My Dear People, 

This Sunday, November 9^th is a special Feast. It is the dedication of St. John Lateran, the Cathedral in Rome. Because of this event, we, too, recall the dedication of our own Church here at St. James. The Gospel Readings of John tell us of how we should be treating our church. It should be the same way Jesus told the people to treat the Temple in Jerusalem. It is the House of God, and we should deal with it with great respect. 

After a short sojourn in Capernaum, Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and the text implies that the Disciples accompanied Him (2:12,17,22: 3:22).

For the first time in the Gospel, we meet with direct notice of a Jewish liturgical feast: The Passover of the Jews. As an observant Jew, Jesus made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and entered the temple area.  

The Temple was the most important institution and building in Jewish life operating under the auspices of the high priest and the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. It was the place where God dwelt among His people in a special manner, and it was a central factor and component of Jewish life. The temple was God’s house, the place where He made Himself known, instructed His people, and received their worship.    

The psalmist said: “How lovely your dwelling, / O Lord of hosts! / My soul yearns and pines / for the courts of the Lord” (Ps. 84:2-3). 

Since Passover was a pilgrimage festival, it attracted an international crowd of pilgrims, swelling the population in Jerusalem with hundreds of thousands of people. The Temple’s Court of Gentiles would have been inundated with pilgrims, who were given entrance to the temple precincts in successive waves.  

Since foreign coinage often carried the image of an emperor or king (Mark 12:15-17), and such images were considered a violation of the law (Exodus 20:4), the pilgrims needed to exchange their currency to pay the temple tax and buy sacrificial animals in monies acceptable in the temple (hence the money-changers). Pilgrims would then have their Passover lambs (sheep and birds) slaughtered and offered in sacrifice. Upon entering the temple precincts, Jesus could see those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers who were seated there.

Jesus drove out all who supplied pilgrims with the proper temple coinage and the animals for the Passover sacrifices. (The Synoptics--Matt 21:12-17). Several things in Jesus’ command: “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” provides insight into John’s theological understanding of the temple incident. Of the four Gospel accounts of this incident, only John has Jesus calling the temple “my Father’s house.”  This unique phrase reveals that John understands Jesus’ action here in terms of His relationship with the Father. Jesus is the Son of God, and His relationship with the Father legitimizes His astonishing action, which disrupted the business related to sacrificial offerings, thus implying a claim to have control over the temple. By disturbing the sacrificial system, Jesus symbolically announces changes to come in the worship of God. Just as the water of Sinai was transformed into wine at Cana, so will the worship of God be transposed into worship of the new covenant--worship in Spirit and truth” (4:24). 

But John, for theological reasons, places this event at the start of Jesus’ public life. 

Only in John’s account does Jesus speak of the commerce in the temple as turning it into a “marketplace.” This could be a subtle allusion to the end-time vision in Zech 14. There the prophet envisions the day of the Lord, when He will come in power to rescue His people, defeat their enemies, and establish a perfect situation in the world. God will so sanctify His people that they will have no need to purchase animals for sacrifices in the temple: “No longer will there be merchants in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day” (Zech 14:21). Jesus’ command that the commerce in the temple must stop could be a prophetic indication that the Lord has now come with the salvation for His people as foretold by Zechariah. 

Jesus’ Disciples recall the words of scripture: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  The quotation is from Ps 69:10, but John made a subtle but very significant difference. In the ancient Greek version the text reads, “Zeal for your house consumes me” (Ps 68:10 LXX), but in John’s Gospel, the verb is in the future tense, “will consume me.” Jesus’ zeal for his Father is one of the principal reasons that He will be consumed on the cross. 

By placing the temple incident at the start of Jesus’ public ministry, John provides a lens for viewing the whole of Jesus’ life and work. For the first time the source speaks of His relationship with the Father. The Father is the source of Jesus’ authority and His mission of salvation. His claims about His relationship with the Father and His actions that follow from it will be the cause of controversy between Him and Jerusalem’s religious authorities throughout His life and will lead to His death.

[Source taken from the Gospel of John by Francis Martin and William M Wright IV]

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Fr. Vincent Clemente