Sermon preached 9 August 2026
Reading: Luke 19:41–48
Tr Pastor Lawrence McCatty
First Lesson: Jeremiah 7:1–11 · Psalm of the Day: Psalm 51 · Second Lesson: 1 Corinthians 12:1–11
The Temple Needs Cleansing
Context
Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey, His path strewn with palm branches and the crowds shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” and “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
Their day of grace draws to a close
For the past three years, the Son of God had come among them bringing the glorious gospel of their redemption. Their day of grace had come upon them. Jesus had been teaching and healing, preaching and performing miracles, but for many their time of grace was drawing to its close. Just five days later these same crowds shouting “Hosanna” would shout “Crucify! Crucify!”
Many deceived themselves that He was the promised military king who would overthrow the Roman occupier and re-establish Israel as the most powerful nation in the region.
A group known as “the Zealots” were passionate, were zealous (hence the name), for an earthly powerful King, just like King David. They were Jewish patriots who were known for their hatred of Rome more than anything else. And in Jesus, they have a King, descended from David, who performs miracles and is a charismatic leader that thousands of people follow. This was surely the mighty one who will lead them to victory against the Roman occupier.
But with the cheers of “Hosanna!” still ringing in his ears, Jesus looked up at the city of Jerusalem and burst into tears, weeping aloud, in the depths of grief. Jesus wept, not for himself, not for the suffering and death that he was to undergo just five days later, but He wept for the blindness of the people and their leaders, whose hard hearts despised the living Word, God incarnate, that had visited them and lived among them.
He came to bring them the peace they really needed. The “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” that they had cried out for as He approached Jerusalem. But they didn’t want to know His peace, as Jesus tells us in verse 42:
“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes”.
Jesus had come as the Prince of Peace. Hear Isaiah’s prophecy from around 700 years before:
6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.Isaiah 9:6
And by His sacrifice He would win the promised peace with God for them, but they scorned and rejected Him. They wanted a powerful, military leader who would lead them to earthly victory, but He came as a servant, as a lamb to the slaughter.
But God did not hide the truth from them
“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes”.
“But now they are hidden from your eyes”.
God did not hide from their eyes or ears the truth concerning Jesus. It was self-induced blindness. Time after time most of them had ignored the plain evidence presented to them in His miracles and in His teaching about God’s Kingdom and about Himself.
Jesus’ prophecy fulfilled
And so forty years later, in response to a violent revolt led by the Jewish Zealots, Jerusalem would be mercilessly attacked by the Roman armies and utterly destroyed, not because God desired it, not because God chose them for destruction, but:
“because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
As Jesus sadly says at the end of verse 44.
The Jewish historian, Josephus, wrote about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD. He tells us that the city siege started at the time of the Passover festival, when many had gathered within the city from every land, and that there were about three million Jews in Jerusalem.
Josephus writes that the Romans encircled the city with a wall to cut off supplies to the city completely and drive those in the city to starvation, exactly as Jesus prophesied in verse 43:
43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side …
By August 70 AD the Romans had breached the final defences and massacred much of the remaining population. Over 1 million people died, many from starvation and disease, and around 97,000 were taken captive and enslaved. The temple was razed to the ground and the city walls reduced to rubble:
As Jesus goes on to say in verse 44:
44 … and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you …
The corrupt church of then and now
Not only had Jerusalem, the centre of God’s earthly kingdom, which housed His temple, His house, rejected Him but it had become the centre for false teachers and false teaching.
The nation of Israel was called to be a light for all peoples:
“I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness;
I will take you by the hand and keep you;
I will give you as a covenant for the people,
a light for the nations,
7 to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.Isaiah 42:6–7
But those who should have known best who Jesus was, the scribes who knew every letter of the Law, the Pharisees who taught in the synagogues and the Temple, who read from the very Scriptures that clearly told who Jesus was, who should have thrown themselves at His feet in repentance, were the very people who not only rejected their Saviour, the Messiah, but encouraged and told others to do the same. They led them astray. They had every opportunity to know but tragically failed to recognise their Saviour.
Today’s Christian church is God’s house on earth, His Holy city on the hill, the light for the nations, but tragically, like Jerusalem, much of the visible church isn’t built on faith in God’s promises, on the foundation stone of Christ. It is built on shifting sand:
3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.2 Timothy 4:3–4
In our Old Testament lesson we also hear Jeremiah condemning false teachers and contempt for God, His Word and His church:
8 “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations?Jeremiah 7:8–10
The church’s time of grace is now, but like Jerusalem much of the church seems more interested in earthly and social issues than in Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected.
