Flipping Tables – Jesus Cleanses The Temple
Flipping Tables is always a valid answer to what would Jesus do. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, following Jesus does not just mean binding the wounds of those who have suffered from injustice. Sometimes it means putting a spoke into the wheel that is grinding them down.
After making his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus went to the Temple. The two acts – the triumphal entry and the cleansing of the Temple – are set pieces designed to demonstrate exactly what Jesus is all about. They are a kind of performative theology, the acting out of missional principles in a way which is consistent with the prophetic traditions of the Old Testament. In his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus announces his coming kingdom and presages his role as the new King about to take up his throne. The revolution of King Jesus begins when he starts flipping tables.
The Revolution Begins With Flipping Tables
When Jesus goes to the Temple and flips the tables, he establishes what the arrival of the Kingdom of God means for the religious, social, and economic dynamics of the people of God. But first, it’s important to note that the cleansing of the Temple occurs at a different time in John’s Gospel than in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, the meaning is the same. John simply applies the meaning of the Temple cleansing to the whole of Jesus’s ministry, whilst Matthew, Mark, and Luke specifically attribute it to the narrative surrounding Jesus’s death and resurrection.
But what is going on when Jesus goes into the Temple?
What’s Going on at the Temple?
There are three things taking place when Jesus cleanses the Temple. The first is socio-economic, the second is religious, and the third is theological.
First, Jesus’s flipping over the tables of the money changers and criticising the Temple authorities is an act of socio-economic protest and resistance. The Temple was the heart of a complex web of sociological and economic factors that underpinned Jerusalem’s role in the wider Judean culture.
The Temple was an economic powerhouse. Jewish people from all across the Mediterranean would travel there to make sacrifices, but to do so, they had to exchange their pagan money for special Temple coins. Which was a chance to make money. The animals for the sacrifices had to be bought. The priests had to be paid. The temple tax had to be given. Alms to the widows and orphans needed to be made. The leftover meat from the sacrifices was sold out of the Temple to the butchers of Jerusalem. Money flowed through the Temple.
The Temple was also the social and political heart of Judea. Without a king of their own, Judea was effectively run through the council of priests and the high priests associated with the Temple. They maintained the balance of power with Rome, local governors and client kings, and synagogue leaders. The Temple was a symbol of the surviving political power remaining to the Jewish people under Roman occupation.
Jesus Flipping Tables is Making a Prophetic Statement
So when Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and the people selling the sacrifices and says this Temple will be pulled down and destroyed, he is attacking not only those individuals but also the systems and structures that have made the Temple such a symbol. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he criticises the Temple for no longer being a house of prayer but a den of thieves. This is big and dramatic stuff for Jesus to be doing. It is tearing away at the foundations of Judean society and is precisely the kind of activity that gets the attention of the Sanhedrin and Roman occupiers. It was the equivalent of Jesus walking into a bar late at night and shouting, “Come on, if you think you’re hard enough”, to everyone inside.
Second, Jesus challenged the religious systems of the day. The Jewish faith was rooted in the sacrificial and Temple systems. Whilst the Exile, the rise of the synagogues, the growth of the diaspora, and the increasing power of the prophetic traditions had all challenged the sacrificial and Temple systems, they had not replaced them. The Temple remained at the heart of the Jewish faith and the sacrificial system was still the way that people could access the blessings of God.
Flipping Tables Overturns The Power Structures
Into the middle of these steps, Jesus overturns the structures which enabled the sacrifices to take place and challenges the very existence of that Temple. That is what Jesus flipping tables means.
The Temple, both the first one and the second one, were symbols of God’s presence with the people. The prophets had challenged that assumption, but the sheer physicality of the Temple precincts had remained a tangible reminder of the presence of God and the power of the priesthood as those who stood between the people and God to mediate those blessings. Jesus is saying that this thing you have all literally looked up to your whole lives, this place that you have come and bought animals to shed blood, the caste of people who stand between you and God, all of it is coming to an end. Something new is coming along.
This was not a new message. Prophets and prophetic groups had all made the same claim. But Jesus was transforming it into something radically different. Something which, when combined with his entry into Jerusalem, indicated something different was happening. Something which needed to be understood in a third way.
Flipping Tables Shows Us Who Jesus Is
Third, Jesus is making a theological statement about who he is and thus also about who God is. Jesus was radically redefining the relationship between God and humanity away from the Temple and the sacrificial system and into himself. Jesus is the place where humanity encounters God in the world. Not in a special curtained room hidden in a Temple but in the dust and on the road. Jesus is the revelation of God, a walking, talking apocalypse. Jesus’s body was the new Temple. The living body of God on Earth. This is what it meant to say that the kingdom of God has come and that Jesus is going to be taking up his rule as Lord and King.
We Have to Flip Tables As Well
But it would not stay only with Jesus. This is the really revolutionary claim of Christianity: that through the Holy Spirit, every single disciple of Jesus would fulfil that role as well. There would be no more need for Temples, holy places, priests, and sacrifices. Just as Jesus was the true Temple and the true High Priest, every disciple was to fulfill the incarnational role of Temple on Earth.
When the Holy Spirit is living in you, you become a place where God is encountered in the world. You become a Temple of the living God. You become an apocalypse, a place of revelation. This means that the presence of the knowledge of God’s glory will fill the world as the waters cover the sea.
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