Biblion Bible Commentary
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Destroy This Temple
John 2:13-22
13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. · WEB
He drives the market out of the temple courts and answers the demand for credentials with a sentence nobody understands for three years.
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem John 2:13.
This Gospel places a temple clearing at the start of the ministry where the other accounts place one in the last week. Readers have long divided over whether the same event has been moved for thematic reasons or whether it happened twice in three years. Both readings are held by careful people, and nothing in this passage settles it. What this account plainly does is put the confrontation with the temple authorities at the front, so that everything after it is read as happening between a man and an institution that has already decided about him.
He made a whip of cords and drove all out of the temple, both the sheep and the oxen John 2:15.
The whip is this account's detail, and the wording is careful about what it was used on — the animals. The livestock is driven, the coins are poured out, the tables go over.
The trade was legally necessary. Pilgrims needed unblemished animals and temple currency for the half-shekel, and it was all conducted in the one court that Gentiles were allowed into. What that meant in practice is that the only place in the building where a foreigner could pray was a stockyard with a bureau de change in it.
"Take these things out of here! Don't make my Father's house a marketplace!" John 2:16.
The charge here is not robbery, which is what the other accounts record him quoting; it is marketplace. The complaint is against commerce as such occupying that space — and my Father's house is a claim made in public, in the temple, at Passover, by a Galilean nobody.
His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will eat me up" John 2:17 Psalms 69:9. They reach for a psalm, and the verb they land on is consume. The zeal will eat him, and the psalm they are quoting goes on to the vinegar offered for thirst Psalms 69:21.
"What sign do you show us, seeing that you do these things?" John 2:18. The question is not unreasonable. Someone has taken authority over the temple courts, and they ask what backs it.
"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" John 2:19.
The answer is a riddle and it is a sign given in advance — the only one on offer, and it will not be visible for three years. The imperative destroy is not a request; it is a challenge that hands them the initiative, and they take it.
"It took forty-six years to build this temple! Will you raise it up in three days?" John 2:20. The literal reading, offered in derision, and this book's standard technique: the flat misunderstanding is allowed to stand so that the real meaning can arrive later.
But he spoke of the temple of his body John 2:21.
The writer explains it for the reader, which he does rarely. And the identification is enormous: the building where God's presence met his people is being replaced by a person, which is what the prologue said when it used the word for pitching a tent John 1:14.
When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said John 2:22.
The sentence is a small confession by the man writing. He is telling us that he did not understand it at the time, that he understood it afterward, and that the remembering is where the belief came from. It is the second time in one chapter the account has said his disciples remembered, and this book was written by somebody who had done a great deal of it.
held with reason What this mark means