Simply Jesus - Chapter 10b "Battle and Temple"

(My apologies...I forgot to publish this last week after publishing part one of chapter 10.)

We continue on with chapter 10...the first part is about the battle that Jesus waged and won in His personal temptation in the wilderness, His exorcisms, and His death on the cross.

The last part of this chapter is about the Temple and its significance in Jewish kingdom agenda. Besides winning the battle against the enemy, Jewish would-be Messiahs had a second great aspiration, which was to cleanse the Temple of all pagan contamination. Jesus too had this aspiration. His action of striking out at the moneychangers in the Temple is commonly known, but what is not always understood is that this action was "staking an implicitly royal claim: it was kings, real or aspiring, who had authority over the Temple. It was Israel's kings or would-be kings who planned it (David), built it (Solomon), cleansed it (Hezekiah, Josiah, Judah the Hammer), rebuilt it (Zerubbabel, Herod the Great), and hoped to defend it (Simon bar-Giora)...In each case, of course, building the Temple was associated with the larger story of victory over enemies, liberation for the people, and so on..." It was the Exodus/Passover narrative all over again, and a key element in this narrative is God's presence with His people..."Passover implies Presence."


And it was during the Passover that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and this awakened in the minds of the onlookers the powerful prophecy of Zech. 9:9-11. Many themes are rushing together at this point in the story of Jesus' final days. Because of their clear grasp of their history and story, the people present that day when Jesus rode into the city would have taken in all the meaning with a single glance!

So what was the "meaning" of it all? Well again, this action was an emphatic royal action as prophesied by Zechariah. As we saw in the first part of this chapter, Jesus redefined the battle - it would not be a military battle of "us" against "them".  His riding into Jerusalem on a donkey made clear that He came as a peaceable King but also that His kingdom would cover the whole earth, and the onlookers would have known in their bones that the result would be "the establishment of God's covenant with  his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting...in prisoners being set free...if this great event were to happen, it could only mean that Israel's God was at last coming back. His glorious Presence was once again to appear..."

On the heels of the royal act of entering Jerusalem as He did, Jesus cleansed the Temple; this too was an act of royalty, and the Jewish people would have seen all of this as part of the rich "web of prophetic allusion and symbolism."

Cleansing the Temple

Wright believes that Jesus' dramatic action of cleansing the Temple was a declaration that the Temple was under God's judgment and would soon be destroyed forever. "It looks as though everyone knew that Jesus was in some sense or other pronouncing God's judgment on the Temple itself - and, by implication, on the present regime that was running it...if you stop the regular flow of sacrifices, you bring the Temple to a shuddering halt...If the Temple isn't the center of everything, the place where heaven and earth meet, the building in which God and his people come together, then what is?"

In order to better understand these dramatic actions and sayings, we need to step back once again and try to understand the worldview of the first-century Jew and we need to ask some foundational questions. Those questions have to do with how the Jews in Jesus' day thought about space, time, and matter. Chapter 11 deals with these questions...