Clearing the Way for Everyone to Pray
Luke 19:45 ¶ And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold,
Luke 19:46 saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”
Luke 19:47 ¶ And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him,
Luke 19:48 but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.
Fresh off of the big party known as the “Triumphal Entry,” Jesus barges into the temple and becomes unpopular right away.
The court where all of this is going on is called “The Court of the Gentiles” and it was the section of the temple where Gentiles (read anybody that isn’t Jewish) can come and pray to the God of Israel.
Think of it as the cry room in a church before we had TVs and sound systems. If you weren’t allowed in the big church because your baby made too much noise, you could sit back there in the cry room and listen to the message through a little scratchy speaker. There was noise in there and it was hard to pay attention, but you weren’t stressed when the noise came from your kid. You could still participate.
For the “Court of the Gentiles,” it was the only place in the temple that you were allowed to go if you weren’t Jewish. It was the largest part of the temple, which may point to the fact that God wanted to make room for all of the nations to come and worship Him (see the entire book of Isaiah, for example.)
But if YHWH isn’t attractive and there aren’t hundreds of people coming from all other nations to worship Him, maybe we could repurpose that space? That’s exactly what happened. Instead of having a prayer meeting and crying out to God about the lack of Gentiles, they filled up the space with stuff that would make their lives easier. They turned it into a marketplace where people could buy ‘temple approved’ sacrifices.
The marketplace became so common that a path developed right through the middle as a shortcut from one side of the temple to the other. If you came up the hill from Bethany and were headed into Jerusalem proper, you could save several minutes by cutting through the Court of the Gentiles. It’s not like you were interrupting some foreigners that had come to praise Yahweh. Who cares about them anyway?
So you can see why Jesus was mad. So mad, in fact, that He destroyed property, closed down businesses, caused a public disruption, and claimed to own the place (calling it His Father’s).
You can almost imagine after all of the chaos and dust settles, a nervous Ethiopian family and some Greeks standing there shocked. Jesus just smiles and lifts up His hand like, “Right this way, I cleared out a spot for you to pray. Let me show you how.”
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