John 2:13-25

Jesus Reveals His Glory

Jesus Redefines the Temple

John 2:13-25     Jesus' Body – The New Temple

The Passover was one of the great feasts of Israel. Thousands of pilgrims, including Jews from the Diaspora, flocked to Jerusalem to celebrate it annually. Those who could not journey to Jerusalem celebrated the feast in their own homes. Essentially, they remembered their liberation from Egypt centuries before, and believed that, through their remembering, they would share, once again, in the continuing action of the liberating God.

The ritual consisted of a shared meal where each family group ate together a roasted lamb, the Passover Lamb. Beginning at noon, the Temple in Jerusalem would be teeming with pilgrims, bringing or buying lambs to be slaughtered by the priests or Levites in time for the Feast to be celebrated that evening. 

Apart from the lambs needed for the Passover meal, cattle, sheep and doves were needed for sacrifice. Pilgrims who had incurred “uncleanness” (a ritual condition which was virtually inevitable, whether for farmers dealing with animals, or for Jews living in the Diaspora), needed to have their uncleanness purified before they could participate in the feast. For that, they needed to offer animals in sacrifice.

Money changers were necessary because transactions in the Temple could take place only with coins that bore no images engraved on them. Jews from the Diaspora generally would have carried with them coins circulating in the Empire, most of which bore images of the emperor.

Since the doves would have been in cages, Jesus had no way of driving them out. Their owners needed to take them with them.

The courtyard of the Temple was huge, and thousands of people would have been milling around. It would have been highly unlikely that Jesus, single-handedly, could have cleared the whole area. Nevertheless, his action created a significant stir.

Jesus’ action was not motivated by a concern that the merchants were dishonest or exploitative – though they may have been. Without suitable coinage, there could be no transactions. Without animals, there could be no sacrifice, nor could visitors acquire the Passover Lambs they needed for the Feast. Jesus’ gesture was aimed at the system, not at particular practices. It radically challenged the whole practice of Temple worship.

Jesus’ objection may have echoed a comment in the prophecies of Zachariah regarding the purification of Israel in the end-times. (Zechariah, however, still assumed that there would be Temple worship, even if unimaginably different):

Jesus was not the only one to call the Temple worship into question. Many Jews were disillusioned with what went on there, and particularly with the chief priests, who collaborated with Rome, and whose ministry they regarded as illegitimate. (Essenes, for example, had completely withdrawn from society and lived in community in the wilderness, close to the Dead Sea. They looked forward to a purified Temple and a purified priesthood.)

To function at all, the Temple system needed to be a marketplace. Jesus sought more than a purified Temple and a legitimate priesthood; his critique went deeper. Jesus understood the Temple as a place to encounter God. He questioned the sacrificial system, and the market it needed. In this, he followed in the footsteps of some of the outspoken prophets of Israel. Too easily, sacrifice reverts to empty ritual. Rather than expressing a converted heart, ritual, too often, substitutes for it. 

Sacrifice

Temple spoke of sacrifice; and sacrifice of death. Something in the human psyche associates death with the sacred. The sacredness associated with death, with killing, exerts a powerfully unifying effect on a society; but the sense of unity it generates is based on illusion. Certainly, in the Jewish consciousness, the Temple had become the emotional centre of national identity, even for those who thirsted for its purification.

The God of Jesus was not a God whose honour demanded satisfaction. God sent Jesus into the world because God loved the world, and empowered Jesus to save that world precisely by the way of love. Jesus would reveal a God who was not focussed on death, who had nothing to do with death. Jesus’ Father was the God of life, and God’s will for humanity was that it appreciate and delight in life.

Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Temple death system, would comment, at a later stage of the narrative, in relation to the “sacrificial” death of Jesus: “… it is better for you that one man die for the sake of people, than that the whole nation be destroyed” [11:50]. Jesus’ death would be violent. His blood would flow, and flow freely, as freely as the blood of any victim killed in sacrifice. 

Jesus’ death, however, was not a ritual killing. From the point of view of his killers, it was simply an act of political expediency; and from Jesus’ point of view, it was an act of sheer integrity, the price of his commitment to the way of non-violence and love. With Jesus’ death, there would be no further place for ritual sacrifice; with no further need for Temple sacrifice, there would be no further need for Temple.

The author’s comment was drawn from Psalm 69. However, the text was deliberately changed to suit the purpose of the narrative. The past tense used in the psalm – (It is zeal for your house that has consumed me [Psalm 69:9]) – became future tense when quoted, referring prophetically to Jesus’ eventual death by violence at the hands of the chief priests, zealous for the Temple and for their vested interests:

The generalised term, the Jews, obviously referred here to the chief priests, whose prerogatives Jesus had challenged. Naturally enough, they contested his authority for doing what he had done, and challenged him to prove it.

