Posted on 11/18/2022 7:58:53 AM PST by MurphsLaw
Friday of Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 19:45–48
Friends, in today’s Gospel, we see Jesus cleansing the temple.
What did it mean for a provincial prophet to come into the holy city of Jerusalem and make a ruckus in the temple?
Well, you can probably imagine. To make matters worse,
Jesus says something that is as shocking as his actions.
He says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
No wonder it was precisely this act that led to his crucifixion.
So what was he doing and why?
First, in showing his lordship over even this most sacred symbol,
he was announcing who he was.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus acts in the person of God.
Secondly, he was instituting a new Temple, the Temple of his crucified and risen body.
Jesus himself is the place where God dwells, and we,
in the measure that we are grafted onto him, are temples of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is passing judgment on all of the inadequate, corrupt forms of human religion
and is establishing the new and eternal covenant,
the new Temple, in his own person.
My house shall be a house of prayer,
but you have made it a den of thieves.”
And every day he was teaching in the temple area.
The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the
people, meanwhile,
were seeking to put him to death,
but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose
because all the people were hanging on his words.+++
In the passage just previous to this, Jesus wept over the city and predicted there would not be a stone on top of another left standing, which would include the temple. We have contemporaneous accounts of the destruction of the temple in AD 70 which described the temple being dismantled in just this way, with the Roman soldiers searching every nook and cranny to find the remnants of the gold that had adorned the temple façade.
Jesus also may have been employing a type of "performance prophecy" where he acted out what was to come (the earlier prophets, especially Jeremiah, were known for this). By driving out the buyers and the sellers and not allowing anyone to pass through, he temporarily caused the sacrificial work in the temple to cease. By doing so, he may have been symbolically showing that soon the sacrifices in the temples would end forever.
Lots of work and prayer to be done, for sure, starting with ourselves.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.