Matthew 21:12-17 - Hope for the Outcasts

I love hearing Micah pray.

I love joining in with him in prayer.

Sake your Bibles and go to Matthew chapter 21.

Matthew 21 · chapter mention

Matthew 21.

For those of you that are new here visiting, we've been going through the Gospel of Matthew together for uh just, well, right around two years.

And we are in chapter 21, which is the beginning of the end of Jesus' ministry.

In fact, uh, Matthew spends almost a whole third of the rest of this gospel just on this last week of the life of Jesus and the things that occurred after his resurrection.

We looked at one of these events in this final week, last week, uh, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.

And there he presented himself as Israel's Messiah and King.

And that prompted the praise of the people, that also uh prompted some suspicious curiosity on the parts of others who are wondering, who is this that everybody's shouting about?

And we're going to come to the second event during this final week, that of what we call the cleansing of the temple, verses 12 to 17.

When Jesus came into the city, you would think that it coming as the Jewish Messiah, that he would come gathering a sizable force of people and seizing power by going to uh Fortress Antonia and dealing with the Romans, but instead he goes solitarily to the temple and deals with the Jewish people.

An interesting twist of expectation.

Let's read uh this section of scripture, beginning in verse twelve.

Jesus went into the temple and threw out all those buying and selling.

He overturned the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves.

He said to them, It is written, My house will be called a house of prayer, but you're making it a den of thieves.

The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.

When the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonders that he did, and the children shouting in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant and said to him, Do you hear what these children are saying?

And Jesus replied, Yes.

Have you never read you have prepared praise from the mouths of infants and nursing babies?

And then he left them and went out of the city to Bethany and spent the night there.

Jesus comes into this temple, and as he does so, we're introduced in this small section of scripture to two episodes in his time there.

One is the clearing of the temple, and the second is his meeting with people who are blind and lame and healing them.

The cleansing of the temple we'd seen before.

If you read the Gospel of John, you see that early in his ministry he did this.

This is his second occurrence.

And the healing of the blind and the lame is something Jesus has been doing throughout his ministry.

In both of these, we see Jesus set in opposition to the religious authorities of the day.

And this morning I want us to see him as he presents himself here, first of all, as the Lord of the temple, who is worthy of our obedience.

And then secondly, to see him as the Lord of compassion, worthy of our praise.

So those two points are going to be the focus of our attention this morning.

The Lord of the temple, worthy of our obedience, and the Lord of compassion, worthy of our praise.

Well, let's introduce ourselves to this place we're at, because everything revolves around what's going on in the temple.

And I'm not sure what you imagine when you think about the time and life of Jesus and Jerusalem, of what it might have looked like, and the city of Jerusalem with the temple there.

You might have some notion of it by way of pictures that you've seen of modern day Jerusalem.

Around 20 BC, Herod the Great launched a building program of the temple, kind of reconstructed everything, and made it one of the world's most magnificent structures.

It was so large a building project that Herod never saw its end.

In fact, Jesus never saw its end, and there's still some discussion about whether or not it was even finished by the time it was destroyed in 70 AD.

This is a long building project.

And it was a magnificent complex.

The western wall that we see, and you might have a mental image of having seen that, those are simply the stones of the foundation of the platform, to say nothing of all the buildings that would have been on top of that platform.

We had the opportunity to go into some of those tunnels about nine months ago and ran into one stone that was 40 feet long, eight feet deep, and four feet high, and weighed, oh, what was it, 80 tons?

I think it was something like that.

One stone.

Most of those columns were about 30 feet high, and some of them were upwards of a hundred feet high.

The columns were massive.

Three people would have to go fingertip to fingertip to work their way around them.

They were that large.

So if I get Chad and Micah up here in the three of us, I'll give you a good feel for how big those columns are.

Those are just the boundary walls of this immense and extravagant edifice.

Historians tell us it took 10,000 carpenters and masons laboring over four decades to build this complex.

It was an architectural wonder.

