The need for cleansing: Healing our blind spots
Matt 21:12-17
Some years ago, Transport for London put out a short ad for their awareness test, a humorous whodunnit, to alert drivers to the dangers of not noticing what they do not expect to see. I won’t give the game away in describing it, but well worth testing your observation skills, which are as relevant to driving as to how we read Scripture. We all have our blind spots and often only see what we expect to see. For many Jews who expected Messiah in Jesus’ time as a triumphant king, the need for cleansing in their own lives was such a blind spot. Jesus’ next symbolic action of cleansing the temple is a reminder that Messiah’s coming is not only a delight but carries with it the painful process of refining (Mal 3:1-3). As we come to Good Friday and remember Jesus’ suffering to purify us from sin, we too are reminded of our need for cleansing.
Money changers and traders
The location of the money changers and traders (Matt 21:12) would have been the Court of the Gentiles, a large walled area around the Temple. The activities Jesus condemned here were not wrong in themselves, but their location in the temple interfered with worship. Foreign coinage had to be changed to the special Tyrian one used in the Temple,[1] and it was more practicable to buy sacrificial animals locally than bring them from long distances. These activities were previously transacted on the Mount of Olives, but convenience led to their move into the Temple precincts around this time or just a few years earlier. Given that the location was where god-fearing Gentiles could come and pray, Jesus’ quote (Matt 21:13) is all the more ironic since the full sentence in Isaiah 56:7 describes the Temple as ‘the house of prayer for all the peoples’.
The root of the problem
Jesus’ critique, however, goes deeper than the issue of prioritising trade and profit, over worship even though ‘robbers’ den’ (v.13) fits well with this perspective. The phrase comes from Jeremiah’s famous Temple sermon, where the prophet condemns Israel for the way they live sinfully as they please, then use God and His temple as their robbers’ den (i.e. safe haven) to protect them from the consequences of their sins (Jer 7:8-11). Behind their attitude is a complacency and arrogance that they are God’s people, loved and chosen, and therefore no harm can touch them. It is an abuse of God’s love, a belief in cheap grace that fails to see the immense cost of grace to the Lord. It is easy to excuse our sins on the basis that God will understand and forgive us, but this attitude destroys true worship because it uses Him for our selfish purposes.
Where our hope comes from
Yet, this is not the end of the story, and the next incident brings us hope. Jesus wants to heal our blindness and our lameness (Matt 21:14) and those who come to Him knowing their deficiency can find restoration and wholeness. As so often before, it is the insignificant, the negligible (here the children), shooed away by the powerful, who recognise Jesus as the Messiah (Matt 21:15). Psalm 8:2 that Jesus quotes adds another dimension to this in the Hebrew where what is being established is not only praise (as in the Septuagint, i.e. the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament used by Matthew) but strength. What does this mean? The idea in context is that God uses the weak (infants and babies) to show His strength by allowing them to call on His majestic name (Ps 8:1). It is those who trust in God’s strength no matter how weak they are whose lives are transformed. As we remember Jesus’ death on the cross, we are reminded that He submitted Himself to the same principle and in His frailty relied on the Lord to save Him. What an amazing God we serve, who has undergone weakness so that we might receive mercy (Heb 4:15-16)!
[1] Many commentators suggest that the pagan images and inscriptions on foreign coinage were unacceptable for use in the Temple, hence the need to exchange them. However, Leon Morris points out that the Tyrian coinage used in the Temple also had these and the real reason was more likely to do with its known reliability for accurate weight and value (The Gospel of Matthew, Pillar NTC [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992], 526).
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