JOHN121 - How Dare You Turn My Father’s House Into a Market?

John 2:13-17

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And right now we're talking about the situation in the temple that was kind of understandable in terms of how things got weird and sideways and how it got all cheapened with money and sales and a livestock market happening right there on the temple grounds. We're talking about how we get and we can kind of trace how it devolved into what it was at the time of Jesus. But like so many things in life where, yeah, I get how it happened, still, we might not like what it has turned into, even if we get it, even if it's normal. Today I want to continue unpacking just what the situation was and what the scene was like, and what the smells and the sounds were like, and what the experience was like for a person who's just coming to try to worship God and be faithful in the first century AD, when they would go to Jerusalem for Passover and encounter this zoo, this mess that was made up of people selling livestock for sacrifices and also money changing that was going on to get it so that people could pay the temple tax with exactly the right kind of acceptable coin. It was very exploitative. Now, the temple tax ends up being about two days' labor's worth of silver every year that every dude has to pay to the temple. There were three different times a year that you could pay it. I think I don't know this for sure, but I think it corresponded to the three big festivals that people might go to Jerusalem to celebrate that I was talking about yesterday or the day before, or whenever that was. Whatever the case, I remember there were three times where you could just kind of show up and you could proactively do the payment. And then I think you could also uh pay that payment to local authorities, representatives of the temple, you know, when they were around, you could go and just pay that temple tax and take care of your business at other times of year as well. So a lot of people paid the temple tax at Passover. You're there, you know, like two birds with one stone or whatever. Well, speaking of two birds, we really have two things going on here that just sort of evolved and we're unfortunate, but we're here in the temple. One, you got a whole bunch of animals all around the temple because people aren't bringing their sacrifices with them. When the sacrificial system was put in place 1400 years before the events of John, pretty much everybody was pastoral. Pretty much everybody, I mean, they were nomadic. They lived everybody, wealth was a flock, everybody had something to sacrifice. Well, now you have a pretty strongly urban culture undergirded by Roman urbanism and logistics. And people just don't, I mean, not everybody has a sheep, you know. There are rich people who need to per the terms of the deal, they need to make a big sacrifice. Cattle, well, that's expensive. Also, dude, I'm a banker. I live in a town. I don't have a cow. What I mean, I'm in an apartment. It's where would I keep it? So you gotta go buy a cow in Jerusalem, and then the cow needs to be certified. Remember, God's expectation for these sacrifices were that they would be good. Well, you need somebody to vouch that these are certified good sacrifices, and not like, you know, crappy ones, the dumb ones, the runts, and the weaklings and the weird ones. It's gotta be the good ones. So these sellers, these booths crop up over the centuries around the temple to, you know, as a service, to help people. Well, obviously, supply and demand being what it is, there's gonna be a pretty hefty markup on this because you know, everybody wants cattle right now. So, you know, one, we have a monopoly on buying that cattle in a certified zone, that being here around the temple. And two, because of that monopoly and the demand, we assure you these are market prices that they may seem exorbitant, but this is just what you're gonna have to pay. It's like when you go to an airport and all of a sudden your whopper at Burger King is 26 bucks. Yes, that I saw that this week. I was at 20, it might have been 22 bucks. San Francisco Airport, 22 bucks for a whopper? What are we doing? Well, I'll tell you what we're doing. They control the situation. You can't go anywhere else to get Burger King. They're the only one, and you're inside the boundaries of security, so it gets more expensive. Well, this is the only place where you can get the cattle, sheep, and doves and have them be certified properly. So if you are one of the ones who's gonna buy an animal instead of providing your own, and it's much safer to just buy an animal from the experts, of course, this would be the place to do it in the shadow of the temple. But that's not what the temple was built for. We've got very targeted specifications of what the temple looked like. We, both archaeologically and from biblical historical records, we know what it was made for. You can go and still get a little bit of a sense of it if you go to Jerusalem now. I mean, go to that western wall and just look around and think, okay, well, how would it work if you brought in enough livestock and just crammed it in here and did sales? How would that sound? How would that look? How would that change the vibe of things? If you did that to accommodate, I don't know, a quarter of a million, a third of a million people, pilgrims who are coming to town to buy these things? Um, it would be absolute chaos. It would smell nothing like the incense from the temple. It would smell awful, it would be loud and ruckusome. There would be yelling and negotiation. None of this was really the point of the temple. It's not what the facility was in any way built for. And when you really stop and think about how we got here, on the one hand, you can see how it just crept, how this just over time became normal. A little more demand, a little more demand. Pretty soon, probably people aren't running the booths themselves. They're like doing coaching. Like, you just, you know, for a thousand bucks, I'll teach you how to make money selling cows and sheep and doves at Passover time. You're gonna make crazy money. And then I'll just take 10% of whatever you earn. And so you have like pyramid schemes, probably it's just you understand how these little industries, these little niches in an economy grow up. But also, if you really stop and think about how much real estate we have around the temple and what the point of the temple is and what the temple is like the rest of the year and what it was during this very holy time of the year, gross. You're ruining it. It's just tacky, it's awful. Okay, then add to that that you have the temple tax thing going on. And this to me is just absolutely comical. Now, Jesus does not disapprove of the temple tax in the book of Matthew. There's even a miracle where Jesus is like, yeah, it's temple tax time and we're gonna pay it miraculously. Hey, there's some in a fish, go get the fish, and there's a tetradrachman in there, go ahead and pay that temple tax. So it's not like Jesus is an anti-temple tax guy, he's not undermining Nehemiah's reforms, but he does apparently