And we would still consider it that if it was here.

One rabbi, later rabbi, remarked about it, he said, It used to be said that he who has seen, who has not seen the temple of Herod has never seen a beautiful building.

It was that unique.

So this is where we're at, in that kind of place.

And at the heart of the temple complex would have been the temple building with its division of the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest could go in once a year, and then the holy place.

And it towered above everything in the city.

The doors to the temple were between 60 or 100 feet tall, depending on who you talk to.

And the temple building itself would have towered some 15 stories up from the platform.

You see pictures of the Dome of the Rock, right?

That shiny gold dome mosque that sits on the temple complex.

Double the height of that, and that's how tall the temple would have stood.

Outside of that, you've got the court of the priests, where the altar was and where the sacrifices were made.

Outside of that, you've got the court of Israel, where the laymen of Israel could come.

Outside of that, you have the court of the women where the Jewish women could reside and be.

And then on the furthest peripheries of this would be the court of the Gentiles, where the Gentiles would come.

And it is that outer periphery, the court of the Gentiles, that's our focus in this passage of scripture.

A 35-acre area, an open-air courtyard, you might say, where Jesus and everything that we're about to look at is.

Deuteronomy 12, God told the people of Israel initially to bring their own sacrifices as they went in to worship.

But over the course of time that transformed into people realizing that if they brought their animals, they would have to be extremely careful to make sure that they never got hurt or harmed or maimed or bruised or broken in any way because they wouldn't be acceptable to sacrifices.

And they had taken this animal some several miles on their journey only to have it refused at the temple.

Some of them didn't want to be bothered with all of that hassle, and so they would just bring money with them and buy an animal while they were there and sacrifice it.

But those who wanted to bring their own animals would come and they would go to the priest, and the priest would inspect their animal, and the priest would go, Yep, you're gonna have to get a different one.

And lo and behold, I just have one for sale right here.

The religious authorities had set up four markets in the Mount of Olives, so just on the other side of the Temple Mount area, where animals could be purchased.

They could be bought for a price, they could be guaranteed to be blemish-free and valid for sacrifice, but you had to go through the merchants.

And around 30 AD, the current high priest that Jesus will be dealing with, and whose name we'll mention, Caiaphas, instituted something else, a shocking new development.

He set up a marketplace not on the Mount of Olives, but inside the temple complex itself.

He set up a market in the court of the Gentiles to where these animals could be bought.

At one level, it just seemed like a convenient, hassle-free arrangement.

But there's more.

Added to this is people were ordered to exchange their Roman coinage that had the visage of Caesar on it with other coinage to be able to pay their temple tax.

And it would have been just would have been blasphemous to have the head of a man on a coin dedicated to God.

So they had to make that exchange.

And so the money changers are there as well.

So you have the merchants selling animals, you've got the money changers trading money.

And all of this is set up to accommodate all these Passover pilgrims who have come with their money, with their sacrifices, with their obligations to pay the tax.

So imagine the scene, this extremely extravagant temple complex with these courtyards of increasing prohibition of people to go into.

And on the outer periphery of that, the court of the Gentiles filled with tables of people exchanging money, tables and pins and corrals of animals and all of that.

Masses of people exchanging money, masses of people arguing about the price that they have to pay for the animals that they're about to receive.

People looking at that and looking at the tariffs that are exacted on top, the fees that they have to pay in order to get their temple tax money.

Money boxes sort of sat around, some of them scattered, and coins rolling around, and animals bleeding and making noise, and doves escaping the cages that they're in and sort of flying off.

What a concohony it would have been.

We need some help.

And what would have really been a shock was this was the guy everybody was hailing as the Messiah.

The Jewish literature of the day said that when the Messiah came, he was going to purge Jerusalem of the Gentiles.

And he's in the temple purging the Jewish people and disrupting their worship.

Is now coming after them.

He's upturning the tables of Jewish people in the Jewish temple dedicated to the worship of Yahweh.

What is happening here?

