Trouble with the Temple

During this Advent season, we are doing a short series of sermons on the biblical theme of the temple. The temple is an important biblical theme, a theme that runs from the opening chapters of Genesis all the way through to Revelation. Understanding the theme of the temple will help us understand the entire biblical message.

It will certainly help us understand Jesus and some of his strange (to us) behavior like what we see in this passage. We Gentiles must never lose sight of the fact that Jesus was a Jew, that he shared the hopes and aspirations of the Jewish faith, and that everything he did has to be explained from within that context.

How shall we describe the hopes and aspirations of the Jewish faith? One word that would summarize it well is shalom, peace. Jesus was passionate about peace, so passionate about it that he would insist that everything that prevents the world from experiencing this peace, this shalom, had to be removed. It would have to go. And in this passage, the quite shocking thing that Jesus is suggesting, is that it is the temple itself which is preventing the peace that God desires for his world.

Let’s consider, first, the temple’s purpose; second, its failure; third, its future.

The Temple’s Purpose

First, we need to understand the temple’s purpose. What was it there for? What did it represent? What did it symbolize? We need to understand this if we are going to make sense of Jesus and what he came to do. You see, it is virtually impossible to overemphasize the importance of the temple in Jesus’s day.[1] And yet, it is difficult for many modern readers to keep this in mind as they read the Scriptures. Here are three things the temple was intended to signify.

Presence of God

First, it signified the presence of God. One of the most important concepts about temples—and this was certainly not unique to ancient Israel—was the idea that a temple is the place where that nation’s god took up residence.[2] Israel’s temple was no different. It was built to be God’s house, the place where heaven and earth came together.

Now, we modern people might scoff at this, consider it the superstitions of ancient peoples, but they were not fools. When Solomon dedicated the temple he built, he said,

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! (1 Kings 8:27)

So, it’s not like he thought that God could somehow be put inside the box they built. But that God could in fact occupy the box—this was not a sign of God’s limitation but of his condescension and grace. One scholar wrote,

If God has a tabernacle or temple on earth, it is not that he needs a place to dwell in, for his holy house on high was there before the world was created, but, we might put it, because men need some visible thing by which to realize his loving presence.[3]

So, the temple signified the presence of God.

Communion with God

Second, the temple signified communion with God. The temple was the place where sacrifices were offered. And what was the purpose of sacrifices? Here again we “enlightened” folk might scoff, we no doubt will be appalled at the whole idea of animal sacrifice. But such practices were taken for granted in the ancient world.[4]Not much time was spent explaining why this was commonplace, but it certainly had do to with both forgiveness of sins and cleansing from defilement.[5]And these were not merely about individual forgiveness and cleansing but also about national purification. N. T. Wright comments,

If [the temple] was the place where Israel’s god lived . . . it was also the place of sacrifice, where sins and impurities alike could be dealt with, enabling the people, individually and as a nation, to enjoy the unbroken presence of their god.[6]

Kingdom of God

That national perspective on the temple helps us see a third purpose for the temple. The temple signified not only the presence of God and communion with God. It also signified the kingdom of God.

We can hardly say that the temple was a mere religious place you could go to once a week to take care of your spiritual life and health. The temple signified a kingdom, a political reality. The temple meant that the god who lived there was in charge, and the people who worshiped him there were his citizens, the ones who would benefit from his reign. When some of Israel’s exiles returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple after the first temple had been burned to the ground by the Babylonians, some of their adversaries tried to stop them by sending a letter to the king of Persia saying,

And now be it known to the king that the Jews who came up from you to us have gone to Jerusalem. They are rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city. They are finishing the walls and repairing the foundations. Now be it known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and the walls finished, they will not pay tribute, custom, or toll, and the royal revenue will be impaired (Ezra 4:11-13).

They urged the Persian king to search the historical records and he would learn that

this city is a rebellious city, hurtful to kings and provinces, and that sedition was stirred up in it from of old. That was why this city was laid waste. We make known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and its walls finished, you will then have no possession in the province Beyond the River (Ezra 4:15-16).

Notice that the act of rebuilding the temple was the first sign that someone was attempting to build a city and an entire rival kingdom. That’s what Israel’s temple represents.

The Temple’s Failure

So now as we come to these strange stories in our passage today, we need to keep these primary purposes of the temple in mind. As a Jew, Jesus would certainly have had these things in mind, and his actions here and elsewhere are best explained from within that perspective. And from that perspective we can quite easily see that Jesus considers the temple to be a failure. It is not living up to its purpose, and this is a very big deal.

