John 2, Part 2

Notes
Transcript
Transitional Verse
12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.
After the first public miracle, Jesus leaves Cana and goes to Capernaum. After a few days in Capernaum Jesus has goes to Jerusalem and is appalled at what He finds going on in the temple.
13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there.
15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.
16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
(Jesus went down from Cana to Capernaum, since Cana was in the hill country while Capernaum was at the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum is about 16 miles (26 km) to the northeast of Cana and could easily be reached in a day’s journey. People went up to Jerusalem because it was located at a higher elevation than Galilee and because it was the capital.)
Much of the Gospel of John revolves around the Passover festivals in Jerusalem. John wants to make sure we never lose sight of who Jesus was and why Jesus came. Jesus is not the main character in an interesting story. He’s more than a wise teacher. Jesus came to earth because of Passover—to fulfill, once and for all, God’s promise of a spotless Lamb who will take away the sins of the world (1:36).
Passover is an important time in Israel. In Jesus’s day every adult male living within fifteen miles of Jerusalem is required to attend the Passover. If he’s over the age of nineteen, he has to pay a temple tax. Many Jews from much farther away will make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Passover to participate in the celebration. When they arrive, their first destination is the temple, to pay the tax and then to offer a sacrifice in worship to God. However, when Jesus arrives, the temple doesn’t look like a place of worship; it looks like a place of business. Inside the temple he finds men selling animals to be sacrificed and offering to change foreign currency for currency acceptable to pay the tax. Jesus fashions a whip and expels all of these businessmen and their livestock. The money changers have their coins spilled and their tables overthrown, and those who are selling doves are ordered to get themselves and their birds out of the temple.
Jesus is angry. How can Jesus be angry? If God is love, how can Jesus—who is God—get angry? Genuine love is compatible with anger. In fact, genuine love is sometimes demonstrated by anger. At times anger proves love is authentic. Let me give you an example: a friend of mine is passionate about ending modern-day slavery and human trafficking. He writes and speaks about it. He’s visited Washington to meet with politicians. He has traveled to foreign countries to learn more about stopping it. He’s worked hard to bring it to people’s attention. I don’t doubt his commitment to ending trafficking. I don’t doubt his love for those in slavery. But I would doubt a claim that he never got angry about it. I know his love for the abused is real because he gets angry when he sees the abuse.
I could declare my undying affection for my wife, but if you saw me sit back and yawn while someone hurt her, would you believe I loved her? My love for her would be manifested by the anger I displayed at what was harming her. “Spineless love is hardly love” (Borchert, John 1–11, 164). Jesus’s love for his Father fuels his anger at the temple’s corruption. Jesus doesn’t lose his temper. He’s not out of control. He doesn’t fly off the handle. But he is angry. He’s in control of his emotions and can articulate why he’s angry, and he displays his anger without sinning.
Jesus is angry because the Jews have desecrated his Father’s house (v. 16). When the first temple was dedicated to God, the builder, King Solomon, called it “an exalted temple for [him], a place for [God’s] dwelling forever” (1 Kgs 8:13). At that dedication, “the glory of the LORD filled the temple” (1 Kgs 8:11). God isn’t confined to the temple, but the temple is a special place where he would meet men. In this house men would come to worship him, and sacrifices were offered to him. This house was built to display his glory. But the sounds of confession have been replaced with the sounds of commerce. Gone are silent prayers to God. They have been exchanged for the angry chorus of men haggling over the price of bulls and sheep. The cooing of doves and the stink of manure now occupy the place that used to be reserved for men to humble themselves and worship God. Jesus levels a charge, but the charge is not unethical practices. They have twisted the purpose of the temple. Jesus is denouncing impure worship. The holiness and gravity of worship have been lost. People have forgotten why they come to the temple in the first place.
In another place Jesus calls them thieves, but here the focus is not on their exorbitant prices. It’s not on how they’re doing business. The focus is on where they’re doing business. How dare they take the place of worship and turn it into a marketplace? They’ve set up shop in the outer court of the temple, the court of the Gentiles. Their lust for money is interfering with the Gentiles’ coming to worship the one true God. They’ve trivialized the worship of God. When an unbeliever entered the temple and saw the commerce, he would assume the God of Israel is a prop used to extort people’s money. Jesus is angry because his Father’s house is being corrupted. Worship is being perverted. Kent Hughes wrote, “The way we worship reveals what we think about God” (John, 70). Jesus thought correctly about God. He perfectly understood the holiness, power, and authority of God. That is why he was so passionate about God’s house.
