The temple of Jerusalem at Passover must have been a complete sensory overload: this manic festival atmosphere with people struggling to acquire what was necessary for worship. Thousands of worshippers, thousands of sellers, shouting over each other in Aramaic, in Greek, in whatever language they could use to agree on a price. Money changers jingling foreign coins into drawers and returning bags full of Tyrian shekels across the table. Bleating lambs, the cooing birds, the smell of manure, the smell of sweat, the smell of animal blood.
There was noise. It was chaos. A loud conglomeration of human concerns to acquire what was necessary to worship, to sacrifice, to celebrate.
Jesus walks into the temple – sees the crass use of his Father's house as a place to pocket profit! His eyes must have been shooting fireworks! He tears open gates and he shoos animals out of their pens. He flips tables in fury. Eyes wide, people stop transacting, and start running. Coins scatter and the birds take flight.
Imagine afterward the shocked silence. The beautiful, blessed quiet as people contemplated what just happened.
How can that temple be a metaphor for our own lives? Why have the sacred spaces in our hearts become full of distraction and noise?
I barter with what I want to do versus what I actually could do. The language of my excuses sounds like Greek to my sense of comfort! I negotiate with my desire to have what I want versus my desire to give unreservedly. I crowd my inner court with distraction – with scrolling, with commenting, with comparing – hoping to become something worthy enough to approach the altar.
The marketplace of my mind drowns out the one voice I need to hear, but Jesus stomps right out into the middle of my chaos and flips all the tables I'm hiding behind: it is the voice of my Lord calling me to return again to sacrifice the small things in service of the larger thing, the only thing that matters: the loving of my God with my whole heart, and the loving of my neighbor.
He clears the temple so that communion can happen again. So that silence can return. So that I can hear the voice of my Father saying, "You are mine."
by Carie Grant
