And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
On the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey He was cheered and worshipped:
Mark 11:9-10 (ESV)
And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”
He then visited the Temple and looked around at what He could see:
Mark 11:11 (ESV)
And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
The next day He returned to the Temple and that is when He begins to turn over the tables of the money changers and drive the animals out of the Temple. When people came to Jerusalem for the Passover they didn’t bring the necessary animals to make a sacrifice. So they would buy an animal in Jerusalem. To make it easier to do so (and to gain from the profit of the sales) the religious establishment brought the sales right into the Temple. The money changers were needed as people came from different places and had different types of money. You could only purchase an animal using Jewish currency. Plus each Jewish man, 21 years and older had to pay a Temple tax with only Jewish currency. This is what Jesus observed the day before. This is what made Jesus come in and cleanse the Temple. What was supposed to be a place of worship, to enable people to come to God in holiness, had become a flea-market of merchandise. You can only imagine that someone was selling the equivalent of t-shirts that read I was set free at Passover 33 (AD). And whereas our bodies are now the temple of God and we can’t make the comparison between the Passover season and Temple worship with our Sunday morning church services, it is safe to say we often have not made it about Jesus, the real Passover Lamb. That is the point of His cleansing the Temple. It was no longer about the lambs, it was about the laundering of money. There is certainly nothing wrong with merch for the church, but if it replaces the Lamb of God, who took away the sin of the world, we are turning our places of worship into modern day entrepreneurial enterprises.
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