have a problem with the way this is being handled. And I I agree, I think it's pretty laughable. Now, the very same people who you know care for this temple and are so concerned about idolatry and the dangers of idolatry, the very same people who had an absolute meltdown at exactly this same moment in history over Pontius Pilate bringing in some shields that had a representation of the emperor on them there by the temple. Oh, that's idolatry because the Emperor Tiberius claims to be a god. We can't have those there. We can't have any images of anything that claims to be a god. Those very same people turned a blind eye. In fact, they endorsed the practice of accepting only Tyrian shekels, Tyrian tetradrachmas, as payment for the temple tax. Well, that's a big problem because you know whose face is on those coins? Not Julius Caesar, not Caesar Tiberius, somebody who is claiming to be a godman emperor. No, a demigod. Hercules is on Tyrian shekels. You know how I know? Because you can just go and get them. You want to hear one? Here, listen. There you go. That's about how heavy that is. And on the front, you got Hercules with his, you know, kind of like little wreath thing. Usually Hercules is uh portrayed wearing like the hood of a lion. Maybe it's a lion. It's hard to tell. Mine is a little bit worn down. And then on the back, you got an eagle like on the prow of a ship. And then you can kind of read the words from Tyre. This coin is from Tyre. Uh, I don't know what that word means. Well, one of the words means holy. It's the same word that gives us Hagia Sophia. So from the holy city of Tyre, something like that. Right here, engraved on this coin that is this heavy. Listen to the bulk. It's a lot of silver. I mean, it's a it's a really hefty, valuable chunk of silver. Still, if I took that coin I have and melted it down, it'd be worth a pretty penny. The nice thing about Tyrian shekels is they were neat coins, they were well minted, and they had a very predictable weight to them. You could easily tell if they'd been shaved or messed with in any way. Each one weighed about maybe half an ounce, something like that, maybe 15-ish. Yeah, 15 grams, maybe a little bit more. And it looks like this is either all silver here in my hand or very, very close. So today, you know, in modern money, three months ago that was worth like a hundred bucks. Right now that'd be worth maybe 50 bucks, 60 bucks, something like that. Maybe a little bit less if it's half. Maybe it'd be worth like 30 bucks right now. But you know, it's still decent money in terms of American coinage. But the question remains well, why would the religious leaders melt down and threaten mass suicide as recorded by Josephus over images of gods being anywhere near the temple, but be okay with a coin that has Hercules on it and that is foreign from Tyre? Well, the reason is because they were really nice, really valuable coins with really predictable silver value, and they didn't want to get cheated out of the money they had coming in with this tax. So if you came in to pay the temple tax, you were expected to trade out whatever little bronze coins or whatever that didn't have any actual metal value themselves at a certified money changer table to make sure you could get. I mean, they had a giant stack of coins that looked just like this one, and they would take all kinds of different coins from around the empire. Again, coins that probably were not made of silver. They were the the value of those coins was the government vouch behind them, not the metal value. And they would change government vouch cheapo coins for actual metal value coins, and they would only accept that. So if you want to pay the temple tax, well, the Bible doesn't say you have to pay with a Tyrian tetradrachma. That didn't exist when these things were written in the Old Testament. But we do, and we're willing to just kind of look the other way, even though it has the son of a god, a demigod, right there on the coin, even though that's obviously idolatry per our own ground rules and categories that we've created and enforced even violently ourselves. So the whole thing is pretty chamois, my friends. That's the point. And it's the kind of chamois thing, you know, like I was talking about earlier, that you see all the time. You're like, all right, look, I get how we got here. I get why we're doing what we're doing. And I, you know, I could talk to the person at the booth about it, but they're gonna be like, I don't know, man. I just gotta do the thing, just make a living. This is just what I was told to do. I don't know, you're talking to the wrong person. Well, guess what? There's never a right person to talk to. Nobody. You're gonna get patted on the head for raising any objections to this thing. You just go along to get along. And anybody who would ever dare resist a thing that is completely bastardized and is in a violation of our social contract and the point of whatever it is that we're supposed to be, you're just gonna have to take it because it's normal now. Well, Jesus didn't treat this as normal, and I just think it's awesome that he came into this maybe understandable situation, but definitely a gross perversion of the point situation and just called it for what it is. This is garbage. Jesus' actions proclaim loud and clear, this is a joke. However, we got here, you've turned this whole thing into a joke, a laughable eye roll obligation, injustice that we all just have to take that goes so far as to not just change the metaphorical smell of what the temple is about, but the literal smell of what the temple is about. You have put a barrier between the people and God, which is an accusation that Jesus makes many times against the temple establishment and the religious leaders of his day. And this is also, it flies in the face of what the prophet Isaiah says in Isaiah 55, 1, super famous verse, says, Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come by and eat, come by wine and milk without money and without cost. This isn't like some sort of early Marxism or something. I've heard it co-opted that way before. That ain't the point. It's a picture of the kingdom. It's a picture of the infinite provision of God. It's also a picture of the care and compassion of God for the nameless and the impoverished and the people on the edges of society. They're a part of the kingdom too. But whatever had mutated here in Jerusalem was repugnant to Jesus and completely flew in the face of the point of what the temple was supposed to be about. I, for one, find this cathartic. And I don't know that I want to go flip over tables or be aggressive or violent, but man, there's something that resonates with it. When things turn foul, when they turn unjust, when they turn not how they ought to be, but they're normal and they're accepted, there's a certain feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that goes with that. And just on a very personal note, it's kind of cool to see Jesus nuke it and call it what it is with all of his authority and all of his strength. Sweet. Okay, more to come. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.