A Needed Cleansing

 John 2: 13-22

Jesus Clears the Temple Courts

¹³ When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴ In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. ¹⁵ So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶ To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” ¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

¹⁸ The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

²⁰ They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” ²¹ But the temple he had spoken of was his body. ²² After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

We see Jesus in a fit of justifiable anger, as he drives out the people using the temple for commerce and reminding them what these sacred precincts were meant to be, a place of worship, not business. As we look about us do we also see the sacred, or intended to be sacred, degraded into something commercial or even profane? Do we feel the same fire that moved Jesus to take drastic action?  It's hard to discern the truth these days, so blurred have we gradually become.  It's even harder to stand up for the sacred and the holy in our current milieu, but if we don't, who will?

Bro. Rene