Wednesday
Wednesday
The New Temple
So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!
Mark 15:29–30
Here is one more piece of abuse that the Jewish leaders hurled at Jesus while he hung on the cross. It concerned his teaching about the temple, and it deserves our meditation today.
The place to begin is our Lord’s respectful attitude to the temple as the house of God. He, of course, knew the history of Israel. He was well acquainted with the sequence of events from the tabernacle in the desert, to the first temple built by Solomon, to the second temple begun after the Babylonian exile, to Herod’s temple still under construction. In each of these buildings there was an inner sanctuary, or Holy of Holies, in which the shekinah glory, the symbol of God’s presence, could be seen. Thus God dwelt in the midst of his people, and the temple was the focus of their spiritual life.
But Jesus was shocked by the contemporary desecration of the temple by its use for commerce. The house of prayer had become a den of thieves. So Jesus did more than cleanse the temple; he foretold its destruction and replacement. “Destroy this temple,” he said, “and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19). His hearers entirely misinterpreted his meaning. They protested that the Jerusalem temple had already been under construction for forty-six years; how could he possibly rebuild it in three days? The claim was absurd. But John explained that Jesus was referring to his resurrection body, which would become a new temple, the focus of the new messianic community. In the future, even when only two or three of his disciples met in his name, he would be among them (Matt. 18:20).
Jesus’s contemporaries never forgot this saying of his. The false witnesses reminded the Sanhedrin of it. And while he was on the cross the priests mocked his prophecy of a new temple. The New Testament letters, however, unfold Jesus’s prophecy. The old temple was destroyed in AD 70, but now Jesus’s messianic and resurrected community is the new temple, the dwelling place of God by his Spirit (see 1 Cor. 3:16).
For further reading: Ephesians 2:11–22