Why Did the Temple Look Like A Mall Around Passover?

March 11, 2021                       John 2: 12-14

12 After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there for a few days.

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. ¹⁵Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ ¹⁷His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ ¹⁸The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ ¹⁹Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ ²⁰The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ ²¹But he was speaking of the temple of his body. ²²After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

23 When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

            So, an interesting geographical detail from the Wedding at Cana, this place is located just north of Nazareth, in very close proximity, hinting at some connection between the places as the reason for the invitation for Jesus and his mom.  This is a closing bit I did not think of yesterday.

            It showed up now in relation to Jesus’ move.  From Cana, it says he went down to Capernaum with his mom, his disciples, and his brothers (BROTHERS?  See note below) for a few days.  He would have gone ‘down’ because he would be walking through the Jezreel Valley, pretty much due east of Cana, over the rise at the close of the Valley and ‘down’ into the basin in which the Sea of Galilee lay.  Then it is around the west side of the Sea until he gets to Capernaum, along the northern coast of the Sea.  Something to test for, geographically, is the significance of Capernaum.  I have read that this was something of Jesus’ ‘home base’ between his itinerancy (walk-abouts) as a Rabbi.

            Verse 13 records the Passover as being near and introduces us to the incident in Jesus’ ministry which has the greatest ‘temporal’ displacement.  The driving out of the moneychangers takes place early in Jesus’ ministry (almost first) in the Gospel of John, but in the other gospels, when recorded, it is much closer to the end, almost connected to the Passover at which Jesus is to be crucified, as though this incident is one of the things that set Holy Week into operation. 

            Some have tried to explain that there were two such incidents.  It is something I cannot explain at present.  But that distracts from the incident itself.

            It is near Passover, Jesus was at Capernaum, in the north of the Promised Land, and it records that he went back to Jerusalem in anticipation of the Sabbath.  He went ‘down’ to Capernaum from the highlands that surround it.  The normal route to Jerusalem was to follow the Jordan River south, to about where John was baptizing, across from Bethany-on-the-Jordan, and then climb “up” to the peak on which Jerusalem was situated.

            What follows is actually drawn from a recent sermon as these were the lectionary verses for that particular Sunday.  It is necessary to understand that there is a great concentration of Jews in Jerusalem and what we know as the Promised Land, but there was also a HUGE scattering of Jews across the lands around it, across the Roman Empire and across the Middle East as we call it today.

            Take a moment to pull up a map of Israel in the times of the Old Testament.  The twelve tribes of Israel each had their allotted portion of the land.  After David and Solomon, that united kingdom divided north and south.  The Northern Kingdom would eventually be conquered by Assyria and the people carried off into the region now occupied by Iran and Iraq.  That Kingdom was never restored.  A couple hundred years later, the Southern Kingdom would be carried off into the Babylonian Exile, pulled out of the land for seventy years, by which time the Persian Empire had swallowed up the Babylonians as a power and the people were allowed to return.

            Even with relative independence under the Persians, the Jews in the Promised Land would then be overtaken by the Greeks in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests.  There would be internecine fighting between the smaller empires carved out of Alexander’s conquests by his generals.  At length, Rome would rise up and conquer the Promised Land.

            At the end of this, there were significant Jewish populations in Assyria, as well as in Babylon.  Even after the return from the Exile, after almost two generations, the Jews were well established in Babylon and not everyone came back.  Then, with the Greek and Roman conquests, there was a steady stream of people looking to get out of the warzone.  That happens to this day.  Jews would end up creating communities in cities from Egypt to Greece to Rome itself and beyond.  Collectively, this is known as the Jewish Diaspora.

            The importance of this surrounds Jewish festivals like Passover.  For as widely spread as the Jews were, Jerusalem was still the center of their religious world.  That is why “Next year in Jerusalem” is still a part of the Passover Seder liturgy.  What happened at moments like Passover (and Pentecost, where Acts records there were Jews from multiple language groups around the empire and beyond) is that there is a HUGE influx of pilgrims.  Jerusalem could see its population swell from twice to more than five times it’s ‘peacetime’ population levels. 

