Today's Bible Reading and a reflection by Rev'd Edith
Our reading for today is the story of Jesus removing the money changers from the Temple. A well-known passage, but it is often seen in very simplistic terms. It isn’t a story about a protest about exploitation by the money changers and the dove sellers. They may have been making a profit. After all they had to make a living as well as everybody else. People had to be able to buy pure animals for sacrifice. To buy animals you had to have the right money, and the Temple insisted on its own special coins. It isn’t the buying, selling and money-changing Jesus is objecting to in itself.
The word translated in this passage as ‘robbers’ does not mean thieves. A better translation is ‘brigands’. Brigands were revolutionaries, people who believed so strongly in God’s coming kingdom of justice and triumph for Israel that they were prepared to take the law into their own hands. They were violent. The temple itself, instead of being regarded as the place where Israel could come to God in prayer, had come to stand for the violent longing for a great revolution in which the kingdom of God would come by force. By stopping the sacrificial system, Jesus was calling into question the Temple’s reason for existence. He certainly was turning the tables – physically as well as metaphorically.
Hidden, almost, in all this is the staggering fact that people were coming to Jesus in the Temple and he was healing them (v14). The people who were kept out were now welcomed in. The people who had been scorned were now healed.
Jesus turned the tables in the Temple and He continues to turn tables in our own time, in our own lives, if we allow Him in. A thought for Holy Week! Edith