For the priests, signs simply meant proofs intended to convince unbelievers. According to the author, Jesus’ signs were not proofs for unbelievers, nor wonders to be marvelled at, but invitations to believers to look more deeply and to discover richer meaning.

(Construction of the Temple had begun under Herod the Great, about fifteen years or so before Jesus was born, and continued after Herod’s death.)

The author used a literary technique that would appear again in the unfolding narrative: a cryptic statement of Jesus would be misunderstood, and thus provide Jesus with the opportunity to explain at greater length, and with greater emphasis, the message that he wished to convey.

Destroy this Temple

Interestingly, Jesus’ statement about the Temple’s being destroyed and raised in three days was brought as an accusation against him in the Synoptic Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial before the High Priest, though it had not been mentioned earlier in their narratives. In this Gospel, the incident, though mentioned now in the story, would not be brought up at all in the account of Jesus’ interrogation before Annas (the power behind the throne, and father-in-law of Caiaphas, the High Priest at the time) [18:19-24].

The author observed that Jesus was speaking of the Temple of his body. He understood that Jesus was the Word made flesh: God lived among us in the human Jesus [1:14]. There would be no need for any special geographical location for people to have access to God, or for animals to be killed for the removal of sinfulness. There would be no need, indeed, for any sacrificing priesthood. In fact, within forty years of Jesus’ death, the Temple would be destroyed by the Romans, and the Temple priesthood rendered pointless. Yet, the group of disciples survived, as did Judaism, both in the Holy Land and in the Diaspora.

Jesus did not attack the Temple. He simply saw it as totally dispensable. It is fallen human nature that needs to construct “the sacred” and to worship a god that is little more than the projection of its own corruption. God is not encountered in the human “sacred”. God is encountered in the risen humanity of the forgiving, crucified Jesus.

The incident confirmed the message which Jesus had given to Nathanael that the “sacred place” where earth and heaven connected was the humanity of the Son of Man [1:51]. 

Like the chief priests, the disciples, also, had not understood Jesus’ reference at the time. Only in hindsight, after his resurrection, would they understand. Indeed, the whole of the Gospel would be a re-reading and re-stating of incidents from the life of Jesus, interpreted and understood in the light of the resurrection, under the guiding inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In the process, the Scriptures that had previously nourished them would take on new and deeper meanings. The life of Jesus would unveil other layers of insight; and, in their turn, the Scriptures would help to depth the mystery of Jesus.

To date, the text had given no “miraculous” signs done by Jesus in Jerusalem. Though the Jews had asked for them as proof of Jesus’ authority, the narrative had recounted none, beyond Jesus’ enigmatic reference to his future death and resurrection.

Why would Jesus not entrust himself to them? What was the problem with those who believed in his name because they saw the signs? The first disciples had followed Jesus before seeing any signs worked by him, no doubt simply impressed by his integrity and inner authority. The Christian believers for whom the author was writing many years after Jesus' death had similarly witnessed none of Jesus' signs. In the author’s mind, the purpose of signs was not to give birth to faith but to interpret and to deepen it. What nourished true faith was to remain with Jesus [1: 39] and to share his life.

The comment was made in hindsight, as the community reinterpreted the actions of the historical Jesus through the lens of his resurrection.

Jesus Knew What was in Everyone

Jesus knew the human heart, the as-yet-unredeemed human heart. It was precisely this unredeemed humanity that he had been sent to save from itself and from the power that the sin of the world held over it. 

Jesus knew the human heart impelled by desire (learnt from its surrounding culture) for the limited things of this world; the acquisitive human heart that sees others as competitors and as potential threats to the achieving of its own learnt desires; the heart fiercely protective of itself and its interests.

This unredeemed human heart needs others for its own flourishing, though it knows them also as rivals. It needs to belong; it needs community; it needs its leaders for protection, as it needs its gods. To contain and to focus their fears and angers, such communities need their boundaries and their enemies. To know who they are, they need to know who they are not. Their gods are the gods on their side, the gods whose enemies are their enemies. They need strong gods.

What unite such communities are precisely their common fears and their common angers. Whoever threatens their unity from within becomes focus for their scarcely suppressed floating fears and anger. They need their victims, their scapegoats, their sacrifices, to save them from their own otherwise destructive rivalries.

In Jesus' case, the enthusiastic response of those who “saw his signs” expressed too easily the unredeemed heart's need for powerful and beneficent leaders, for a god-on-their-side. Jesus had come to redeem such hearts. He would love them to the point of death, but “he did not entrust himself to them”. By no means would he allow himself to experience the contagion of their self-interest.

The experience of the disciples for whom the Beloved Disciple was writing had encouraged them to recognise that Jesus had, in fact, entrusted himself to them. That he knew what was in everyone was, for them, a deep source of affirmation and of peace. As readers today reflect, too, on their own experience, they can draw confirmation from the fact that the Jesus who knows what is in a person has, indeed, entrusted himself to them.

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