The account of Jesus cleansing the Temple is placed by Mark -- with Matthew and Luke following his lead -- towards the end of Jesus' ministry1. John puts it at the beginning, right after the first sign of Cana (John 2:1-12). Mark has so schematized the accounts of Jesus' ministry that he places the entrace to Jerusalem and the subsequent cleansing of the Temple as the climax of Jesus work and the arena of His "showdown" with the powers that resist the Gospel2. Brown3 opines that John "is more correct here."
The account of the cleansing of the Temple is similar to the one found in Mark (though, John's has a lot more detail). The only thing different is the Scripture citation used to explain it. In Mark (and Matthew), Jesus himself quotes from a collation Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. Here, Jesus does not quote scriptures; he makes a remark to that effect:
Take these out of here
and stop making my Father's house
a marketplace.
Jesus then comes into the Temple as the Son who cleans house. The disciples are the ones who remember a line from Psalm 69 (Ps. 69:10) which is a suffering just man's lament asking for vindiation.
The ensuing confrontation with the Jews is totally John's. In the Synoptics, chief priests and scribes seek to kill Jesus but they could not. In Matthew, the authorities confront Jesus not because of what he did in the Temple, but because of what they hear the children singing about him.
The issue of the confrontation is about a "sign". "What sign can you give us to show by what authority you do this?" (v.18). In Matthew and Luke, the sign about Jesus' authority is asked in a different context: his ministry. The sign that Jesus gives in this case is the sign of Jonah. For Matthew, it is the resurrection; for Luke, the sign is Jesus himself in the act of calling all to repentance. Here, Jesus replies: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." (v. 19)
The Jews misunderstand. The reference to the Temple is ambivalent. Like Nicodemus later one (John 3) and the woman at the well (John 4), the Jews misunderstand the words. But while in the case of Nicodemus and the woman, the misunderstanding becomes a way for Jesus to draw them on to fuller understanding, here the disciples understand but only after the resurrection (v.22). Jesus was referring to His Body that the Jews will destroy in his passion and death but which He will raise up after three days.
In Mark's account of the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, someone accussed Jesus of having said:
I will destroy this temple made with hands
and I will build another not made with hands. (Mark 14:58)
The witness has understood a spiritual temple that will be built. In John, the temple of the Lord's Body that will be raised up in three days will become the place where God will be worshipped in spirit and in truth (cf. John 4:34). It is the Church, His Body: "For we are the temple of the living God" (2 Cor. 16:16; see also Col. 1:24 and Eph. 2:19-22)
For Reflection
1. The sign that Jesus gives is the sign of His death and resurrection. The of the resurrection is His Body, the Church. If we, the Church are signs of the Resurrection, how how you think can we contribute to the progress of humanity and of the world? How can we help our country or town?
2. "Stop making my Father's house a marketplace." If the "Temple" that we are is "the Father's house", in what way can we turn it into something as profane as a marketplace? (See the OT reading, Ex. 20:1-17)
3. "Destroy this Temple..." With these words, Jesus signifies his passion and death. Paul writes: "Jews demand signs, Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified..." (Cf. 1 Cor. 1:22-25)
What particular meaning should the sign of the Cross have for you as a Christian?
1 See Mark 11:15-19, Matthew 21:12-17, Luke 19, 45-58
2 There is an article about the Passion and Death of Christ as having been written as a Battle in a way similar to that done for the account of Creation, a "ChaosKampf", so to speak..
3 I am using here Raymond Brown's "The Gospel and Letters of John: A Concise Commentary" which is a very shortened version of his two large commentaries of the Gospel of John and the letters of John appearing in the Anchor Bible.
