Why is that everyone doesn’t want to follow Jesus? In John 2, we’re given the first glimpse into John’s answer: Jesus’ glorious reign of joy and life must come through judgement and radical reconstruction. In some ways, it’s a shock: Jesus is much fiercer than we might imagine. But it’s also obvious: of course real hope means nothing less than judgement and the resurrection of the dead.
13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
This transcript has been automatically generated
John chapter 2, verse 13.
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the moneychangers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables.
And he told those who sold the pigeons, Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade. His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for your house will consume me.
So the Jews said to him, What sign do you show us for doing these things? Jesus answered them, Destroy this Temple, and in 3 days I will raise it up. The Jews then said, It has taken 46 years to build this Temple; will you raise it up in 3 days? But he was speaking about the Temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Now, I hope you won’t mind if I start today with what might feel like a slightly impertinent question. How is it that anyone is not a Christian? You might think that I’m deluded to ask, um, does this guy have no idea of just what percentage of the world out there do not currently follow the Lord Jesus? But hear me out. Um, over the last few weeks in John’s Gospel, if you’ve been here, we have seen the most extraordinary introduction to the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is the Creator God come in person. Bursting with life and light, with grace and truth. His first public act was to go to a wedding and to make it better, actually to turn a small reservoir of bottled water into the very best wine. The Jesus that we meet in the pages of John’s Gospel is beautiful and good and kind. He is magnetic.
And yet people don’t believe in him. And how could that be? You might say, well, of course, of course, because it’s all a fairy tale. None of it’s actually true. And sure, you’re right, that is a good question to ask.
But it’s not the whole storey, is it? Because the truth is that for many people, you might even wonder most people, that isn’t really the issue. It’s not that they don’t believe that Jesus is real, it’s that even if he is, they don’t actually want what he’s offering. In fact, many Christians are persuaded that Jesus Christ is real, and yet they’re only really half in. And maybe you’re here in London as somebody who is committed to being half-hearted as a Christian.
For the next few years. And so here’s my question: how could that be? And how could any inquirer into the Christian faith not be drawn to this man? And how could any professing Christian not be completely wholehearted in following him? Well, I think if we were to ask that question to the Apostle John, the friend of the Lord Jesus who wrote the eyewitness account that we just heard read a minute ago, Well, I think if we were to ask him that question, he might begin by directing us to John chapter 2.
Just look back at verse 13. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.
And he told those who sold the pigeons, take these things away. Stop making my Father’s house into a house of trades. And if you’ve grown up with a vanilla view of the Lord Jesus, this passage is very jarring, isn’t it? It’s out of step with the Jesus of Victorian iconography, children at his feet, and bluebirds kind of flitting around his hair. And it’s out of step with where we were last week.
All of the joy now turned into judgement, a wedding exchanged for a whip. And what most— might be most jarring of all is that it’s entirely at his initiative. You see, this is not the result of a frayed temper, an outburst, after months and months of sore provocation from religious leaders who’ve been in his ear. No, this is the action of a man who has quite deliberately gone from the wedding to Jerusalem in order to make precisely this scene. And what John is showing us this morning, and what the Lord Jesus wants us to know this morning, is that whatever was going on at the wedding, He comes to judge.
And for all his goodness and his grace and sheer joy, he comes as a judge. It must have been quite a scene. Verse 14 again: In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and oxen, and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And John doesn’t give us much in the way of context, as there’s no indication that these traders were particularly sharp in their dealings, and there’s no indication that the cattle were particularly noisy that day.
And all that we really know is that it was Passover, and then suddenly, unannounced, the storm— tables overturned. Cattle driven through the crowds, pigeons flapping and grunting. I made the mistake last Saturday of going to Borough Market with my family, and as I stood wedged into the middle of an entirely immovable crowd, watching my boys dart off between people’s legs into the middle distance, completely powerless to follow them, the thought did just cross my mind, actually, what would this have been like if a herd of sheep and cows had been driven with a whip through the middle of this right now? It’s a good question because at Passover the temple would have been like Borough Market on a Saturday, absolutely rammed full of people who’d gathered from all over the Roman Empire to be there. And I don’t imagine it escaped anyone’s attention that there was a commotion that day.
