The going forth of the Saviour

The going forth of the Saviour
BST

The temple
Luke 19:45–21:38

[Jesus Cleanses the Temple]
    [45] And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, [46] saying to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be a house of prayer,' but you have made it a den of robbers."
    [47] And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, [48] but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.
(Luke 19:45-48 ESV)

    It would be possible to take what is often called the 'Triumphal Entry' of Jesus into Jerusalem, a week before his death, as the beginning of the last main division of Luke's Gospel (19:28ff.). In Luke even more clearly than in the other Gospels, however, it is not actually an entry, for Jesus is still approaching the city in 19:41; and for this and a number of other reasons1 I have linked that passage with the middle division, and taken the third division (the passion narrative) to begin not with the Palm Sunday events of 19:28ff., but here at 19:45, with the Lord's entry into the temple in Jerusalem. First we have a section just over two chapters long which, as the [Luke, Page 180] above quotations show, is set entirely in and around the temple in Jerusalem.2

1.    The meaning of 'the temple'

a.    The heart of the city of Jerusalem

This was one of the most splendid buildings of the ancient world. The original temple, Solomon's magnificent structure dating from the tenth century BC, had been destroyed four hundred years later, and replaced in due course by what was known as the 'second temple'; it was this one which in the time of Jesus was undergoing a prolonged and thorough renovation by King Herod,3 who lavished immense sums of money on it. It was a complex of buildings about a quarter of a mile square, with the actual temple itself at the centre, crowning the city of Jerusalem, which itself crowned a hilltop, so that the temple—much of its exterior plated with silver or even gold, and the rest dazzling white marble—looked from a distance like the snow-capped peak of a mountain.
    Its real importance, however, was not that of an imposing piece of architecture. Its religious significance, at the heart of the faith of Israel, was immensely greater.

b.    The heart of the faith of Israel

It was the centre and symbol of Jewish religion. Remembering this, we can see why Luke returns to it at this stage in his narrative. For he had begun the story of Jesus in the same place. It was there that Zechariah 'was serving as priest before God' when the angel appeared to him in order to announce the coming birth of Jesus's forerunner John (1:8ff.), and there Jesus himself, as a child, was taken on two occasions, a highly significant prophetic word being uttered about him each time (2:22ff. 41ff.). In his opening chapters Luke was saying, as it were, to his non-Jewish readers, 'My story concerns the Saviour of the world; but if you are rightly to understand its message of universal salvation, you have to realize at the outset that it begins in what some may think the most unlikely surroundings—in Judaism, the religion of Israel.'

    From this root had grown the new plant, the religion of Christ. Through nineteen chapters Luke has chronicled its growth and development. And now, as the life of Jesus nears its climax, Malachi's prediction (already quoted more than once in the Gospel) is fulfilled again: the Lord comes to his temple.4 Luke returns to the place from which the new 'faith of Israel' has sprung; as if to say, 'And now what is to happen to the old faith, the faith for which this temple stands?'

c.    The heart of the spiritual experience of mankind

As I have said, we are not here concerned with Middle Eastern archaeology; but neither are we concerned only with comparative religion. For 'the temple' has a deeper meaning even than that of the symbol of Judaism. It represents, in both Old Testament and New, the place where God meets with man. Such an encounter is not necessarily restricted to one particular place, and in his second volume Luke will explain this both to Jewish and to non-Jewish readers, in the words of Stephen for the one and of Paul for the other.5 For Judaism, the promised place of encounter was indeed, for many years, the Jerusalem temple; for Christianity, it is within6 or among7 God's people, wherever they may be, since they are themselves his temple.
    According to this deepest significance, then, all of us have our own 'temple', the place in our innermost being where we confront God. The 'temple' stands for our relationship with him. It may not be a very good relationship. It may be a sham, or an illusion. But it is our religion, our faith, our way of life: 'me and God'—whatever sort of God I may believe in.