Cleansing the Temple: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 11:15-19)

In Martin Luther’s day the church was selling indulgences, “get out of purgatory sooner” cards, and playing on people’s love for their relatives and desire to see them reach heaven sooner, and, in the process, making the church wealthy.  Luther rightly challenged that and eventually the whole system that had departed from the gospel.

Is there any way we have lost our bearings like this?  Have we departed from the true purpose of the church?  Jesus is in Jerusalem and nearing arrest and crucifixion at the hands of his own people.  He hurries that inevitability by challenging how his own people have perverted the purpose of the temple.

And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came they went out of the city. (Mark 11:15-19, ESV) 

Israel saw her temple as a sign that God was with her and blessing her.  But she had allowed it to be turned into an economic engine.  When pilgrims came to Jerusalem at the annual feasts of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, they came to make sacrifices.  But there was a required temple tax and the need to buy animals and other sacrificial elements in the temple currency.  So tables were set up to exchange currency and to sell the needed items.

From Jesus’ perspective this had changed and corrupted the purpose of the temple, to be a house of prayer at which Jews and Gentiles could worship (Isaiah 56:7).  How’s that for an evangelical purpose!  Needless to say, Israel was not succeeding so well at their witness to the nations.  And they were corrupting the witness to their own people, as well.  Temple worship had become an expensive endeavor instead of an inviting interaction with God.

So as the Messiah it was Jesus’ job to cleanse the temple, to prepare the people for its true purpose in God’s kingdom.  But it only enraged the chief priests and scribes all the more to kill him.  It was a judgment on them and the people were turning from them to Jesus.

We must be careful even as His church to prevent ourselves from altering the purpose of the church in God’s kingdom plans.  When our focus is anything but representing the kingdom and the good news that entry into it is possible, now, we are altering that purpose.  We shouldn’t be allowing disunity spawned from pursuing personal agendas.  We certainly shouldn’t be a way of producing income to make ourselves wealthy. 

We are to be a light that attracts others to God, or else enrages them with our purity.  Justice and love should be the hallmark of our existence.  We have a long way to go.