The Cleansing Of The Temple (John 2)
When Jesus entered the Jerusalem temple and found it turned into a marketplace, he was deeply saddened. People had forgotten that the true temple is not made of stone but of flesh and spirit. As Paul taught, our bodies are the temples of God. Yet, here was the sacred space overrun by commerce. Some merchants sold animals for sacrifice, which had a pretense of religious purpose. But others were engaged in purely secular trade, like money changing, profaning the sacred space.
This echoes Jesus' teaching about serving two masters. He warned against storing up earthly treasures, for where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. The merchants in the temple had made wealth their idol, displacing God from the center of their lives, from the "temple" of their hearts.
Jesus' cleansing of the temple foreshadows a deeper purification. The whip, a symbol of his impending suffering and crucifixion, prefigures how his sacrifice would cleanse the true temple – our bodies – from sin. When Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days," he spoke not only of his own body but of ours as well. His resurrection wasn't just his own; it's the resurrection of all believers. Through faith, we are raised with him, our bodies becoming temples of the Holy Spirit, joined to him in his new life.
