The Cleansing of the Temple

S. Mark xi. 15–19

S. John has described a purification of the Temple at the first Passover after the commencement of our Lord’s Ministry. The other three Evangelists record a similar act at His last visit to Jerusalem. There are sufficient variations in the narratives to overthrow the theory of those who think it improbable that such an act would have been repeated, and conclude that the sacred writers, either S. John or the Three, have been misled as to the time of its occurrence.

In the fourth Gospel we find, when the language is rightly interpreted, that Jesus drove out with His scourge only the sheep and oxen, but in the other narratives the buyers and sellers also were forcibly expelled. Again, in the former the desecrators of the Temple are remonstrated with for turning God’s house into a “house of merchandise,” but in the latter into “a den of thieves.” The differences are not unimportant, for they well illustrate a principle of our Lord’s dealing with sinners, by which He treats them tenderly at first, but is unsparing and severe, if the remonstrance is unheeded and the sin repeated.

The circumstances which led to the profanation were these. The Jews who came up to the Feasts from a distance would obviously find it more convenient to purchase their sacrificial victims on the spot, and cattle-markets were held in the city; but in lapse of time, when the authorities of the Temple began to grow mercenary, they determined to have such a large source of profit in their own hands. The Court of the Gentiles was always held in little respect by the Jews, and it seemed to them quite justifiable to utilise it for their purpose. There is some uncertainty about the first introduction of the traffic into the Temple; but it was probably before the occasion when Bava Ben But a “sent for three thousand of the sheep of Kedar, and having examined whether they were without spot, brought them into the Mountain of the House, that is, into the Court of the Gentiles.” There is no doubt, however, that after this time, for about twenty days before the Feast the corridors and arcades and outer walls of the sacred enclosure 2 were commonly occupied by cattle-pens; and the solemn stillness of the precincts was broken by the unseemly confusion of the lowing of herds and the wranglings of drovers and pilgrims bargaining for their price.

Besides these there were the money-changers. After the Captivity the Jews of the Dispersion, when they came up to the Feasts, in common with those who dwelt in Palestine, made each their offering for the Temple service. It was enjoined in the Law that they should “give every man a ransom for his soul unto the Lord... half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary.” There was only one coin in which it might be paid into the treasury. It was intended as a safeguard to prevent the Korban being desecrated by the introduction of pieces of money upon which heathen emblems were stamped. Those pilgrims therefore who came from countries where non-Jewish money was current, as Babylon, Alexandria, Greece, or Rome, were compelled to procure the half-shekel by exchange. It was not only a fruitful source of gain to the bankers, who demanded an exorbitant discount; their extortion kindled the indignation of our Lord, and His ears were pained by the clinking of money and weights and balances, and the strife of words and angry recriminations, mingling with the prayers and praises of the sanctuary.

But this was not all. Even the offerings of poor women, and others, whose very poverty might have exempted them from fraudulent imposition, were included in the market.

The whole scene was such as would raise the righteous anger of any one who was jealous for the honour of God’s House. It was almost a worse profanation than that which made our cathedrals and churches scenes of riot and desecration in the times of Edward VI., when S. Paul’s was turned into a stock-exchange for merchants, and its aisles were used as common thoroughfares for both man and beast.

What may have suggested to our Lord the cleansing of the Temple on both occasions in immediate connection with the Passover, was most probably the Divine command to the Jews to purge all leaven out of their houses on the eve of the Feast. It was a highly symbolical act, for “leaven is born of corruption, and corrupts the mass with which it is mixed.” Well then may our Lord have been eager, alike at the beginning and the close of His earthly Mission, to strike home by a forcible illustration their need of real purification. It may have been also that He remembered the ancient prediction of the seer who foretold His last visit to Jerusalem: “In that day there shall be no more the trader in the house of the Lord of hosts j” or that which closed the scroll of prophecy, describing how the Messiah should “come suddenly to His Temple” and “purify the sons of Levi.” So it was that He drave the base traffickers from the sacred precincts, and with all their unseemly strife and overreaching before His eyes, appealed to them, in a voice of awe-inspiring terror, to stay the evils which had changed a house of prayer into a cave of brigands, wrangling over their ill-gotten gains.

That they dared not resist, but submitted to be driven out at the bidding of a Man, Whose authority was backed by no external force, may well have excited the sneer of the incredulous, who forget Who He was. It will create no surprise in the mind, if we realise that it was He “out of Whose mouth went a sharp two-edged sword,” and Whose “eyes were as a flame of fire;” or even if we only recall the many instances in which guilty, conscience-stricken men have quailed in abject terror before the majesty of innocence and offended purity.

Now this cleansing of the Temple has for all time a double application in its practical teaching.

It is intended primarily to inculcate reverence for holy places. It was the repetition in a more striking form of the original command, “Ye shall reverence My sanctuary.” And that our Lord designed not only to condemn open and flagrant desecration, but also to discountenance the slightest neglect or carelessness, is clear from the very significant record, He “would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the Temple.” He was so consumed with zeal for His Father’s House that He would exclude from its courts all trace of worldly occupations. And we only catch His spirit of reverent awe when we enter a consecrated church with the Patriarch’s thought uppermost in our mind, “Surely the Lord is in this place; this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

Again, it bids us look on to that great Purification of which this was but a faint foreshadowing, when He shall come in the final judgment to separate for ever the good from the bad, and to banish from His Presence everything that offends. It has pleased God that for a time the sinner and the righteous should live together, and that His rain of mercy should descend upon the just and the unjust. He no longer drives out with indignation and anger those who defile His Church by their impurity and hypocrisy, but suffers them, even as He suffered the traitor Judas, to go on their way with their sins undiscovered. But it is only for a time. One day He will come, as He came from Jerusalem, on that first Palm Sunday, eighteen centuries and a half ago, and repeat the act of cleansing, only with infinitely graver consequence to those who shall be cast out.

How we shall escape that terrible expulsion will depend upon our endeavour to keep through life another temple undefiled, that is, the temple of our body. That form was hallowed for ever by the Incarnation of our Blessed Lord, and it is made to each on. of us in Holy Baptism a dwellingplace of the Holy Ghost. Let us learn then to reverence it as God’s sanctuary, and we shall have nothing to fear from the Advent of the Judge at the last day.

Note: Trdvra’s, rd re Trp6[3a.Ta /cat to us /36as, is not as in the A.V. “them all... and the sheep and the oxen,” but as in the R.V. iravras is in the masculine gender, agreeing with /36as, the masculine being more worthy than the neuter, according to the grammatical scale.

Note: It was separated from the Holy Place by the” Song “or Zpmov rov lidivov, a low wall, on which, Josephus says, was the inscription, fiT) 8etv aW6<pvlov evrbs rov ayiov irapelvai. The court was actually called the” Choi” or “profane” place.

Note: “The Booths” are frequently mentioned in Rabbinic writings. For their connection with the extortion of the chief priests, cf. Edersheim, i. 371.

Note: Lightfoot mentions the extravagant prices which doves reached at one time, and the efforts of Rabban Simeon to stay the injustice, by which the cost was reduced from a piece of gold to two farthings.

Note: For an interesting account of the “B’dikath Hachamez,” cf. Picritz, Gospels from a Rabbinical Point of View, 33.

Note: “Canaanite” as in the A.V. is often a synonym for merchant, because the Phoenicians were the principal commercial nation. Cf. Prov. xxxi. 24; Isa. xxiii. 8-11; Hos. xii. 7; Zeph. i. n.

Note: airrfKalov XtjgtGiv. It is far stronger than in the A.V. k€tttt)s is a thief, but 770-r77s is a highway robber or brigand.