
I recently preached on John 2, where Jesus cleanses the Temple (for the first time). This provocative scene becomes even more enthralling once you make the connection that the zeal with which Jesus was consumed was about something far deeper than the “brick and mortar” structure in which his tirade took place. He was, to be sure, disgusted by the corruption of the liturgy and the ritual that was taking place in his Father’s house. However, the priests and patrons of the Temple that day were not merely desecrating a building. Rather, they were profaning the very heart of God. The haven of God’s presence was being polluted by vendors, money changers, and humanity’s incessant greed (John 2:14).
The profundity of this contaminant is made even worse once you recall that the Temple edifice itself was meant to stand as a witness to God’s abiding promise and presence for his people, which, of course, is what Jesus comes to distinctly embody. In the Christ of God, saints and sinners “no longer enter into a temple of wood and stone to meet with God,” writes Dane Ortlund. Instead, uncannily, he continues, God enters “into a temple of flesh and blood to meet with us” (157). He condescends to meet us on his terms, which just so happens to be right where we are, in skin and bone amid sin and death. One of my favorite nineteenth-century orators, Scottish Baptist Alexander Maclaren, concurs:
He [Jesus Christ] is greater than the Temple, for in Him, in no symbol but in reality, abode and abides the fulness of that unnameable Being whom we name Father and God. And not only does the fulness abide, but in Him that awful Remoteness becomes for us a merciful Presence . . . as the ancient name of that Temple was the ‘Tent of Meeting,’ the place where Israel and God, in symbolical and ceremonial form, met together, so, in inmost reality in Christ’s nature, Manhood and Divinity cohere and unite, and in Him all of us, the weak, the sinful, the alien, the rebellious, may meet our Father. (10.2.135)
Jesus Christ not only draws near to sinners and strangers (Eph. 2:13), but he also brings the presence of God close to them. He takes up residence in flesh and blood to showcase the Father’s attendance to mankind’s every need. “That body of Jesus,” comments twentieth-century Lutheran scholar and theologian R. C. H. Lenski, “was prefigured by the material Sanctuary of the Jews” (217). Within that ornate meeting place, with blood and smoke wafting in the rafters, the Father met with his fallen and failing children, mercifully pardoning their sins and keeping them in his covenant of unending faithfulness. The Temple was a structural representation of the corporeal Redeemer. Lenski continues:
It was a kind of substitute for it until the fulness of time should come. It was a promise of the true and everlasting connection which our Savior-God would make with us sinners by means of a more sacred Sanctuary or dwelling place, namely our own human nature which was assumed even in a material body but in altogether sinless form when he became man for our sake. (217–18)
It is not happenstance that allows Maclaren, Lenski, and Ortlund to agree in articulating the essence of the Temple in the embodiment of the Savior. In so doing, they cohere with Stephen’s and Peter’s testimonies, not to mention Jesus’s own revelation, as recorded by John: “He was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:21). Now and forever, sinners are invited to meet with their Maker and Redeemer at the body of the crucified and risen Lord.
Grace and peace to you.
Works cited:
R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961).
Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944).
Dane Ortlund, Surprised by Jesus: Subversive Grace in the Four Gospels (Leyland, England: Evangelical Press, 2021).