How many cleansings of the temple were there and why does it matter?
John records a cleansing of the temple, at the beginning of his ministry, right after the changing of the water to wine. The other three gospels record a cleansing of the temple story after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. That John’s is the first cleansing and the others are the second is inferred by the placement of the story in the narratives. But none of them explicitly record two cleansings.
However, when in Jerusalem, Jesus was in the temple frequently. That was where he challenged the existing religious powers with various parables. Mark records a second visit to the temple in chapter 12:41. The end of that chapter focuses on the story of the poor widow and the relative size of her contribution. The point is not that there were one, two or many cleansings of the temple, but that he was there a lot and saw what was going on. The importance of the episode is signalled by the fact that within a week of this incident, Jesus is dead.
So, we have a situation where Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph and carries with him power of the crowd. He was a good Jew and loved his Father, Javeh, the god of Israel. When he went in to the temple and saw the profiteering going on, he got very angry. With religious zeal for God the Father, he cleanses the temple of the activities that do not help people to show their love for God or their neighbour. He probably left that day hoping that the crowd that followed him would take the lesson to heart and understand why he did what he did.
But what was Jesus feeling when he returned to the temple in the day(s) after the cleansing. The people still toed the letter of the Levitical command to give a shekel and a pair of doves. So, the money changers and the dove sellers had returned to their favourite stalls in the outer temple. Who can blame them for continuing the patterns that they knew. The weight of habit is a hard thing to move.
Internally, Jesus probably raged again at the intransigence of his people:
“Don’t they get it? Don’t they see that this is all a farce? That the money changers and the dove sellers are just a symptom of them not focusing on first loving God and then their neighbour? Yesterday, I showed them my rage at the lack of respect of the temple and who inhabits it. What the frig do I have to do for them to see that they need to stop this pattern and just love God? Kill myself?”
Yes.
The whole world “noticed” his death. It is this trigger that has reset our relationship to God. All he wanted was for the people of Israel to love God as much as he did.
Do we?
In some ways, we now take it for granted that we can talk directly to God and have a new relationship with Him. We do need to notice that it took a sacrifice to reset it.
Random Thoughts 