stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.
What is the Father's house meant to be if not the visible representation of the ordering of our lives toward God? Like well ordered temples we are meant employ structures that keep God's presence as our central concern. If our lives are concentric rings of priorities, the closer to the center we get the more we want the space to be reserved for God alone. We are temples of the Holy Spirit (see First Corinthians 6:19-20) and yet in spite of this dignity we often allow worldly concerns access to courts that are meant for praising God and enjoying his presence. We are meant to be able to enter our inner courts without the baggage of the world, without noisy and distracting desires for something besides God. But we smuggle in the things we truly worship, the idols we adore without identifying, by a pretense of religion. Sacrificial animals were in an important part of the temple system in the time of Jesus. But in the name of providing them, the idol of the love of money was usurping a place that was meant for love of God alone.
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples (see Isaiah 56:7)
We come up with justifications for why we can't simply spend time peacefully in the presence of God, why we must instead focus more upon the worries of the world than on him. But this too, this need for control, is idolatry. We are meant to bring our petitions to God like sacrificial animals, ready as offerings, but without the need for control or the need to hold on that an economy of money changing symbolically represents.
He made a whip out of cords
and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen,
and spilled the coins of the money changers
and overturned their tables,
and to those who sold doves he said,
“Take these out of here,
and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
Jesus does not want our soul to be a marketplace. He wants to free us from the attitude which plagued both the prodigal son and his elder brother who were concerned only for what was their own, apart from what the had in common with their father. He wants to do this because when we focus on ourselves at the expense of God and neighbor we are in fact sacrificing our freedom.
In those days, God delivered all these commandments:
“I, the LORD, am your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery.
God gave the commandments not to limit the freedom of his people, but to ensure it. He knew that the people had come from a place of slavery and that they still had the tendencies toward slavery that idolatry inherently contained within their hearts. Now that they were free of physical bondage, he wanted to ensure that they did not act in ways that would finally limit their freedom. The only way this could work is if they put him first, above all other concerns. There was a sense in which each of the commandments could be read as blueprints for building a temple to God in their hearts.
You shall not have other gods besides me.
You shall not carve idols for yourselves
in the shape of anything in the sky above
or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;
you shall not bow down before them or worship them.
The Lord wants to purify our hearts just as he did the temple. Only parts of us the don't serve our highest good stand to lose from this purification. We tend to identify with those parts and so fear his purifying action within. But we would do well to embrace what he wants to do in us. The temple may have to be entirely destroyed and rebuilt by his resurrection power. But when it is finally doing what it is meant to do we will understand why he had such zeal to set it right.
Do we find it hard to trust God to come to us, and to let him reorder our loves?
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
The sign he offers us as proof that we should trust him with the temple of our heart is the Cross. Only the Cross can allow us to see beyond the limited perspective of merchants and slaves to see the goodness of the plan the Father has for his house, for our hearts, in which he intends to dwell.
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