Jesus and the Temple

Matthew 21:12-14 & 20-22

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.” And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. . . . When the disciples saw [the fig tree wither], they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”

2 Samuel 5:6-8

And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off”—thinking, “David cannot come in here.” Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, “Whoever would strike the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack ‘the lame and the blind,’ who are hated by David’s soul.” Therefore it is said, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Jesus did with the Temple’s traditions what he did with the money-changers’ tables: he turned them upside down. . . . The people who had been kept out [i.e., the blind and the lame] were now welcomed in. The people who had been scorned were now healed. It was an action full of significance. It summed up everything Jesus had been doing throughout his ministry (71).

[Jesus came to the fig-tree] looking for fruit, but when he found none he solemnly declared that the tree would be barren for ever. That’s exactly what he was doing with the Temple. . . . Saying to “this mountain” that it should be “lifted up and thrown into the sea,” when you are standing right beside the Temple mountain, was bound to be taken as another coded warning about what would happen to the Temple as God’s judgment fell upon his rebellious people.

Suddenly, therefore, the lines of Jesus’ work all through the earlier days in Galilee come together with new force. All along he’d been acting as if you could get, by coming to him, the blessings you’d normally get by going to the Temple. Now he is declaring, in powerful actions, that the Temple itself is under God’s judgment (72-73).