make a part of the story easier to grasp. Reading NIV, and knowing a little bit concerning the temple itself and the outer courts, I imagine something akin to a cathedral, with its outer close, then its inner complex of spaces — gift shop, refectory, lavatories — that are nowadays an indispensable a part of any cathedral’s ministry to visitors.
To evaluate Jesus’s actions here as realistically as possible, we will imagine this contemporary equivalent. Picture the scene: after an hour or two looking around the constructing, you retire to a cathedral’s gift shop with its adjoining café to enjoy a well-earned cup of tea. Suddenly, a person rushes in brandishing a weapon and throws all of the postcards, guide books, and spiritual knick-knacks to the ground.
If that happened to me, I’d find it disturbing — frightening, even. Why was this man so offended, so violent? Such behaviour doesn’t belong even within the periphery of the cathedral itself, never mind near the inner space, where God is sought and located.
At least the person’s weapon isn’t life-threatening. No sticks or blades were permitted, even within the outer circuit of the temple grounds. This explains why he selected a whip, manufactured from cords knotted together, possibly with knots at the top of every cord as well. Such an implement could definitely sting or hurt. But it could not wound by breaking the skin; nor would it not inflict everlasting damage. Just as well, for the passage is sort of problematic enough already.
It is a proven fact that we do occasionally come across events within the Gospels which portray Jesus as being in a state of high emotion, including anger. We can struggle to judge them. Seeing Jesus impassioned and violent to the purpose of committing criminal damage, and even assault, is definitely disturbing.
There is all the time a simple answer to problems of this type in scripture. “Well, it’s Jesus,” we will say. Normal rules don’t apply. If he’s offended, those traders will need to have deserved it. This seems to me to be an unsatisfactory response to such visceral emotion. If Jesus got here to boost fallen humanity, his stooping to this level of human passion is mindless.
Even without bringing within the Synoptic accounts, we will see how Christians have been scouring scripture for tactics to make sense of what Jesus says and does on this occasion. John records that his violent treatment of the traders called to remembrance a psalm verse (69.9); and this keeps the deal with the righteousness of Jesus’s anger.
But, if we return a verse, we get a fuller picture. Just before this reading, John has mentioned that, when Jesus went as much as Jerusalem, he left his brothers behind (2.12). Two verses are being evoked, not one: “I’m a foreigner to my circle of relatives, a stranger to my very own mother’s children; for zeal for your own home consumes me, and the insults of those that insult you fall on me.”
The way during which these words recall the isolation of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) explains why this episode gets a complete Sunday in Lent to itself.