The Prophetic Ministry of Jesus

One of the great difficulties we face when reading the Bible is the temptation to disconnect the New Testament from the Old. Without even knowing it, we can start to imbibe the heresies of Marcion, that second century theologian who considered Christianity to be completely at odds with Judaism and the Old Testament texts. Don’t be a Marcionite! Interpret the New Testament in continuity with the Old.

Old Testament scriptures are hovering all around everything we find in Mark 11. The triumphal entry that begins the chapter echoes Zechariah 9:9.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

So, what does Jesus think he’s doing when he rides into Jerusalem on a borrowed colt? He thinks he is this long-awaited king that the Old Testament had predicted, and the words the crowd is singing proves the point. They are citing from Psalm 118. This is Israel’s Messiah. This is her great king. Here he comes as the renewed Davidic king, coming to establish the long-awaited kingdom of God.

If you have a Bible with cross-references, keep your eye on them as you keep reading. Because there are clear echoes here to Isaiah and Jeremiah which also explain what is going on, what Jesus thinks he is going. Jesus sees himself as standing in continuity with some of Israel’s great prophets who often performed symbolic acts that seem strange to us.[7] Isaiah walked around naked, Jeremiah smashed pots, Ezekiel drew a map of Jerusalem on a clay brick. These “sign-acts” so often had to do with Jerusalem and its temple, as do Jesus’s acts in our passage today. If we don’t keep this in mind, well, you can just imagine how strange our interpretation and application of these passages might become.

The best way to understand these “strange stories” is to see them as prophetic symbols, in the tradition of Israel’s great prophets. As a prophet, Jesus is speaking for God, representing God. The arrival of Israel’s God at the temple is the arrival of Israel’s great hope. This is the return of the king, the arrival of the kingdom, the inauguration of the last days. It is an exciting moment. Until all of a sudden, it’s not.

The Fruitless Fig Tree

Because, first, Jesus does not find what he was looking for.

As he approaches Jerusalem, he is hungry. He sees a fig tree in the distance, sees that it is in leaf, and goes to see if he can find any fruit on it to eat. But he was disappointed to find nothing but leaves, and he spoke disparagingly to it: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” The disciples heard what he said. After the temple incident in verses 15-19, we are told in verse 20 that the next morning, as they passed by that fig tree again, “they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots.”

It’s a strange story, not least because the fig tree hadn’t done anything wrong. Mark says in verse 13 that “it was not the season for figs.” But what explains the story is the Old Testament background. Although it isn’t cited directly, Jeremiah 8 is clearly in the background. In that passage, God is declaring judgment against his people who have said “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace (Jer 8:11), for not being ashamed at their various abominations (Jer 8:12). Verse 13 says this: “When I would gather them, declares the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.”

The point, then, of the fruitless fig tree is that here, at the moment when God is coming to his temple, he find that his people are fruitless. But it’s not because they haven’t had time; it’s because the problem is in the roots, as it were. This tree will never produce the fruit God is looking for. It is good for nothing. It might as well be chopped down.

The Abominations in the Temple

Now something similar is happening in this strange story in the temple. Only this time Jesus finds what he is not looking for.

The background again is Jeremiah, but one chapter earlier. The fact that Jeremiah 7-8 present the backdrop to these two stories show us that for Mark (and Jesus) these two actions of Jesus are to be explained in light of that wider Old Testament context. Jeremiah was directed to “stand in the gate of the LORD’s house” and warn the people not to “trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD’” (Jer 7:4). He goes on to say that just because the temple is the LORD’s house, this in no way guarantees its longevity. In verse 11, we read, “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” Yes, indeed, Jeremiah says. God has seen it and he has a history of tearing down his own house “because of the evil of my people Israel” (v. 12).

So, when Jesus goes into the temple and wreaks havoc, and explains his actions with the words of Jeremiah, there is no doubt that this is what Jesus is signifying: he is signifying that the temple has failed and God himself is going to put an end to it, just like he did in the Old Testament. And just as Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army took down the first temple, so also Titus and the Roman army took down the second almost four decades after Jesus. A prophet of God indeed.

The Temple’s Future

The thing about Jesus is he is not just another one of Israel’s prophets, coming along and saying that God had had enough of Israel’s failures, that God was going to judge his own people. The thing about Jesus is that this is at the same time an announcement of judgment and an announcement of salvation. The king has arrived at the temple, at long last, and has found it wanting. He will turn the temple upside down (quite literally, in fact). But like demolition day at the start of a remodel, the tear down signifies the beginning of the rebuild. The temple has a future, and it starts right here.

