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Sermon - The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 31st August 2008
St Aidan's West Epping 8:30am
Matthew’s record of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple comes after his triumphant entrance into the city of Jerusalem. The feast of Passover was drawing nigh and Israelites were gathering to the temple to pay their tax and buy animals for sacrifice. The half-shekel temple tax (Matt 17:24) could not be paid in Roman coinage, so money changers would facilitate the exchange, with a healthy profit to themselves. As the Son of David enters the temple courts he proceeds to overturn the tables of the money changers and those selling doves, announcing God’s judgment on this activity combining the words of Isaiah (56:7) and Jeremiah (7:11): “It is written, 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you have made it a den of robbers."
The context of Jeremiah’s declaration is that the Israelites were trusting in the temple, without really trusting or serving God :"Do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.'" (Jer 7:4) God would soon destroy the temple, through the Babylonians, to expose their hypocrisy. The context of the passage from Isaiah, on the other hand, is the vision of Gentiles coming into the temple of the Lord, not to destroy it but to pray to him and to praise him.
The outer court where Jesus overturned the tables was the court of the Gentiles. Successive divisions of the temple precincts included a place for Jewish women, an inner court for Jewish men, the holy place for priests and the holy of holies for the high priest. Each compartment becoming more restrictive the closer one got to the symbolic presence of God in the holy of holies. Jesus' reference to the prophet Isaiah provides not only a picture of cleansing from corrupt practices but an accessibility to the temple presence of God for all nations.
This is reinforced by Matthew's reference to Jesus' healing the blind and the lame (21:14). When King David captured Jerusalem, the Jebusites mocked David by saying that they need only send their blind and lame to fight David off. David was victorious in the battle and sent his men to kill the "blind and the lame", a metaphorical description of the Jebusite army. The saying therefore arose that the blind and the lame could not enter the house of the Lord (2 Sam 5:8). Thus Jesus' healing of the blind and the lame in the outer temple precincts speaks powerfully of not only a cleansed temple, but cleansed people.
Yet the chief priests, who should have been pleased to see the sick healed, poured scorn on Jesus. Their indignation was scathing of the children's praise, "Hosanna to the Son of David", announcing Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem (Matt 21:9, 15). We may well think it is the title "Son of David" that would have been most annoying to the chief priests. However, the accolade "Hosanna" (meaning "Save us") was equally offending, for such an entreaty should only be addressed to God (Psalm 118:26).Yet as Jesus observes, out of the mouths of babes God has brought perfect praise (Matt 21:16).
The children discerned that Jesus was on a mission to save, that he was the true Messiah, the Son of David. something greater than Solomon was here, something greater than the temple (Matt 12:6)!
As Jeremiah's prophecy preceded the destruction of the temple, so Jesus' cleansing preceded the temple's destruction. While the fulfilment would not come for another 40 years at the hands of Roman armies, Jesus was about to establish a new temple, the temple of his body (John 2:21). The body of Christ, the church, is now the true temple of God. It is not in bricks and mortar that we seek God's holy place, but in the lives of his people, gathered around his throne. For we are those who know the content of Hosanna - save us - and we have come to Jesus, the only Saviour of humankind. For in him we find our true cleansing, the cleansing of our sins and the removal of all stain, so that we might be fit for the dwelling place of his Spirit, who continues to transform us into the image of God 's Son, and prepare us for glory.