By Robert A. Bryant
Isn't the gospel account of Jesus cleansing the temple amazing? It stands in stark contrast to many popular notions of Jesus' character. Here is no picture of a gentle, soft-spoken Jesus calmly confronting the religious establishment with authoritative teaching and divine wisdom. Rather, here Jesus appears with His sleeves rolled up ready for a fight. After making His very own whip, He charges through the heart of the religious establishment striking forcefully and aggressively at a religious system that has become skewed. Imagine it! Jesus is opening pens and cages of oxen, sheep, and doves with one hand, while, with a whip of cords in the other hand, He is driving animals and people alike into confusion and retreat.
Advertisement
Is this really our Lord Jesus? What about His commandments to turn the other cheek or to give your cloak also if anyone takes your coat (
Matthew 5:39-40)? What about loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you? (
Matthew 5:44) Mercy and love do not seem as evident in this account of Jesus driving people out of the temple like so many animals. Yet all four gospels agree that our merciful and loving Lord Jesus charged through the temple like a bull in a china shop. He overturned tables and poured out the coins of inappropriate commerce on the floor. Jesus drove money changers and animals from the temple. At the height of the Passover season, no less, in a city filled with pilgrims gathered at the temple to commemorate God's delivering mercies and covenantal love, an angry Jesus -- God's Son, our merciful Lord -- is overturning tables and disrupting the religious life of the people.
This account of Jesus' aggressive behavior doesn't mesh too well with our cherished views of Jesus as teacher, healer, comforter and gentle shepherd. So we may be prone to think Jesus didn't swing the whip too hard. If He did wield the whip forcefully, He surely didn't hit anyone with it. Our Lord would never do anything that disruptive, would He? As a good friend and colleague said to me once, "Maybe, maybe not." But overturning tables and disrupting life really is the way of our loving and gracious Lord Jesus, you know.
Jesus is far more confrontational than we often imagine. It is a characteristic of His work in the world. Jesus is constantly disrupting things, whether it be on the corporate level of, say, a religious establishment, or on the personal level of an individual's life. Wasn't it our Lord who used the purification jars to hold wine instead of water at a wedding in Cana? (
John 2:1-11) Remember the time he entered a house to eat with some Pharisees but refused to wash before dinner? (
Luke 11:37-54). Then before the food was passed around the table He called His hosts hypocrites, pronounced woe upon them and left without eating. Try that the next time you're invited over to someone's house for dinner and see if that doesn't cause a disturbance!