A Fresh Start

To understand Jesus, we can’t forget the temple and its significance. Jesus didn’t set out to overthrow Judaism and its temple but to fulfill it. You see, Israel’s God is not unrighteous. He keeps his promise. He fulfills his covenant. His plan for the world is not going to fail. His temple will stand forever as a testimony to his victory. The Christmas season is as good a time as any for us Christians to be thinking about the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord—the one that will stand forever.

Consider, for example, the significance of the Jewish celebration called Hanukkah, celebrated during the same season as Christmas (this year: December 14-22). The festival pre-dates Jesus; John 10:22-23 mentions it. It commemorates the successful Jewish revolt against the Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanes. Antiochus attempted to Hellenize all the people under his rule, including the Jews. As part of that attempt, he turned the temple into a pagan shrine and sacrificed a pig on the altar. As you can imagine, this was quite the insult. A devout Jew and his five sons started a revolt and won. They liberated Jerusalem and the first thing they did was purify the temple. The temple was then rededicated with an eight-day long festival, which is what we now know as the festival of Hanukkah.

We might think that Hanukkah and Christmas have little to do with each other, but as one Jewish author writes, they “have one real point of contact.”

Had Antiochus succeeded in obliterating Jewry a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, there would have been no Christmas. The feast of the Nativity rests on the victory of Hanuka.[8]

A Different Kind of Temple

So, let’s not forget the temple theme when we think about Jesus this Christmas season.

Unless we are to imagine that Jesus’ action was purely random and unreflective—which itself would be exceedingly unlikely, granted all the other things we know about him—we must suppose that what he did in the Temple was closely integrated with, perhaps even climactic to, the rest of his work.[9]

Yes, indeed. In John’s record of Jesus’s violent actions in the temple, Jesus explains his actions like this: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

The Jews must have laughed as they pointed out it had taken forty-six years to build the temple. But John tells us that Jesus “was speaking about the temple of his body.” (Jn 2:19-21).

Praying and Forgiving

So, we can see that Jesus is certainly not giving up on the temple theme and all that it is meant to signify. But he is taking it in a quite surprising new direction.

Jesus is claiming to be the true temple, and since the current one that was standing had become antagonistic to what the true temple signified, a head-on collision was imminent. Which would still be standing when the battle was over? And what would this all mean for disciples of Jesus, then and now?

As Jesus explains the fig tree incident to his disciples, he urges them to “have faith in God.” His claim in verse 23 seems to be another reference to the temple: “this mountain” that could be “taken up and thrown into the sea” would most naturally be a reference to the temple in Jerusalem he has just challenged.[10] To “have faith in God” then is to have faith in Jesus who, if the temple there in Jerusalem did come down in dramatic fashion, would have yet more validation as a genuine prophet of God.

If Jesus is the true temple, then the ideals for which the temple exists would finally be realized in him. In verse 17, Jesus cites from another Old Testament text, Isaiah 56:7, when he says that God’s house is to be “called a house of prayer for all the nations,” Jew and Gentile alike. The true temple will be the place where Jew and Gentile come on equal footing into the presence of God and commune with God.

Because, you see, though the temple in Jerusalem should fall, there would now be a cornerstone laid that would become the new and genuine temple, built to last forever. For those who believe in Jesus, they would become members of his body, living stones of this ultimate temple. So Jesus urges them to reflect the ideals of this true temple in verse 23: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive.”

In other words, offer shalom. Offer peace.

As the chapter draws to a close, there is a question about the authority of Jesus, because Jesus is doing something in this chapter that is quite daring. You don’t get to just go around redefining everything about the temple, but that’s what he is doing. He doesn’t give up on the temple. He is not starting a new thing but showing what the old thing was about all along.

How can he do this? Because, as Paul writes to the Ephesian believers, “he himself is our peace” (Eph 2:14). Indeed, he is the prince of peace.

Or as Paul tells the Colossians, using striking temple language, it is in Jesus that “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20).

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[1] See N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 406 note 127.

[2] John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 10.

[3] George Foot Moore, cited in Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 407.

[4] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 408.

[5] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 407.

[6] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 410.

[7] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 415.

[8] Herman Wouk, This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 90.

[9] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 414.

[10] Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 422.