This didn’t happen in a corner. It must have been chaos.
The thing that made it really shocking was what the building that this happened in represented.
The Jerusalem Temple was the pride of the nation. It was the meeting point between heaven and earth, the symbolic house of the true and living God. And Jesus went in with a whip. It must have been chaos. It was.
And it was the first sign that however good the reign of King Jesus was going to be, it could not be the rubber stamp on everything that we were already doing. Even to his own people, even to his Father’s house, he comes to judge.
It’s important that we realise that this wasn’t just an anti-corruption protest. It is possible to read this passage in that way and to imagine that the problem was that Jesus encountered lots of sharp practise and dodgy trading, and that this was his stand against religious opportunism. You might even think that Jesus is teaching us here to respect holy places. And perhaps as you think that, you look at the church bookstore they put at the back there with slightly nervous glances. And wonder what might be coming next.
And say this scene is about cleansing or purifying God’s house so it can go back to its proper function, make the temple great again. But the truth is that what’s happening here is much bigger than that. Now listen, there’s no doubt that Jesus saw something wrong that day. He says it. Look at verse 16 again.
Take these things away. Stop making my Father’s house into a marketplace. Stop it. Now, the fact that the temple precincts were filled with the buying and selling instead of prayer and praise, with the chink of coins, I think that is wrong. But in the rest of the Gospel, John is going to make it clear.
Jesus is going to call out the entire religious establishment of his day, as mercenary, as thieves and robbers who take profits from the sheep. And if that is the disease that the leaders of Jesus’ day were suffering from, I guess here we see that it goes right to the heart, even the temple itself. Stop making my Father’s house into a marketplace. Something’s wrong.
But by driving away the sheep and the pigeons and the money changers, Jesus isn’t just refining the house or driving away corruption. Whether it should have been happening in the temple courts or not, and I suspect the answer is it shouldn’t have been happening in the temple courts, the trade that was going on that day was essential to the functioning of the temple. People who were coming to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices needed to be able to buy sacrificial animals. People who were coming to Jerusalem to pay the temple tax needed to be able to change their money into the right currency. And so when Jesus drove the money changers and drove the animals out, he wasn’t just shutting down the church bookstore, he was switching off the lights.
For the day he was shutting the doors. It was a sign that at least for a moment Jesus was shutting the temple down. Just think of that. We love to imagine that Jesus was the king of the toothless grin, telling everybody to feel included, telling everybody that he wanted them to feel safe. But the truth is that when he came to the holiest place on earth, The very heart of the first-century religious world, the pride and joy of his own people.
What he saw made him shut it down. Just stop it. Stop making my Father’s house into a marketplace.
And the point is that for all the joy of the living God come amongst us, we mustn’t miss the fact that he also comes as a judge.
And of course, this is one of the reasons why so many people don’t want to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Last week I was reading an opinion piece in one of the newspapers about the appointment of Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of London. And it was extraordinary, and this particular commentator was deeply disappointed. But what was extraordinary about the article was his reasons for being disappointed. And he had no confidence that Sarah Mullally would be able to return the Church of England to all the things that he thought that it should be.
And he was very clear on what he thought it should be. It should be about pews and not comfortable seats. It should be about organs and not chairs. It should be about the cadences of 17th-century English. That’s what you should be hearing, not this ghastly modern liturgy.
Most importantly, importantly of all, it should be wrapped up inside 45 minutes so that it never gets in the way of a good Sunday lunch. Ideally, it should be a pit stop on your Sunday morning constitutional, capped off with a Bloody Mary when you get home. You can imagine a Southeast Asian version of the same, can’t you? Church should be early, it should be short, it should be out of the way in time to spend most of your Sunday at the country club playing golf. It shouldn’t expect too much from you.
Pay your tithe and then it should let you free to live the rest of your life in your landed property, looking forwards to early retirement. And as I read the article, I thought, I wonder whether this guy has ever met Jesus. And actually, I do get it. And listen, I don’t have much nostalgia for the 1662 prayer book, although I do own one and occasionally use it. And I quite like guitars, and I long since gave up the hope that the 10:30 service would be over in time for me to get home for a Sunday lunch.
