NOTES for Luk 19:45-48

Each of the evangelists, according to the logic and features of his own narrative, gives us an account of the cleansing of the Temple. The point is that for the Jews who saw the Lord Jesus driving the sellers out of the Temple, this was a symbol that He truly is the Savior of the world, the Christ. The prophet Haggai says of this Second Temple that its glory will be greater than the glory of Solomon's Temple, because the Deliverer will come into it. And now Christ drives out of the Temple the bustle unworthy of the holy place, and then, as the evangelist Luke writes, He teaches every day in the Temple. Day after day, again and again, Christ proclaims the Father's love and calls people to repentance.

It is important for us to notice how the evangelist Luke speaks about His listeners. The Synodal translation here offers the words: "...all the people listened to Him attentively"; in the Greek original, however, the evangelist uses a very vivid word: "...all the people hung on Him as they listened". This is the kind of unflagging attention, when we literally hang in clusters on Christ, catching His every word, that prevented the chief priests and scribes from immediately carrying out their treacherous plans. They wanted to destroy Him, but could not, the evangelist says, because all the people were literally hanging on Him. The world's hostility toward Christ, the opposition of the powers of evil to His saving action, proved powerless when people listened to His word in this way.

What draws attention is the similarity of this image to the words of Christ recorded by the apostle John in chapter 15 of his Gospel: "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me". It is characteristic that here the evangelist Luke uses not his usual word "ochlos," crowd, but "laos," people, the word by which laypeople in the Church later came to be called.