Well, at one level, you could say that Jesus was rebuking the behavior that had been directed by the commerce that was going on, that he was upset at the enterprise of using this place for buying and selling of sacrificial animals and exchanging money.

If you're going to do that, do that outside.

Perhaps that was it, but I think there's something more here.

There's something more here.

And this is why I took the moment to sort of explain the temple, the holy, the holy of holies, the holy place, the area of sacrifice, the court of the Israel where the men went, the court of the women, and the court of the Gentiles, and it being in the court of the Gentiles.

You see, the court of the Gentiles was the only place that Gentile converts to Judaism could worship.

They couldn't go any further into the temple because they weren't pure Jews, even though they had converted.

And the place where they would enter was filled with these merchants.

All these foreigners had traveled for a long distance and they found it impossible for them to worship.

So Jesus becomes angry.

First of all, because God's house had been turned into a place of extortion, but more so, I think, because it was a barrier to the Gentiles who wanted to worship.

And so what Jesus is doing when he comes into the temple is clearing out the temple so the Gentiles can worship.

The Messiah wasn't coming to clear the temple of the Gentiles.

He was coming to clear the temple for the Gentiles.

And then he says this my house will be called a house of prayer.

You are making it a den of thieves.

Jesus pulls two Old Testament passages into his comment, one from Jeremiah chapter 7, and one from Isaiah 56.

Jeremiah 7 · chapter mention

These are very familiar passages of scripture to the people.

In fact, Jeremiah 7 is called the Temple Sermon, a famous sermon of Jeremiah's.

Let's mention that one first.

Jeremiah back in his day, back before the Babylonian captivity, back when Israel was sort of playing the game of alliance with foreign powers in order to get themselves out from underneath the sort of rule of Babylon, were thinking that they were safe still because the temple was still there and they were still in Jerusalem, and God was on their side because he said he would be.

And Jeremiah preaches a sermon to them that tells them that unless they repented of their wickedness, being in the temple wasn't going to do them any good.

In fact, they would be ripped out of the temple, and even the temple itself would be destroyed.

And so in this sermon in Jeremiah chapter 7, let me quote it: Do not trust deceitful words, Jeremiah says.

Jeremiah 7 · chapter mention

Chanting, This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.

You know what they were doing?

They were playing a game of uh tag, is what they were doing.

You know, there was the Babylonians out there and the Egyptians over there, and somewhat other powers that were around, local, not quite as big.

And they would like go out and like run past the Babylonians and go, ha ha, you can't catch me.

And they'd they'd grab a hold of the temple and go, Safe! I'm safe, can't touch me, can't touch me.

The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, I'm safe.

And they thought as long as they had that base, they were okay.

Jeremiah says to them, Instead, if you really correct your ways and your actions, if you act justly toward one another, if you no longer oppress the resident alien, the fatherless and the widow, and no longer shed innocent blood in this place or follow other gods, bringing harm in yourself, I will allow you to live in this place.

In the land I gave your ancestors long ago.

He said, It's it's not the building keeping you safe.

It's me.

And you're playing this silly game.

You know, they would sort of run away from home and taunt the Babylonians and run away from home and play with the Egyptians, and then they'd run back whenever it looked like trouble, and they'd grab a hold of the temple and go, I'm safe.

But once they got to safe, they would they would still continue the taunts because they thought, this is never going away.

This is this is my security.

And Jeremiah warns them that if they disregard his call to repentance, that they're going to get expelled from the land and expelled from the temple.

This very place they thought was the security of God.

Jesus picks up that sermon and he quotes one little verse from it.

He quotes a little section of them and calls them a den of thieves.

He calls them robbers, but not just robbers, because the word is not your common word for a thief.

The word that he uses is a word for an insurrectionist.

He's calling them insurrectionists, like Barabbas and the revolutionaries that were executed around the time of Jesus' crucifixion.

You see, Jesus' expulsion of these merchants is more than just his indignation about their taking the temple area and using it for their own profit.