Goodness only knows what’s going to happen with the new service time anyway. But when I wonder whether I really want to follow Jesus, it always ultimately comes down to this: he’s too disruptive. I find the way that Jesus confronts us, the way that he confronts whole ways of living, lifestyles, whole systems, whole religions, whole cultures and ideologies, and meets them with judgement, The way that he won’t just let us get on with living the life that we want to live. I find it deeply uncomfortable. I want to be able to tell you this morning that whoever you are, Jesus wishes you well, just the way you are, no judgement.
Jesus is not like that. He comes to judge. And it might be that that is too much for us. We don’t want a Jesus like that.
Except, except just look at verse 17. His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me.
It’s one of 2 moments of recognition in the passage. The other one came 3 years later, much later, and was retrospective. But I think this one came there and then. Even as the disciples saw Jesus in action with the whip and turning over the tables and the coins spreading all over the temple floor, they made a connection and they remembered verse 17, zeal for your house will consume you. It’s a line from Psalm 69, that long reading we had just a moment ago.
One of the greatest prayers of Israel’s greatest king, King David, a prayer all about the enmity that his concern for God’s house provoked towards him. And here’s this moment of recognition. Of course, of course, a real king would behave like this. Of course, he would stand up against evil. And injustice.
Of course he would actually want to put things right. You know, from one angle what you’re seeing is offensive, but from another it’s exactly what we need. 2 sides of the same coin. Why don’t people believe in Jesus? He comes to judge.
It’s deeply unsettling. It sticks in the craw. Why should you believe in Jesus? He comes to judge. And really, in a world as dark and as broken as ours, would you actually want it any other way?
But he doesn’t just come to judge, he also comes to rebuild. Verse 18: So the Jews said to him, what sign do you show us for doing these things? Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and in 3 days I will raise it up. The Jews then said, it has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in 3 days? But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, the religious authorities of the day are unsettled, and so they come to Jesus and they ask for a sign, and he gives them one. Verse 19, destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up. It is a sign. In John’s Gospel, the signs are particularly significant miracles that give you a window into the identity of Jesus Christ. They’re really important actually.
How do you know that Jesus is not just one more loudmouth sounding off? Well, a little over half a dozen times, and the curtain is pulled back for us, and we’re given a window, a chance to see that the man standing in front of us is nothing less than the Creator God come amongst us. And here Jesus points them to the last great sign, at the moment when he will emerge triumphant from his own grave. If you’re asking whether I have the authority to judge this house, you’ll see, he says. Destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up.
He’s talking about his resurrection. And they misunderstand him. Verse 20, the Jews then said, it’s taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in 3 days. Now I have to say, I have a little bit of sympathy for them here. As the book of John unfolds, we’re going to come across all sorts of wilful, really stupid misunderstandings of Jesus, and it’s going to start next week.
But in this conversation, well, you can see why they hear him the way they do, can’t you? He has just cleared the temple. They’re asking him why he has authority to clear the temple. He then says that the sign is that if you destroy the temple, he will raise the temple up again. You can see why they might have thought that he was talking about the Jerusalem temple.
Now, there’s no surprise that they don’t track with him, and no surprise it takes his own disciples about 3 years to catch up as well. So I can sympathise with the muddle. But the connection’s really important, verse 21, that he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this. That might feel like a jump, but the connection is critical because the sign that Jesus has the authority to judge the temple will be the moment that his crucified and risen body replaces it.
Everything that the temple stood for will be fulfilled will be found in him. He doesn’t just come to judge, he comes to replace. Jesus has come to rebuild.
Now, from one perspective, if you’ve been with us over the last few weeks, we’ve been building up to this moment for weeks. I just think what we’ve seen in John chapters 1 and 2. We’ve seen Jesus say that he is the new Bethel, that he is the ladder that joins heaven and earth, with the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. We’ve seen him display his glory last week at the wedding at Cana. We’ve seen him turn the waters of purification in those 6 stone jars into wonderful new wine.
Let me just ask that question. Those 3 things— bridging heaven and earth, final purification, and the display of the glory of God— Well, what else could that mean? Of course, Jesus is the new temple. Those are the very things the temple promised. It was supposed to be the place where the glory of God was and where purification was found and where heaven and earth were bridged.
