A House of Prayer?

During the first century, Jesus Christ of Nazareth entered into the City of Jerusalem riding, not a stallion – the symbol of prestige of honor – but an animal symbolic of servitude, a colt. According to one noted New Testament interpreter, the city may have easily been crowded with as many as one and one-half million people who had come to celebrate this holy time called Passover.  Every Jewish male within twenty miles of Jerusalem was required to attend.

And so, with the stage now set, Jesus makes his spectacular entry into the city; an act that was laden with meaning. He receives a tumultuous and rousing welcome from the huge crowds in and around the city that were gathering from all over to celebrate the upcoming Passover Feast. The people greet him with wild excitement as he rides into the city on a carpet of clothes and branches, with the jubilant acclamation of the people ringing in his ears!

We are told that as soon as Jesus enters the city, he goes to the temple. This reminds me of a Roman triumphal procession, when a victorious general returned from war to his capital city of Rome . He always returned to a grand welcome and reception. He would make a spectacular entry through the gates of the city amidst the roar of the cheering crowds that lined the streets scattering flowers and evergreens along the route of the procession. The procession would finally arrive at the temple of Jupiter in Rome where sacrifices of thanksgiving were offered.

And so we find Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem, but not to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving as would have been done in Rome . Instead, Jesus surveys all that was taking place within the precincts of the temple to see whether it was, in fact, fulfilling its divinely appointed mission – to be a house of prayer for all nations. What he saw distressed him and led him to take drastic action on the very next day. This he did by chasing from the temple the merchants and money changers engaged in dishonest and exploitative trading under the guise of providing a service to the pilgrims, many of whom had travelled great distances to the temple to offer their sacrifices.

And so, bit by bit the courtyard of the temple had become almost entirely secularized. What was meant to be a place of prayer and preparation had now become such a commercialized centre of buying and selling that prayer and meditation became impossible.

For one, near to the Passover time, every male Jew had to pay a temple tax of half a shekel a year. That is equivalent to the sum of around 7p, which may not seem like much, but this amount must be considered against the fact that the average day’s wage for a working man at the time was about 3½p; that’s half the value of the tax payable, and a great deal of money in those days! Furthermore, when it came to the payment of the temple tax, only one kind of currency was acceptable – the shekel of the sanctuary. This is so because most coins then held a picture of Caesar, which to the Jew, was a graven image, and a direct violation of the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4, KJV). And so, as Jews from all over the world came into Jerusalem with various kinds of currencies, it was the function of the money changers to exchange all international currency into the special temple coins.

On the face of it, this seems like an entirely necessary function. The trouble was that each money changer charged a substantial amount for changing the currency in the first place – as much as 10-12%! And, if a pilgrim did not have the exact change, the money changer would charge an additional sum just for making change! It was also not unusual for the money changers to deceive pilgrims who didn’t know the exchange rates.

This was the deliberate exploitation of poor people who could least afford it, and there is no doubt that the money changers made large profits out of it. One person estimates “that these money changers made a profit of between £8,000 and £9,000 per annum”[1] – a tidy sum in first century Palestine !

But that’s not all, because for two, the selling of animals was even worse. For most visits to the temple some kind of animal sacrifice was usually necessary. Such animals however, according to Jewish ceremonial laws, had to be without blemish, and it was the job of the official temple inspectors to check that this condition was met. Here again, on the face of it, this seems like an entirely necessary function.

But while it was easy enough to buy an animal anywhere for sacrificial purposes, the official inspectors at the temple would ensure that any animal bought outside the temple would be rejected so as to force the worshippers to buy those being sold in the temple, sometimes for as much as nearly 20 times the cost outside the temple!

And so, here we have another example of the shameless exploitation of the poor, humble pilgrims; the deliberate victimization of the vulnerable that is nothing less than legalized robbery!

