If you were at church with us on Sunday morning, or have listened to Sunday’s sermon, you know that are we looking at the events of Holy Week each day leading up to Easter. Click here if you need to review, or if you are ready let’s move on.

We have four Gospels that often present similar accounts of events from the life and ministry of Jesus. Sometimes there appear to be conflicts in their story but apparent contradictions are not proof that the events did not really happen. The written accounts were recorded many years after they took place. We know that differing accounts of the same event can be found within a matter of days or even hours on social media. We are going to try to put together a basic timeline of the events of Holy Week but not all of the events are found in each Gospel and the order is not always identical. The cleansing of the temple may have been on Sunday evening or on Monday, but no one is claiming that it did not take place.

Matthew 21:12-17 records Jesus entering the Temple, apparently on Sunday evening, and driving out the money changers. The verses that follow indicate he came back the next morning and cursed a fig tree on his way into Jerusalem from Bethany, where he and the disciples were staying. Mark 11 has a slightly different timeline of the same events. Jesus looked around at everything happening in the temple on Sunday evening but then went to Bethany with his apostles. It was the next day before he entered the temple and disrupted the goings-on there. John’s Gospel does not present events in a narrative format and a careful study of that texts suggests Jesus may have ran everyone out of the temple on more than one occasion, at the beginning and then again near the end of his ministry. That would not be out of character for Jesus either.

The lesson is here is that Jesus is concerned about the temple and what takes place inside. In Matthew 21, linked above, Jesus says “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.” It was the commerce, the exchange of goods for a profit, that offended Jesus. The New Testament Church is a different situation than the Temple in the first century. The church today is the people, not the building. We are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit; we are the temple of God in the world. And he is concerned about what goes on there.