He's calling the religious authorities thieves, insurrectionists, because they weren't just robbing people, they were rebelling against God.

They had turned into insurrectionists by claiming the temple as their own instead of responsibly living because it's his.

And again, just a little comment out of a passage.

In Isaiah 56, we read of the Lord's intention to allow foreigners who have bowed themselves to the Lord, who are holding fast to his promises, to be able to share in the blessings of his house.

This is what it reads.

These, the nations, the foreigners, I will bring to my holy mountain, and I will give them joy in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.

For my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.

The religious elite had set up tables of commerce in the court of the Gentiles.

They were usurping God's authority and were robbing him.

Listen to this, they were robbing not just the people, they were robbing God of the worship of the nations.

They had so obscured the temple's true function to be a place where God's holiness would be revealed, to be a place where there could be worship of all nations.

They had so twisted that the consequences were coming.

The temple was not functioning in Israel's life.

Can you guys hear me?

You can hear me.

The Abrahamic promise could not be fulfilled.

Israel cannot be the means.

There it goes again.

By which God's blessing could be extended to all the nations.

They were standing in the way of God's promised plan to bring his glory to the nations.

And just like the warning that Jeremiah gives in chapter 7, don't say these silly things, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, and think that you're safe.

Repent.

Jesus is now picking up that very same sermon.

And he's saying, You're putting your security in the wrong place.

And you're going to bear the consequences.

And just like Jeremiah warned them, you're going to be expelled from the land, you're going to be expelled from the temple.

In two chapters, Jesus is going to predict the judgment of God upon this generation and talk about the destruction of the temple.

We get further into Matthew 27.

The curtain of the holy place is ripped from top to bottom at the moment of Jesus' death.

An expression of immediate judgment that's going to be fulfilled in just some years at 70 AD, but also symbolizing that a new way to God has been opened up.

Israel and the temple are not fulfilling their role and their part in God's plan.

And so the gospel of Matthew is indicating the shift of attention is going to move from the people to the temple, to the person, the Messiah, and he is going to be the center of salvation, and he is going to be the means by which the blessings of the nations is going to come.

As we read throughout Jesus' ministry, we see that happening.

All these indicators that he's going to be taking the place of the temple, announcing forgiveness, healing the sick, bringing sinners into relationship with God, expressing the very presence of God.

He is in every way taking on the function and role of the temple itself.

And just a few verses from here, Jesus will quote a passage: the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

This is what the Lord has done, and it's wonderful in our eyes.

So we call this, we call this episode the cleansing of the temple, but it's got a far larger significance than that.

By taking this decisive action, Jesus is asserting his authority over the center of Israel's religion and Israel's identity.

He's taking authority over it all.

He is the Lord of the temple.

Like a prophet of old, he protests against the abuses of the temple.

Like Israel's great high priest, he oversees the proper use of the temple and its worship and sacrifices.

And as king, he exercises authority by governing the temple, that central symbol of Israel's faith, that centerpiece of their identity as God's people.

Coming into the new covenant of Jesus Christ, Paul had to remind the church at Corinth that's something that they'd obviously just totally overlooked.

He said, Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?

And you're not your own?

You're bought with a price.

Therefore, glorify God in your body, which is God's.

They were to recognize him as the Lord of the physical temple, and he was worthy of obedience.

We recognize him as the Lord of us, and he is worthy of our obedience.

But we collectively are built as stones to make up a habitation of God.

We become collectively the temple of God.

And we are operating together as that place where God declares his forgiveness, where God heals the broken, where God brings people into the presence of God, where he shows his own presence.

We become the temple.

And we too have an obligation to make sure the way is open for all nations.

We have an obligation to make sure that the message, so that those who would bind themselves to the Lord and bind themselves to his promises could be find a place of prayer and praise.

This is why we go out and preach the gospel.

This is why we send out our beloved brothers and sisters into distant places to bring the message of Christ to nations that haven't heard.