But this flurry of commercial activity in the temple courts also proved a hindrance to the worshippers who had to be crowded into the same space, so that the place of solemn worship was transformed “into a market where the hum of trade mingled with the bleating and cooing of (livestock) and birds.”[2] The pilgrim, seeking God’s presence, finds himself in the middle of a noisy uproar of buying and selling and bargaining and auctioneering in which it was simply impossible to pray. Those who sought God’s presence were being debarred from it by the very people of God’s House.[3]

It wasn’t simply that the buying and selling interfered with the atmosphere of reverence and of awe that were needed for worship; it was that the very worship in the house of God was being used to exploit the worshippers! Thus the temple, in later years, has come to be described as “’a meeting place of scamps,’ and as the worst kind of commercial monopoly and vested interest.” This was what incurred the Jesus’ wrath; he became angry because the temple had become a place of extortion and a barrier to those who truly wanted to worship God; it had become a place where people were being exploited in the name of religion.

And so, with a passion for social justice that burned in his heart, Jesus returned to the temple the next day to rid the temple of those who were, in the name of religion, exploiting others for their personal gain. We are told in v. 15 of our text that, as soon as he arrives at the temple, he begins to drive “out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.” “Jesus cleansed the temple with such violence because its traffic was being used to exploit helpless man and women.”[4]

Quoting Isaiah 56:7, Jesus reminds the people that the temple, the house of the Lord “will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” But you, he said, quoting Jeremiah 7:11, “have made it a den of robbers."

For the Jews, the temple was the place where God dwelt with his people; it was the very seat of God’s throne. The presence of the temple served as a constant reminder to the people that God was with them. For them, the temple was “the very means of access to God.”[5] In fact, the practice later developed, in which devout Jews would literally pray with their faces turned towards the temple in Jerusalem , wherever they were!

Thus the temple, as God intended it, was a place of prayer, not just for Jews, but “for all nations.” But in reality, the situation was quite different. God’s house of prayer for all nations has been corrupted by material concerns, and Christians today often face a similar dilemma without even realizing it.

First, we are always at risk of becoming so embedded in our own rules and practices that we are no longer open to fresh revelations from God. We must be willing to ask where and when our religious practices have become so sacrosanct and, therefore, closed to the possibility of reformation, change, and renewal. The great danger is that today’s church, like the temple in Mark’s gospel, will fall into the trap of equating the authority of its own rules and practices with the presence of God.[6] When the image of our church becomes more important than the substance of our faith, we know we are in deep trouble, for this suggests is that although we may worship in a beautiful sanctuary, well-prepared for worship, we often don’t take the presence of God with us through the week.

Second, the term “den of robbers” was originally used by God, speaking through the prophet Jeremaih, as a warning to those who felt that going to the temple granted them release from guilt for the sins they continued to commit. Ignoring God's moral demands, they relied on ceremonial rites to gain a false sense of security.

The abundance of limestone caves in Palestine led to them being eventual use as robbers' dens; so Jesus’ metaphor was clear to his hearers – the people were treating the temple, the house of God, as robbers do their own dens. It was only a temporary refuge till they ventured out again to pillage and to plunder.[7] Is this how we understand our faith in God – as a superstitious crutch, or as a hideout, thinking it will protect us from evil and from problems in the world? Is our church fulfilling its God-ordained role as a “house of prayer,” or has it become, like the Jerusalem temple, the visible symbol of a superstitious belief that God will protect his people irrespective of how they treated others who were regarded as outsiders.

Finally, we sometimes “find it difficult to avoid the marketing orientation of a successful church. How fast is it growing? How many people attend services regularly? What’s the average weekly collection? Just as he did on questions about the sabbath…, so also here Jesus calls us back to the only question that counts: What did God intend? A house of prayer for all peoples.”[8]

A simple story serves to illustrate the point. Several years ago, while leafing through the Yellow Pages, a customer noticed in the listing of restaurants, an entry for a place called Church of God Grill. The peculiar name aroused his curiosity and he dialed the number. A man answered with a cheery, "Hello! Church of God Grill!" The caller asked how his restaurant had been given such an unusual name. This was the response he got: "Well, we had a little mission down here, and we started selling chicken dinners after church on Sunday to help pay the bills. Well, people liked the chicken, and we did such a good business, that eventually we cut back on the church service. After a while we just closed down the church altogether and kept on serving the chicken dinners. We kept the name we started with, and that's Church of God Grill." This incident is not unlike many churches, denominations, and individuals who over time, have drifted away from their original purpose. Don’t let this happen to you!