That values entertainment over Christ-centred reverence worship.
That mistakes numbers and noise for spiritual activity.
That is focused on wealth and comfort in this age than preparing believers for eternal life with God.
That is more interested in not offending, rather than teaching the truth of His holy life-saving Word.
The Temple
And when Jesus enters the temple’s Court of the Gentiles, the outermost part of the temple, what does He find?
This was the largest area of the temple and was where Gentile converts were permitted to enter. Cattle, sheep and doves were needed for the required sacrifices and were offered for sale to the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who came to Jerusalem for the great festivals.
This buying and selling did not have to be done in the temple area, a nearby area could have served the purpose. But the temple authorities turned a blind eye to it, and likely made a profit from these traders and money-changers and simply did not care!
Imagine the noise of thousands of lowing cattle and sheep bleating, and their sellers hawking their wares, and pilgrims haggling with them to get a better price.
(Get the children to act out the noise of the animals, sellers and pilgrims)
Imagine the stench of cowpats, sheep and bird droppings in the hot baking sun that would have drifted into the sacred worship areas.
And then there were the money-changers contributing to the desecration of the temple. Pilgrims had to pay a temple tax of half a shekel so money-changers were needed to convert the various currencies brought by the pilgrims into Jewish currency. They too could have plied their trade elsewhere, but like the animal traders they had invaded the Court of the Gentiles and contributed to the noise and confusion.
But the temple authorities, the religious leaders just didn’t care. So long as people went through the motions of worship then God had no reason to complain. As long as the people kept coming and filled the temple’s coffers, then all was good.
Jesus burned with righteous anger. Worship of God, His Father, was a holy thing so nothing should distract from it, but here it had been relegated to a sideshow.
He sees the contempt for this special place that was supposed to be respectful and full of reverence for God, and cries:
‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”
We recognise that Jesus is quoting from today’s Old Testament lesson taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah:
11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? (Jeremiah 7:11)
He quotes Jeremiah for a reason. He was drawing the people’s attention that in this section of his book Jeremiah is prophesying of the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians around 600 years before. Jesus is telling them that the fate of this Second Temple will be the same as the First because of their contempt for God’s Church, His Word, and for their unrepentance.
Jesus drives out the distractions
So Jesus drove out the things that were distracting the people from prayer, and stopping them from hearing and focusing on God’s Word.
And with the temple cleansed of the noise and distractions, with the quiet and reverence restored, Jesus then spiritually cleanses and sanctifies it by teaching the people there daily right up until his arrest.
“47 And he was teaching daily in the temple.” and “… all the people were hanging on his words.”
He sets up camp in the Court of the Gentiles to stand in the gate of the Lord’s house and proclaim His Word.
Our church – the remnant
So what does this mean for us and our church?
Before the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of over a million of its inhabitants. God performed a miracle for those that were repentant and believed in Jesus. The Christians, with the Apostles among them, those who did not despise His Word or the Holy Spirit, had all left the city before the uprising that led to its destruction. They withdrew into the regions of Samaria and Galilee. Thus, God separated and preserved His true people, the remnant who had repented, who loved Him, who received the New Covenant through Christ’s own blood.
They were the core for the new Church, built on the cornerstone of Christ, that would spread throughout the whole world.
Christians who believe and teach the true Gospel, who use the Sacraments devoutly, who pray to God in repentance and produce fruit in keeping with their faith. They are scattered all over the world, gathering in small pockets here and there. Some we know of, some we don’t.
Jesus teaches us about the only things that save, that will ensure we are counted among that remnant. We pray that the Holy Spirit will drive out the things that distract us from prayer and hearing God’s Word. That drag us into despising His Word and treating it with contempt.
To drive out the spiritual clutter, the noise and distractions of life, so that we can keep hearing and teaching the precious saving Word of God.
We pray that He may daily:
“Create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us.
Cast us not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from us.
Restore to us the joy of your salvation, and uphold us with a willing spirit.”Paraphrased from our Psalm of the Day, Psalm 51
Our Lord Jesus Christ still stands in the gate of the Lord’s house, in God’s temple, in His house, in the Holy Christian Church, to teach. He does this today through his Holy Spirit inspired Word and called teachers.
And on that glorious day when Christ fulfils His promise and comes again, when we will live in peace, forever, with God in the new and perfect Jerusalem. When there will be:
“a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”Revelation 21:1–4
Amen