In John 2:16 Jesus says, “My Father’s house,” not “Our Father’s house.” This choice of words implies the men doing this are not children of God. If you come to worship God each week and all you think about is yourself—how you can profit from religion, what you like or dislike, what you want or don’t want, and what bothers you or satisfies you—then you may not be a child of God. God’s people are in awe of him. God’s people worship him. Coming to God in faith requires turning from self-worship to true worship. If each Sunday is a narcissistic activity of self-worship, then you are walking in the footsteps of the temple merchants.
When Jesus calls God his Father, he’s stressing his unique authority to protect God’s house. He’s highlighting his exclusive place as the eternal Son of God—not a child of God by spiritual birth like us but forever the Son of God (1:14). At the end of this account in chapter 2, we find an editorial comment: “And his disciples remembered that it is written: Zeal for your house will consume me” (2:17). Jesus’s actions caused his disciples to remember Psalm 69:9: “Because zeal for your house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” Psalm 69 is a psalm of David. David is crying out in despair because of those who oppose him. A major source of the problems between him and his opponents is their failure to understand David’s commitment to the temple. The promised Messiah would come as a son of David who was greater than David. Just as David was consumed with zeal for the temple, so too would the greater David—the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Jesus’s anger at the abuse of the temple not only demonstrated his commitment to the Father, but it also demonstrated that he was the promised Messiah, sent by God.
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”
19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
22 When therefore 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.
The Jewish leaders confront Jesus and ask him for a sign (v. 18). They want to know what right he has to do this. It’s a demand for Jesus to justify himself. They desire an explanation—proof Jesus has the authority to drive people out of the temple. Their question ignores whether Jesus is just in doing it. They don’t do any self-examination. The first response should have been to ask, Was this necessary? Their question does reveal that even Jesus’s enemies recognize something unique about him. If you were in charge of the temple, wouldn’t you want Jesus to be prosecuted? If your money-changing table was overturned or your cattle were driven out, wouldn’t you hope to see Jesus hauled off to jail? You would unless there was something special about him, unless there might be a reason he’s justified in doing this. The religious leaders understand Jesus is different—he’s not some crazy radical. There’s an inherent authority in what he does.
In verse 19 Jesus offers them a sign: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” It took forty-six years to build the temple, and Jesus says he’ll rebuild it in three days. If they want a sign of his authority, they’ll have to knock down the temple and see if he’ll rebuild it in three days. In essence Jesus says, “How bad do you want a sign? Knock it down, and I’ll rebuild it.” But the Jewish religious leaders have already missed the sign. His disciples see it. The sign of his authority is the zeal he has for his Father’s house. Just as David had great zeal for the temple, the second David would be even more zealous. Jesus comes into their midst, he fulfills the words that David prophesied about the Messiah, yet they’re too concerned with other interests to see and understand who he is and what he has done.
John’s third and final editorial comment (vv. 21–22) explains the greater significance of Jesus’s words. Jesus is actually referring to his body. We can make at least two connections between the temple and Jesus’s body. First, the temple is where God meets man. Jesus is God, and through him God has come to man in a new and unique way—a way far greater than in the temple. Second, the temple was where sacrifices were offered for sin. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice offered once and for all for the sins of the whole world. But the sign was not that his body was the temple. The sign was that after the Jewish leaders had torn down his body, he would raise it up in three days. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the ultimate sign of his authority. If he has authority over death, then he has authority over the temple. His disciples don’t immediately understand what he’s saying. John says they don’t make the connection until after his resurrection (v. 22). After his death and before his resurrection, his disciples are terrified. They lock themselves in an upper room (20:19), hopeless and defeated. Then the resurrected Jesus appears to them, and everything changes in an instant. They connect all that he had said before. They realize Jesus has been planning and preparing them all along.
Hearing about God’s anger at sin could lead a person to despair, but the next part of the passage tells us about Jesus’s death and resurrection. If people refuse to turn from self-worship, then they should despair. God’s white-hot anger will be turned on them when they stand before him one day. But Jesus died—his body was torn down—and he rose again so they might find joy and hope in him. His death turned God’s anger away, and if they believe in him, God will pardon them and give them life. The resurrection of Jesus assures us that God loves to make beauty out of brokenness. That’s good news for broken people.
VERSES 23-25 introduces what will be coming - you must be born again - Nicodemus.