They went to Jerusalem. Entering the temple,
Jesus began to throw the sellers and buyers out of the temple. He knocked over the money-exchangers’ tables and the pigeon-sellers’ booths. He wouldn’t allow anyone to carry a bag through the temple.Jesus was teaching, and said this:“Wasn’t this written?—‘My house will be called a prayer-house by all the nations.’ Yet you’ve all made it ‘a cave of thieves.’” The head priests and scribes heard, and were looking into how they could destroy
Jesus : They were afraid of him, and the whole crowd was amazed by his teaching.When it became evening, they were leaving the city.
—Jesus,
The temple merchants.
There’s a lot of misinformation going round about what these “sellers and buyers” were. In fact, I’ve heard more than a few Christians compare them to a church’s bookstore: “How dare they use sacred space to make money!” Yes, there’s a valid discussion to be had about the amount of simony taking place in many churches. But that’s not what was going on, and Jesus’s actions were not a protest against capitalism, or buying and selling, per se.
The temple was a place for ritual animal sacrifice. The animal was a stand-in for a person’s sins; it was killed, and its blood was poured all over the altar. Its body was then cooked and eaten by those offering it, with their priests. Offal was burnt up, and certain sacrifices for certain sins were entirely burnt up. Jesus’s self-sacrifice made these offerings redundant, which is why Christians don’t do them. (Jews don’t do them anymore because there’s no temple to do them in, and they figure prayer will do just fine in the meantime. After all, God saves us from sin, not animal sacrifice.)
Not everyone back then owned animals. Often you’d have to buy an animal for the purpose of sacrificing it. So the Sadducees, who controlled the temple grounds, set aside some of it for the useful service of selling sacrificial animals. These animals were pre-approved—they were healthy and top-quality, as God instructed. It was often way more practical than bringing your animal from elsewhere: Say you lived 20 towns away, and had to drive your goat there. Well, by the time you got to temple, your goat might’ve injured itself, and then where would your sacrifice be? Best to just buy an animal there.
Of course, having driven your goat there from 20 towns away, some people would be understandably upset—“I went to all this trouble to not buy a goat, and now I gotta buy a goat?”—and might accuse the priests of defrauding them: They deliberately found flaws in their animals, forcing them to buy new animals from their cousins in the marketplace. Thing is, the priests were rotated on a weekly basis, like when Zechariah was given temple duty. It might be years before you encountered the same priest. It’s pretty hard to imagine any conspiracy of fraud working under such circumstances. More likely it was just anecdotes from frustrated worshipers who were hoping to avoid the marketplace, and couldn’t.
As for the money-exchangers: In the Roman Empire, money was interchangeable. It was all based on the weight of the coins, not the coins themselves: Five pounds of silver was worth five pounds of silver, regardless of how big the coins were, or where you got them from. So ordinarily you’d never exchange coins, ’cause there’s no point. But there was a point in the temple: The temple didn’t want any coins which had pagan gods stamped on them. And a lot of coins had pagan gods on them.
So the Sadducees set up money exchanges: You could trade your coins for god-free coins. For a fee, of course. But it was far easier to avoid the exchange than the marketplace: You could swap coins anywhere. You could save up all your god-free coins in anticipation of your next temple visit. Of course, if you weren’t so careful, and showed up in temple with pagan gods on your coins, it was off to the exchange—and again, more likely the stories of cheating and fraud were anecdotes from people who were hoping to avoid the exchanges.
But a lot of preachers pass on these stories of fraud and deception as if they’re historical fact. And centuries of anti-Semitism—with stories about greedy Jews who would cheat you at the first opportunity—have contributed to this. Hence, this has been the usual interpretation of why Jesus threw the merchants out of the temple: He was throwing out all the greedy, cheating Jews.
Well, that’s poor exegesis. If you want to know why Jesus tossed out the merchants, you need to look at what Jesus said when he tossed them out.
The Gentiles’ house of prayer.
When Jesus called the temple “a prayer-house,” (v17) he was referring to something the LORD said through Isaiah.
“The sons of foreigners who join the LORD to serve him,
to love the LORD’s name, to be his slaves;
everyone who keeps Sabbath from being violated,
who holds tight to my covenant:
I’ll bring them to my holy hill.
I’ll have them rejoice in my prayer-house.
Their burn-offerings and sacrifices
will be favorites on my altar.
For my house will be called
a prayer-house for every people.”
So utters my master, the LORD,
who gathers up banished Israel again:
“I gather others to those already gathered.”
—The LORD,
This passage was about God’s acceptance of foreigners, of Gentiles, as his followers. If foreigners wanted to serve and obey God, he wanted to accept them as his people, same as the Hebrews. They could offer sacrifices; they could worship in temple; they could pray to him. And this prophecy was eventually fulfilled by the Christians, who have turned to God from both Israel and every nation.
However. At Jesus’s point in history, the foreigners were permitted on the temple grounds, but they weren’t allowed past the wall which surrounded the temple. They could only stay outside, in the area which was known as the Gentile court, since Gentiles were allowed there. They didn’t trust Gentiles to be ritually clean enough to go inside. Therefore only Jews, or circumcised Jewish converts, went inside. Gentiles stayed outside, and temple guards were posted at the doors to stop them. And inside the temple, there were further enclosures—the women’s court, the Israel court (for men), and the priests’ court (for priests only) where the altar and the holiest stuff was.