Because Jesus is the Lord of the temple, and he's worthy of obedience.

The next episode just moves immediately right in.

The blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them.

This is a significant statement.

The blind and the lame coming to Jesus in the temple.

Well, the blind and the lame are mentioned in Leviticus 21.

The sons of Aaron couldn't have any blind or lame sons serving in the temple as an indication of the purity that was demanded in the temple worship.

And Jesus, by healing the blind and healing the lame, is showing his authority to grant the purity that the law demands for entrance into God's presence.

He is fulfilling the Old Testament prescriptions for cleansing by touching and healing the lame and the blind.

This action was something that should have been expected in the Messianic age, Isaiah 35.

Listen to it.

Strengthen the weak hands, steady the shaking knees, say to the cowardly, Be strong, do not fear.

Here is your God.

God's vengeance is coming, God's retribution is coming, he will save you.

The eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped, and then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the moot mute will sing for joy.

Jesus is fulfilling this messianic promise.

In every way, he's shown the vengeance, seeking to secure the salvation of the outcasts, the Gentiles, and saying to the blind and the maim, I've come to heal you.

Don't be afraid.

So let's just step back for a second here.

What has Jesus done?

Jesus, in rushing in, casting out the money changers, tipping over all the tables, and making these statements, is he's not only set his attitude against what's happening, he has in fact shut the temple down.

In Mark chapter 11 and verse 16, in Mark's account to this very same instance, he adds a little detail.

Mark 11 · chapter mention

Jesus would not permit anyone to carry goods through the temple.

He shut the activity down, at least temporarily.

If animals and people couldn't come in or out and couldn't move about, he shut the worship down.

But while he's still there, he opens it up again.

And he opens it up for the neediest people in Israel, the blind and the lame.

He opens it up so that they could be healed, not pushed around and shoved around, not to be ignored or sort of shunned, not to be talked about or looked at, but to be touched and made whole.

This is a scene, yes, of a divine judgment and condemnation, but it's also a scene of beautiful compassion.

Those who are blind and those who are lame, those who were sat at the outskirts of the temple and left to beg for their food.

These individuals who were restricted from coming deeper into the temple, Jesus doesn't cast them out.

He calls them in.

He cares for them.

He heals them.

He gives them access to come closer.

You see, he's the king.

He's not just Lord of the temple, he's the Lord of compassion.

He's the Lord over disease.

And there's no coincidence why, when we get to the book of Revelation and we see this sort of temple imagery, and there is that picture in the presence of Jesus in the worship of God, where there is no sickness, no disease, no hurt, no pain.

This healing is an act of his divine love.

But it's also a correction to everybody else.

At that time, the lame and the blind were left outside, even the sort of Qumran community where the Dead Sea scrolls were written.

They wouldn't let the blind or the lame even in their midst in their communities.

And they were restricted, as I said, from full temple access.

So, in essence, Jesus expels what the religious authorities had allowed, and he allows entrance to what the religious authorities had expelled.

He reverses everything here.

He drives out the money changers and he welcomes the hurt.

He gives grace to the ones the leaders had excluded from any access to grace.

And this is why the children start to sing and to cry, Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna to the Son of David.

Save us, save us, Messiah, save us.

They broke out in praise.

It didn't take long for the Jewish authorities to regroup.

Verse 15, the chief priest and scribes saw the wonders that Jesus did, and the children shouting in the temple.

Hosanna to the Son of David.

And they were indignant.

The fact that they were even together at all is quite a remarkable thing.

The chief priest and the scribes, they hated each other.

The chief priest, they were the wealthy, upper class, priestly party, had their own little section of Jerusalem to live in.

The scribes?

Well, they were the popular people, the Pharisees.

The scribes and the chief priests, they hated each other.

But they could agree on something.

We both hate Jesus, don't we?

Yeah, we do.

And they recognize Jesus as a threat to their position of prominence and power over the religious life of Israel.

And when these children are in there crying out to Jesus, Hosanna to the Son of David, they realize they've got a big problem on their hands.

