The lectionary in my church’s Prayer Book assigns a specific gospel reading for each day of Holy Week, and today that reading is Mark 11:15-19, Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. The story is familiar enough to most Christians. Having triumphantly entered Jerusalem only a day before, Jesus goes into the temple and immediately proceeds to cause all manner of ruckus. He drives out buyers and sellers in the temple court, upsets the tables of money-changers, overturns the seats of pigeon vendors, and forbids anyone “to carry anything through the temple.” When Jesus first enters the temple, it is abuzz with activity. By the time he finishes, it seems to be almost entirely empty.
This is a strange story in many ways—not least because it shows the presence of anger in Jesus, an emotion with which we rarely associate him—and readers naturally wonder at what might have motivated his actions that day. Was he feeling indignant at the exploitation of the poor in the market economy of the temple? Was he cleansing a sacred space from the irreligious activity of buying and selling to sanctify it for worship once more? Perhaps.
But if we really want to understand the meaning of what took place that day, we must pay close attention to what Jesus himself says in verse 17.
Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations?” But you have made it a den of robbers.
This statement, as Richard Hays has pointed out, draws on not just one but two important prophetic texts.[1] The first, which Jesus quotes explicitly, comes from the eschatological vision of the prophet Isaiah, who describes the holy city and its temple as a place in which the deliverance of Israel has been revealed and in which “all nations” are invited to gather in and join in the worship of God (Isa 56:3-8). The second, to which Jesus alludes with his phrase “den of robbers,” derives from the temple sermon of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 7:1-8:3), in which the prophet foretells the imminent destruction of the holy temple which God will bring about in response to the injustice and idolatry of his people.
With these Old Testament sources in mind, we can discern what Jesus was doing that day. He was acting out a prophetic sign against the temple and its corruption. It should have been a house of prayer for all nations, but instead the Court of the Gentiles had been turned into a market bazaar. The Jewish people should have been a light to the nations, but they were instead implicated in injustice and idolatry. Jesus was emptying the court as a prophetic sign of coming judgment and of the temple’s destruction.
I do wonder, as I read this story, whether anyone at the temple that day would have understood the meaning of what was taking place. Did anyone have ears to hear and eyes to see? Did they understand what was going on as that bustling court emptied out its patrons and as the noise that had only moments ago echoed against its walls became eerily silent?
Today, these questions have become even more poignant. And that’s because, right now, we find ourselves in a nation of empty and silent churches. Now, to be sure, there are significant differences between these two situations. Jesus cleared the temple with a whip. We have vacated the pews of our churches in response to the threat of a pandemic.
Still, perhaps there is more similarity between that emptied temple and our empty churches than we would like to admit. After all, Jesus’ action in clearing the temple was only meant to be symbolic of a much more final emptying that would soon take place when the Roman empire would once and for all put an end to the buying and selling of sacrificial pigeons in that hallowed court. And according to the prophetic tradition to which Jesus alluded, this much greater judgment was ultimately guided by the hand of God.
Truth be told, Jesus’ action that day in the temple was only one instance in a long tradition of biblical prophecy. The prophets of Israel regularly announced impending national disaster as the coming judgment of God. The forms which that judgment could take were varied: war, famine, pestilence, and yes, even plague. And because of that, faithful Israelites were regularly enjoined to respond to times of national trial in two ways: humble repentance and prayer for deliverance.
In the past several weeks, I have heard numerous Christian leaders talking about the need to pray for deliverance, or at least the need to adopt the psalmist’s lament—“How long, O Lord?”—in the face of this present trial. But I have heard very few suggest that we ought to take up a posture of humility and repentance. And even fewer suggest that maybe, just maybe, we ought to see the hand of God in this emptying of our churches.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that COVID-19 is a plague sent by God in response to the sins of the church. I make no special claims to understanding the mysterious ways of divine providence. And it would be arrogant, if not morally obtuse, to claim that the current suffering of our world is really nothing more than a wake-up call to slumbering Christians.
But I am also not prepared to casually dismiss the haunting similarities between the emptied temple of Mark 11 and our own emptied churches. At the very least, I think that this moment ought to give us pause. Perhaps our proper response ought to consist not only in acts of love toward our neighbors and in innovative strategies for maintaining worship and community amidst separation, but also in a posture of humble repentance and prayer for deliverance.
As an Anglican, I am grateful that this posture is precisely what is modeled in the liturgical tradition of my own church. Take the Great Litany, for instance. It was the very first liturgical rite that Thomas Cranmer translated and adapted for the purpose of public worship in the Church of England, and is still commonly used today, especially during Lent. Amidst its many prayers for deliverance is this particularly timely petition:
From lighting and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us.
And it’s not just prayers for deliverance. The Prayer Book anticipates seasons of plague and sickness and teaches us how to respond. Here is a prayer in the 1662 edition that is given for “the time of any common Plague or Sickness”:
O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of king David, didst slay with the plague of pestilence threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest: Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The penitential language of this prayer grates against many of our modern sensibilities. But maybe this is precisely what we need during this time of empty churches. Maybe we are being given an opportunity, an opportunity for prayer and for repentance. If so, let us take advantage of this time that we are given.
Jonathan Bailes is Cathedral Theologian at Christ Church in Plano, TX. After earning his MDiv at Beeson Divinity School, he completed a PhD in Theology at Boston College, where he wrote a dissertation on the fourth-century church father, Gregory of Nyssa. Jonathan is a member of the 5th Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
NOTES:
[1] Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor Press, 2016), 26-29.