The Gentile Court was supposed to be a place where anyone could worship—Jews, Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Samaritans (if any of ’em would bother to set foot in the temple), whoever. Rabbis might teach classes there. People might pray or sing there. It was the one place in the world which was both dedicated to the worship of God, and was a truly classless environment: Men and women, Jews and Gentiles, could all worship together.
But this was where the Sadducees had put the merchants. So instead of prayer and teaching, you had haggling over the price of sacrificial animals, and haggling over the fee for money exchange.
Now, imagine you went to a church which segregated a certain group. (I know, Christians aren’t supposed to segregate anyone—we’re to look like the Gentile court—but bear with me a bit.) Let’s say the church segregated the teenagers. And one day, they realized they needed to sell bible studies for an upcoming series, so they just took over the teens’ space and turned it into a bookstore. Where are the teens supposed to go? Well, they don’t care—they need a bookstore, and the teens can just go fend for themselves. Besides, teenagers are annoying, so they don’t mind alienating the teenagers.
So you can see why this outraged Jesus. It wasn’t the capitalism. It wasn’t the greed. It was the prejudice. It was the fact that these activities, though they did some good, were trampling on the ability, the right, of Gentiles to seek the LORD. He couldn’t have that. So he drove the merchants out.
The futility of cheap grace.
Those who claim Jesus was going after greedy merchants, tend to point to Jesus’s statement about “a cave of thieves.” What would a cave of thieves be, other than a group of greedy cheats who were trying to rob the masses? This, they figure, proves Jesus was going after the money-grubbing Jews.
Well, no it doesn’t. Again, let’s look at the Old Testament context of Jesus’s statements. Spílaion listón/“cave of thieves,” comes from Jeremiah.
Be good in your ways and actions
and you can dwell here in this place.
Don’t trust these lying words,
those who tell you,
“The LORD’s temple! LORD’s temple! LORD’s temple!”
When you’re really good in your ways and actions
you’ll establish justice between a man and his fellow.
Foreigners, orphans, and widows won’t be oppressed.
Innocent blood won’t be poured out in this place.
Other gods, which are bad for you, won’t be followed.
You can dwell here in this place,
the land I gave your ancestors long, long ago.
Look, you trust their lying words, but don’t profit
by them .Theft, murder, adultery, perjury—smoke for Ba’al,
following other gods which you don’t understand—
then you come stand before me,
in this house which is called by my name,
and say, “We’ve been saved!”
in order to do all these disgusting things?
Has this house become a cave of wild animals to you?
—
this house which is called by my name, in your eyes?Because this is what I see.
—The LORD,
“Wild animals,” brutes, or parichím, was a term used to describe criminals. The Septuagint translated it listón/“thieves,” and that’s the interpretation Jesus went with. It rightly describes the sort of hypocrites who figure they could live however pagan way they want, then turn round, go to temple, declare themselves saved by the blood of the lambs, and go right back to sinning.
This attitude is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—taking God’s forgiveness and Jesus’s self-sacrifice for granted, and taking advantage of it instead of repenting. It’s like a wealthy dad who will always bail Junior out whenever he gets into trouble, which is why Junior never reforms, and always gets into trouble. And the Jews—and we Christians—are like Junior, figuring all we gotta do is point to our salvation, point to our belief in Jesus which never seems to alter our lifestyle any, declare, “I’m not saved by my own actions, so my own actions don’t matter,” and God will bail us out, because he obligated himself, and he owes us. We use God’s grace to wipe our behinds.
So we see two things Jesus objected to—neither of them capitalism. One was prejudice. The other was cheap grace. One was how they drove out the Gentiles for the sake of selling sacrificial animals. The other was how these sacrificial animals were an utter waste of time and money and animal life, because these people were just gonna turn round and go back to their sinful, godless lives.
If you’re looking for verses where Jesus critiques capitalism, they do exist elsewhere in the gospels. Just not here.
Prejudice and cheap grace.
So now we need to search ourselves. Are there any ministries which our churches have driven out? If so, was it for a valid reason? Or was it because the leadership of your church really didn’t care for the folks to whom it was ministering?
I used to visit a church with a food pantry for the needy. After a point, the leaders decided they didn’t want to run it any longer. One of the leaders got tired of all these shabbily-dressed people coming to the church campus, looking for handouts. He didn’t want it to be that kind of church. So it stopped being that kind of church. And in a few years, it stopped being any kind of church; it closed. I’m pretty sure God closed it because he was annoyed at this rotten attitude. Hopefully other churches in that town picked up the slack.
No, I’m not saying God will shut down your church if you push away the needy, certain classes of people, teenagers and youth, or even other ethnic groups. Although I personally feel he should shut down every prejudiced church in Christendom. They’re not preaching the good news. They’re saying their love—and supposedly God’s love—has its limits. And it shouldn’t, because God’s doesn’t.
Likewise I’ve visited churches which proclaimed cheap grace. The only sins they rebuked were political. The others, they turned a blind eye to. Especially the sins which they themselves committed. They figured God’s grace meant they could be weekday heathens and Sunday Christians. God doesn’t want that either.
Just as Jesus drove these merchants out of the temple, he wants these attitudes out of his churches. We need to join with him in driving them out.