Now, the scene in our narrative is not unlike that which may be
witnessed in any Roman Catholic country in the cathedral place or
outside the church on the saint's day, where there are long rows of
stalls, fitted up with rosaries, and images of the saint, and candles,
and other apparatus for worship.
The abuse had many practical grounds on which it could be defended. It
was very convenient to buy sacrifices on the spot, instead of having to
drag them from a distance. It was no less convenient to be able to
exchange foreign money, possibly bearing upon it the head of an
emperor, for the statutory half-shekel. It was profitable to the
sellers, and no doubt to the priests, who were probably sleeping
partners in the concern, or drew rent for the ground on which the
stalls stood. And so, being convenient for all and profitable to many,
the thing became a recognised institution.
Being familiar it became legitimate, and no one thought of any
incongruity in it until this young Nazarene felt a flash of zeal for
the sanctity of His Father's house consuming Him. Catching up some of
the reeds which served as bedding for the cattle, He twisted them into
the semblance of a scourge, which could hurt neither man nor beast. He
did not use it. It was a symbol, not an instrument. According to the
reading adopted in the Revised Version, it was the sheep and cattle,
not their owners, whom He 'drove out.' And then, dropping the scourge,
He turned to the money-changers, and, with the same hand, overthrew
their tables. And then came the turn of the sellers of doves. He would
not hurt the birds, nor rob their owners. And so He neither overthrew
nor opened the cages, but bade them 'Take these things hence'; and then
came the illuminating words, 'Make not My Father's house a house of
merchandise.'
Now this incident is very unlike our Lord's usual method, even if we do
not exaggerate the violence which He employed. It is unlike in two
respects: in the use of compulsion, and in aiming at mere outward
reformation. And both of these points are intimately connected with its
place in His career.
It was the first public appearance of Jesus before His nation as
Messiah. He inaugurates His work by a claim—by an act of authority—to
be the King of Israel and the Lord of the Temple. If we remember the
words from the last prophet, in which Malachi says that 'the Messenger
of the Covenant…shall suddenly come to His Temple, and purify the sons
of Levi,' we get the significance of this incident. We have to mark in
it our Lord's deliberate assumption of the role of Messiah; His shaping
His conduct so as to recall to all susceptible hearts that last
utterance of prophecy, and to recognise the fact that at the beginning
of His career He was fully conscious of His Son-ship, and inaugurated
His work by the solemn appeal to the nation to recognise Him as their
Lord.
And this is the reason, as I take it, why the anomalous incident is in
its place at the beginning of His career no less than the repetition of
it was at the close. And this is the explanation of the anomaly of the
incident. It is His solemn, authoritative claiming to be God's
Messenger, the Messiah long foretold.
Then, further, this incident is a singular manifestation of Christ's
unique power. How did it come that all these sordid hucksters had not a
word to say, and did not lift a finger in opposition, or that the
Temple Guard offered no resistance, and did not try to quell the
unseemly disturbance, or that the very officials, when they came to
reckon with Him, had nothing harsher to say than, 'What sign showest
Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things'? No miracle is
needed to explain that singular acquiescence. We see in lower forms
many instances of a similar thing. A man ablaze with holy indignation,
and having a secret ally in the hearts of those whom He rebukes, will
awe a crowd even if he does not infect them. But that is not the full
explanation. I see here an incident analogous to that strange event at
the close of Christ's ministry, when, coming out from beneath the
shadows of the olives in the garden, He said to the soldiers 'Whom seek
ye?' and they fell backwards and wallowed on the ground. An
overwhelming impression of His personal majesty, and perhaps some
forth-putting of that hidden glory which did swim up to the surface on
the mountain of Transfiguration, bowed all these men before Him, like
reeds before the wind. And though there was no recognition of His
claim, there was something in the Claimant that forbade resistance and
silenced remonstrance.
Further, this incident is a revelation of Christ's capacity for
righteous indignation. No two scenes can be more different than the two
recorded in this chapter: the one that took place in the rural
seclusion of Cana, nestling among the Galilean hills, the other that
was done in the courts of the Temple swarming with excited
festival-keepers; the one hallowing the common joys of daily life, the
other rebuking the profanation of what assumed to be a great deal more
sacred than a wedding festival; the one manifesting the love and
sympathy of Jesus, His power to ennoble all human relationships, and
His delight in ministering to need and bringing gladness, and the other
setting forth the sterner aspect of His character as consumed with holy
zeal for the sanctity of God's name and house. Taken together, one may
say that they cover the whole ground of His character, and in some very
real sense are a summary of all His work. The programme contains the
whole of what is to follow hereafter.
We may well take the lesson, which no generation ever needed more than
the present, both by reason of its excellences and of its defects, that
there were no love worthy of a perfect spirit in which there did not
lie dormant a dark capacity of wrath, and that Christ Himself would not
have been the Joy-bringer, the sympathising Gladdener which He
manifested Himself as being in the 'beginning of miracles in Cana of
Galilee' unless, side by side, there had lain in Him the power of holy
indignation and, if need be, of stern rebuke. Brethren, we must retain
our conception of His anger if we are not to maim our conception of His
love. There is no wrath like the wrath of the Lamb. The Temple court,
with the strange figure of the Christ with a scourge in His hand, is a
revelation which this generation, with its exaggerated sentimentalism,
with its shrinking, by reason of its good and of its evil, from the
very notion of a divine retribution based upon the eternal antagonism
between good and evil, most sorely needs.