            When people came, it was to carry out the Law of Moses, to carry out the requisite sacrifices at the temple.  There were two choices, attempt to travel, primarily on foot, with the cattle and sheep to be sacrificed, or to shop locally.  The latter made travel far easier, so it was preferred.  And the economic system in Jerusalem set up for that.  But in addition to the proper sacrifice, there was the question of currency.  In the Ten Commandments, there is a law barring any kind of image to be made of God.  Outside of the Promised Land, all the currency was stamped with the deities important to those issuing the coins (in the Empire, that was usually the Emperor, who’d received an official ‘promotion’ to godhood as part of his leadership package). 

            If the Jews can’t put their own God on their coins, the holy work in the Holy Place of the temple CERTAINLY cannot receive coins that have other gods on them.  The only currency that met this criteria was what they minted in the Promised Land itself. So, to buy the animals for sacrifice locally, to make donations to the Temple, all of that required the local coin.  So, currency exchange was the other big business.

            What better way to make this convenient for the religious tourist than to concentrate these services at the very place where they will be needed?  Right there at the Temple!! 

            According to the law of Moses, the sacrifices to the Lord for those who could afford it encompassed sheep and cattle.  For those who could not, the acceptable sacrifice was of a dove.  In Luke, after Jesus’ birth story, it is recorded that Joseph and Mary went to Jerusalem to make the sacrifice of redemption of the first-born (REDEMPTION OF WHAT?  See note below), which was of a dove.

            So the Passover was near, the City of Jerusalem was in full ‘pilgrim’ mode (which, in my visit to Jerusalem, included hotels that had daily changes to their room rates depending on how close they were to a holiday in the City).  Jesus went up to Jerusalem and in the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and the money-changers were sitting at their tables (vs. 14).  I hope this post has explained why they were there.  Next time, how Jesus reacts.

Pastor Pete

Notes: Brothers of Jesus

            One of the dividing issues between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is the family of Jesus.  In various places, the gospels speak of relatives beyond Mary, the Mother of Jesus.  What is translated here as ‘brothers’, in other places as ‘brothers and sisters’, in my tradition, is translated as ‘cousins’ in the Roman Catholic tradition. 

            These divisions have to do with the traditions around the person and the life of Mary, Jesus’ Mother.  She plays a far more substantial role in the work and life of the church in the Roman Catholic tradition than in the Protestant tradition.  There was a time in my life when I was ready to be far more polemic (according to Wikipedea, “A polemic is contentious rhetoric that is intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and undermining of the opposing position.”) about this subject.  In other words, I was far more prepared to be a jerk about why I thought I was right and the other side was wrong. 

            Where I am now, I still believe that there is an over-investment in the person and role of Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition, which includes a belief that she had no other children.  In contrast to that, I think we of the Protestant, and the Reformed tradition especially, have gone so far in opposition, that we have lost an important element in the life and ministry of Jesus.

    I am fully prepared to acknowledge those differences, but I am NOT going to fight about them.

Redemption of the First Born:

            According to the law of Moses, the first-born of every creature under God’s Rule, human and animal, is sacred to the Lord.  What this means in terms of animals is that they are sacrificed to the Lord.  What this means for people is that the first-born sons (misogyny was SO rampant at that time) belonged to the Lord, but they were ‘redeemed’ by the families via animal sacrifice.  Thus, this is what Mary and Joseph offered on behalf of Jesus.

            There is more around the redemption of the first born.  Abraham was called upon to sacrifice Isaac, his ‘only’ son to God (ignoring Hagar and the sacrifice of her life and virtue to give Abraham his son Ishmael; not being of the ‘proper’ wife, he basically did not exist legally).

The last plague in Egypt before the Exodus was God’s slaying of all the first born. 

When the people of Israel were being organized into a nation after they got out of Egypt, God’s first call was that the first born would serve as the priests and those who did God’s work among the nation.  But because of other events, there was a ‘swap’ and this role fell upon the tribe of the third Son of Israel, onto the tribe of Levi.

  Yes, there is NO chapter and verse about these references.  They are in Genesis and Exodus.  I am pulling them from memory.  Google is a good search tool to find out more.  Using a concordance is also excellent for finding these references.  

Jesus is the First Born, the Son of God.  We are adopted into the family of God by what Jesus’ did.