Zeal for Your house has eaten me up

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  And he found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business.  When He had made a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money and overturned the tables.  And He said to those who sold doves, "Take these things away!  Do not make My Father's house a house of merchandise!"  Then His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for Your house has eaten me up."  So the Jews answered and said to Him, "What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?"  Jesus answered and said to the, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."  Then the Jews said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?"  But He was speaking of the temple of His body.  Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.

- John 2:13-22

Yesterday we read that there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.  And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, "They have no wine."  Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me?  My hour has not yet come."  His mother said to the servants, "Whatever He says to you, do it."   Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece.  Jesus said to them, "Fill the waterpots with water."  And they filled them up to the brim.  And He said to them, "Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast."  And they took it.  When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom.  And he said to him, "Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior.  You have kept the good wine until now!"  This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him.  After this He went down to Capernaum, He, His mother, His brothers, and His disciples; and they did not stay there many days.

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  And he found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business.  When He had made a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money and overturned the tables.  And He said to those who sold doves, "Take these things away!  Do not make My Father's house a house of merchandise!"  Then His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for Your house has eaten me up."  In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the cleansing of the temple occurs at the end of Christ's ministry, in the beginning of Holy Week after Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem.  But John's Gospel gives us three Passover Festivals, from which we calculate the three years of Jesus' ministry.  Here in John's Gospel, the cleansing of the temple occurs right at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, and some patristic commentators believe that Christ performed this act twice.  The disciples are remembering verses from Psalm 69:   "I have become a stranger to my brothers, and an alien to my mother’s children; because zeal for Your house has eaten me up, and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me."  John's Gospel establishes from the beginning Jesus' alienation from the leadership, and His scathing outrage at the practices that harm the poor.  The money changers exchanged Roman coins for temple coins, and surely do so at an inflated price in order to make their profits.  Those who sold animals did so for the pilgrims coming to the temple in Jerusalem for Passover to make their sacrifices; doves would have been a poor person's sacrifice, as opposed to a lamb or a goat.   (In the Greek, this word also means pigeon).   One suspects the services of those who sell the animals are particularly necessary for pilgrims who come from far away, to the "house of prayer for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7).  We recall from the synoptic Gospels that Jesus says, quoting from both Isaiah and Jeremiah:  "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you have made it a 'den of thieves'" (Matthew 21:13.).

So the Jews answered and said to Him, "What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?"  Jesus answered and said to the, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."  Then the Jews said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?"  But He was speaking of the temple of His body.  Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.  Once again, we must recall that the term the Jews is used as a political term in John's Gospel, meant to designate the religious leaders.  Here they demand a sign from Jesus that He has authority to cleanse the temple, a sign that He is the Christ.  He is not a Levitical priest, who would have historical temple duties to perform.  The chief priests and the elders demand to know what authority He has (see Matthew 21:23).   My study bible comments that as Christ is careful not to reveal Himself to scoffers, He answers in a hidden way.  The one sign which will appear for all is that of His death and subsequent Resurrection; he will be raised in three days.

We notice how Scripture echoes and reflects off of itself, adding meaning and substance to each occurrence.  The disciples understand Jesus' actions when they recall various parts of Scripture.  They understand His saying, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up, after He has risen from the dead.    There is at once a timeless quality to Scripture and also a kind of omnipresence.  In every circumstance, a snippet of Scripture may spark an understanding or help us to derive a meaning from something happening in our lives.  What the psalmist wrote thousands of years ago may help us to understand a particularly difficult struggle we are encountering here today in our spiritual and worldly life.  A saying of Jesus may be quite mysterious to us, unless we find ourselves also plunged into a struggle for our faith in the midst of bad choices -- then we may find ourselves carrying our own crosses and come to know what it is to struggle for our faith and to rely on God in prayer as He did.  We note how in today's passage, the inspiration of wisdom acts both backwards and forward to illuminate the disciples:  they recall a line from Psalm 69 as Jesus cleanses the temple, which illuminates precisely where He is in His ministry, rejected (as we will later read in John's Gospel) by both family and the community leadership.  His saying about destroying the temple and building it up in three days remains mysterious to them --  until after the Resurrection, when the meaning is illuminated for them.  The timeless and omnipresence quality of the Scriptures work for us at all moments of our lives.  One passage may apply one day to illuminate a particular struggle we have.  The same passage may come back to us many years later, when we find ourselves yet again in the midst of struggle, but this time with more structure and experience to it, and yet the same lesson applies.  In Christ we find embodied the realities of the Scriptures of the Old Testament.  Particularly for the Fathers, those patristic commentators who built the theology of the Church, the fulfillment of type became an essential way to understand Scripture.  In the burning bush of Moses, for example (Exodus 3:1-5) is seen a "type" of the Virgin Mary:  a human being "embraced" in the Holy Spirit, and yet not consumed but giving birth to the Savior of all.   In our earlier reading in John, when Jesus tells Nathanael that he will see angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man, Jesus alludes to Himself as the Ladder dreamed of by Jacob (Genesis 28:12-15).  This is yet another fulfillment of "type" from the Old Testament.  Later on, in chapter 8, John's Gospel reports Jesus saying to the religious authorities, "Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM" (see John 8:48-59).  This is another reference to Himself and to His divine nature as both Son and Lord, unmistakably taken from the revelation to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:13-14), when God was revealed as I AM.  Therefore in order for us to understand the important nature of Scripture, we must cease to understand the Gospels simply as history books, or seek only to understand them as merely factual or historical text.  Scripture exists on many levels of reception and understanding, and it work within us on a spiritual basis, working with our own spiritual nature, an intersection of depth that includes many dimensions within us of experience, insight, wisdom, and personal growth.  In fact, how exactly that will happen for us is incalculable, and how many layers of meaning may be included for us also inestimable.  Our very spiritual nature, an echo and reflection of the One who created us, is also simply that mysterious, and meant to be entered into as a journey -- similar to the journey which the entire people of God entered into with Moses.  We are not the architects of that journey, much as we would like to take comfort in the idea that we are fully in charge of our lives.  The omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal reality of God will make its own plans and hold its own discoveries for us to find along the way, broadening and deepening what we are capable of understanding, and just who we might think we are.  And this is the purpose of Scripture, to take us to places where we really don't know what we're doing -- to places where we simply "don't know what we don't know" but have yet to discover.  We're not the ones in charge, and thus there is prayer, and -- Scripture, to help guide the way for our own journeys of struggle in faith.  This is the adventure of a lifetime, in truth, and more than we can imagine, if we but choose and ask to see it.  The disciples who follow Christ, and those countless ones who came before, all contributing in one way or another to our faith, desired fervently to see it.  In Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, "Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see; for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it" (Luke 10:23-24).  How many today are blind to what they don't know and do not seek to find?  Let your own life be a light, as John's Gospel will teach us to seek and dwell within.  Those who see only the material in life would have us be blind to all that gives meaning and depth; do not let such a "den of thieves" rob you of the beauty of light and life, even if your zeal is something they cannot comprehend.