NOTES for Luk 19:45-48
The expulsion of the merchants from the Temple is probably one of the best-known Gospel episodes. But what lies behind it? Of course, we could reduce it simply to outrage at the ‘baseness’ of what was happening. Yet the trade in the Temple courtyard and beneath the surrounding colonnades was not ordinary trade but, so to speak, ‘sacred’. People sold what was needed for sacrifice: sheep, goats, doves and everything else a pilgrim—or sometimes a local resident, who as a city-dweller had no other source for these things—might need. Of course, even such trade was not entirely lawful from the Torah's standpoint. The Temple is the Temple; trading within its precincts is forbidden, even in what we would now call service areas.
Evidently, in Gospel times this prohibition was easily evaded by appealing, on the one hand, to certain ‘ingenious’ interpretations of the relevant legal provisions and, on the other, to expediency and an established tradition that may by then have been several centuries old. But Jesus apparently recognizes neither as authoritative. He acts with the decisiveness of a prophet, to whom things were sometimes permitted that were not permitted to others. There can hardly be grounds for doubting that this is precisely a prophetic act, something like the symbolic actions prophets sometimes performed: actions that could look strange or even provocative but always had a definite spiritual meaning.
Of course, one such action could not restore order: everything in the Temple courtyard would soon have returned to its former state. But the Saviour's purpose was different: to draw people's attention to a habitual, almost traditional violation of a commandment God had given, a law He had established.
A violation that could of course be justified by expediency or tradition, but remained a violation nonetheless. This action of Jesus was certainly not spontaneous. His attitude towards the Torah and tradition as a whole was exactly the same: He denied neither, but restored both to their original meaning.
If we observe the Torah, we must do so to the end, without compromise and without deferring to tradition, however ancient, if that tradition contradicts the commandment. And if we follow tradition, we must fully understand its true meaning, without which it degenerates into prejudice or meaningless ritual. For both the Torah and genuine tradition will find a place in the Kingdom. Spiritual compromises and prejudices, however, hardly will.