And so, from one perspective, Jesus is saying nothing new here. But there is something new because it turns out that all of the blessings of the reign of Jesus and there are so many, are not just going to be slotted in to our pre-existing lives. And Jesus is not a co-curricular activity, a hobby to spice up an otherwise two-dimensional CV. Jesus is not a conservatory, a few bits of glass that you can stick on the back of your house and leave the rest of the structure otherwise unchanged. He is the house.
And so if you want everything that Jesus has to offer, it’s going to require a whole rebuild. Verse 20 again: The Jews said, it’s taken 46 years to rebuild this temple, and will you raise it up in 3 days? But he was speaking about the temple of his body. Jesus didn’t just come to judge, he came to rebuild.
And again, this is one of the reasons why the people who met Jesus couldn’t bring themselves to follow him. And we know that actually because it turns out that this conversation was fateful. 3 years later, when they actually attempted to destroy his body, when they put him on trial and they crucified him, it was this conversation that was still fresh in their minds. Why should he be crucified? Well, he said something about destroying the temple and rebuilding it again.
When he was hanging on the cross, why should you mock him? He said something about destroying the temple and rebuilding it again. They hated that he said this.
And I guess it must have felt like too high a price. You know, that building was a wonder. At the Passover, Jerusalem, really just a little market town of perhaps 70,000 people, swelled to a great city as hundreds of thousands of people from all over the Roman Empire descended on that building. Pilgrims from the whole world flooding to the jewel in the crown. Of the great holy city.
The rebuilding of that temple was just about the only big high point of the last 500 years of their history. When they successfully defended that temple against a Greek king, well, that was their revolutionary war. Herod, their current ruler, had spent a fortune restoring it to something of its glory. How could that building not be at the heart of God’s future?
But they were wrong. Now when you put the 2 halves of John chapter 2 together, it’s very clear. Jesus has come to bring joy and life and forgiveness and reunion, glory, new creation, a wedding. That’s what he offers to you this morning. But it won’t come through that building.
It comes through him, through his crucified and risen body. He comes to judge. He comes to rebuild. He is the house. And if you want everything that the temple in Jerusalem promised, you need to turn away from your past and turn to him.
And I guess for many of them, that realignment was a price that they were unwilling to pay. It’s too radical, too disruptive.
And you know, I think I can understand that. There can be no doubt that what Jesus offers us this morning is good. He’s come to bring joy and feasting, life and blessing, the freedom of the final forgiveness of our sins. The reunion of heaven and earth, a restored relationship with God, glory. That is good.
That is good. If John could impress one thing about Jesus on us this morning, it would be that that is good.
But here’s the question: if the price of that is not a little bit of rearranging the furniture of our lives, a few panes of glass slapped onto the back of our house. If we need to say that we are basically wrong, that our structures are basically wrong, our lives, our whole pattern of humanity is basically wrong, if we need a radical rebuild, is that a price that we’re willing to pay? Is that price too much to ask?
And you know, for many it is, but not for everyone. I look at verse 21. He was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. It took them 3 years to understand it, but when the crucified and risen Jesus stood amongst them and proclaimed peace and forgiveness and the start of a new day, they got it.
Of course it had to be this way. How could any hope worth having come without revolution, without resurrection, without a radical tear down and rebuild. And the house was torn down and Jesus raised it up in 3 days. And he lives today, he lives. And everything that the temple ever promised, he holds out to us this morning.
And John wrote these words not so that you would stumble over the Lord Jesus Christ, but so that you might join him in believing. Let’s pray.
Our Father God, you know that in all sorts of ways the Lord Jesus Christ is deeply unsettling to us. We thank you so much that when he came to our broken and darkened world, and he did meet it with judgement, we thank you that Jesus is truthful enough and courageous enough to call out what is wrong in that house and also in our own lives. And we praise you that through his death and his resurrection, forgiveness and life and hope and joy and peace are held out to us this morning. And we pray that you’d help each one of us to come to the Lord Jesus, to see who he is and what he brings with real clarity, and to trust him. And we ask it in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
