Dear Parish Family,

Today's Gospel story is one of those episodes that becomes luminous when you compare it with other evangelists' versions of the same event. Try, for a moment, to tell yourself the story of Jesus' clearing of the Temple as you recall it from memory. Now read how Mark tells it in his eleventh chapter and then how John tells it in the second chapter of his Gospel, and let yourself be astonished by what you find there.

In Mark’s version, Jesus, acts as predicted by Prophet Zachariah and quotes Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those prophets provide all the commentary we need. The Isaiah passage is an oracle about the ‘Age to Come’, when dispersed Israel will be gathered in from all over without discrimination. The quotation of Jeremiah refers to the Prophet’s teaching in the Temple condemning the evil behavior of the people who were acting as if their Temple rituals were going to make them right with God without any need to change their behavior. Thus they had turned the Temple into a false haven, a “den of thieves.” So according to Mark's version, Jesus' similar confrontation in the Temple was an acting out of the essential message of his preaching: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel”
What a surprise now to turn to John's version. Whereas in Mark the incident occurs during the final week, John introduces the episode early, right after the wedding feast at Cana. And John's description is far more dramatic. In this version, Jesus makes a whip out of cords and we hear not simply of doves but of sheep and oxen. We witness a veritable stampede of livestock scarcely suggested in Mark's version. And Jesus utters no quotations from the prophets but a direct command, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”

We recognize that it is from John that most of us get our picture of the cleansing of the Temple, thanks to Michelangelo's rendering of this scene. But John is being more than pictorial. The point is not drama but symbol. St. John seems to presume that his readers know the Synoptic tradition. Now he tells the familiar episodes with his own thematic coloring. In this Gospel Jesus replaces, one by one, all of the major Israelite institutions. His life, death, and resurrection definitively fulfill the meanings of Temple, feasts, and Torah. And here John shows Jesus acting out the full Easter meaning of his life: he can drive out the animals of the Temple sacrifice because his own self-offering on the cross will permanently fulfill the purpose of Temple sacrifice.

Jesus says “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The authorities misunderstand, but the evangelist hastens to explain that he was speaking of the temple of his body, a meaning that would become evident after Easter. If we ask what really happened in that Temple scene, Mark probably brings us closer to the events of history. If we ask ‘what is the deeper meaning of that happening’, John’s meditation draws us deeper. The reason John brings this to the beginning of his Gospel, out of historical order, is also the reason that we read this nearly halfway on the road to Easter. It forecasts the whole paschal mystery.

Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.