Jesus and His Bible, Part 9

Welcome and Worship in God's House

To summarize events between the last quotation and this next one: After his encounter with the rich man, Jesus educated his followers on how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he said that those who left their houses and relationships and lands would receive back  a hundred times their loss in this time, accompanied by persecution, and in the time to come, would receive eternal life.  He told the disciples he would be killed in Jerusalem, and the response recorded by Mark is that James and John came to ask for seats of preeminence in the kingdom. Jesus said they would have to share in his experience, and that they would indeed share it, but that he didn’t decide who was preeminent in the kingdom of God. (He had just said that the last would be first, so that’s a clue.) He also said that whoever wants to be great among Jesus’s followers must be the slave of all.  Then he healed blind Bartimaeus. 

He entered Jerusalem on a colt and the crowds hailed him as King. He looked around the temple and went back out of Jerusalem for the night.

On the way back into Jerusalem, he cursed a fig tree without fruit, and then returned to the temple. It is easy to connect the fig tree to the temple as an enacted parable, given what happened next.  He drove out those who bought and sold in the temple and turned over the tables of the money-changers.

And then he said: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robber’s den” (Mark 11:17). The picture invoked is that the merchants in the temple are like a band of robbers who hurry back to their safe hideout to count their takings, and the temple is that cave.  

Jesus quoted two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The first is Isaiah 56:7. This quotation comes from a passage that begins “Preserve justice, and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.” The passage promises blessing to those who do not profane the Sabbath and who do no evil. The blessing is also for the foreigner and the eunuch who keep God’s Sabbaths and choose what pleases God and hold fast to God’s covenant.  

Jesus invoked Isaiah’s inclusive prophecy as he cleared out all the hubbub and chicanery from the court of the Gentiles.  By his action, seen as a parable, Jesus took the holy interior of the temple where only Jews could go and extended it out into the outer court where Gentiles were allowed to visit. He invited outsiders into God’s presence, including them in the privilege of worshiping God. 

The second is Jeremiah 7:11. This comes from a word that Jeremiah was told to speak in the Lord’s house, the temple, to all the people of Judah who entered to worship. This is the immediate context: 

Amend your ways and deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not think that because the temple is here, you are ok. You must practice justice, you must not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow, and you must not shed innocent blood or worship idols. But if you do wrong and then come here and say “We are delivered”—has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? 

This directly confronts any sense of being exclusively chosen to belong to God, the sign of which for the Jews is the temple. Sadly, however, their actions do not reflect justice and mercy to those who are other and those who are needy or helpless. If they are implicated in the death of the innocent and if they put anything (like wealth, see the rich man of Mark 10) ahead of God in their worship, they have made the temple a robbers’  hideout. (It is not hard to apply this to the many who make money out of religion in our time.) Jeremiah highlights the teachings of the Torah that specifically command justice and mercy to vulnerable groups of people and the many instances in the Hebrew scripture that insist on care for the innocent and putting God first. 

In both quotations from Jesus’s Bible, the context has to do with the fact that the chosen people have themselves chosen to act without justice and righteousness and they have thus obscured the intent of God, which is to invite and include the foreigner, the powerless, the eunuch in the knowledge and worship of the true God, and to protect the interests of the helpless, friendless, and innocent.  Instead, in Jesus’s time, the place these folks were welcome had become a marketplace rather than a place of worship, a place where the “protected” classes were taken advantage of in order to accumulate money.