Because they're looking at this man, they think.

And the children are shouting in the temple, save us, Messiah, save us, Messiah, save us, Messiah.

We got to stop this.

And they ask Jesus, Do you hear what they're saying?

Can you really accept this blasphemy, Jesus?

And Jesus says, Yeah, I hear it.

I hear it.

Have you never read out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you prepared praise for yourself?

Yeah, Jesus heard what they were saying.

And what he was, what he says about them is what they're saying is absolutely true.

I agree with what they're doing.

Have you not read?

Psalm 8, as we heard, is all about praising God.

And it begins, Yahweh, our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth.

Jesus is deliberately accepting the praise of Yahweh here as these children cry out.

His actions in the temple are pronouncing judgment on the religious authorities, but healing to the blind and the lame.

And all of that should have caused them to repent in their heart, to acknowledge him as the Lord of the temple and given them their obedience and to acknowledge him as the Lord of compassion and given him their heart and their praise.

But instead they got indignant.

And Jesus walks away, goes to Bethany, and comes back at it another day, which we'll look at.

What's going on here?

Well, in these startling encounters that we've just read, the religious leaders confronted by Jesus are confronted with the Lord of the temple and the Lord of compassion.

They should have given him their obedience in their hearts.

We too are being confronted with the Lord of the temple and the Lord of compassion.

For some of us, we need to recognize that he is the Lord of us, and he deserves all of us.

And then there's other of us here who need to realize that he's not holding you out, he's welcoming you in.

And he's not saying, change before you come.

Come as you are.

He's teaching us that the kingdom of God is not just about rules and regulations and outward forms of worship.

That the church of God is not a place where we can take advantage of others and to use them to better our social standing or to selfishly find and indulge in or amassing wealth in the name of God.

His kingdom is here among us, and it deserves the first place.

The king who is gentle and righteous, the king who has salvation, the king who has come worthy of our worship, worthy of our obedience, worthy of our praise.

But understanding that's just not enough.

We need to give him ourselves, who we are, all of us, to be ready for complete submission to him and ready to be obedient to him and quick to be in praise of him.

Because the people of God must be a place of prayer and a place of praise and a place of proclamation.

And we're faced here with the personal claims of Jesus upon each and every one of us.

His rightful place, deserving of us our lives, our obedience, our prayer, our praise.

In this little section of scripture, the whole of God's kingdom is encapsulated.

Statements of his mercy and forgiveness, statements of it reaching all the way to the Gentiles, to the nations, statements of a coming day of consummation that will be one of judgment and of glory.

Statements about Jesus as he stands alone and above and against all of those things that people had set as common patterns of religiosity in their day, in order to show himself unique, the very anointed one of God who's come to save.

May we be a people recognizing him, never forgetting who he is, giving him the allegiance that he's due, giving him the praise that he deserves, because he is not only Lord over us, he's Lord for us as well.

Let's pray.

Oh Father, thank you for this short little episode in the life of Jesus, as brief as it is, yet so full of truth and love.

We pray, Father, that our hearts might be exercised by what we've read and heard together.

And that, Lord, we would not think that we stand secure because of some place or some pattern of religion, but rather we would cling to you, who is the true temple.

And we would say, He is the temple of the Lord.

And I'm identified with him.

Lord, help us as your people to keep your purposes and plans in Christ at the very forefront of who we are.

May we not forget that you are designing and desiring the name of Jesus to be exalted among all nations.

May we continue to be forward-moving in bringing the message of Christ to everyone here and everywhere.

And may we, Father, recognize that we're to live with one another in self-giving love, not using one another, not presuming against one another.

And may we, Father, learn to love those who are left out of society, those who aren't quickly welcomed and exalted, those who feel like they're outcasts, because they're not outcasts to you.

We thank you that we're not.

We thank you that you love the outcasts.

Because that's what each and every one of us are.

And we bless you in the name of Jesus.

Amen.