Transcript
Jesus Cleanses the Temple
First Baptist Richmond, January 18, 2026
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
John 2:13-25
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves and the money changers seated at their tables.
I’ve been looking at the story of Jesus cleansing the temple for a week now. I’ve been reading the commentaries and digging down deep. There is so much that could be said about these few verses but the thing I keep coming back to, the moment that has captured my imagination, is that moment when Jesus makes a whip of cords.
What was he thinking?
The story starts out peacefully enough. John tells us that the Passover of the Jews was near and just the way he says it is a clue that even though Jesus himself was a Jew, and all his followers in those early days were Jews, the Christian movement had grown enough and changed enough by the time this Gospel was written that John felt the need to clarify for his readers: the Festival of the Passover was a Jewish thing.
Not everybody would understand.
But Jesus would. He was an observant Jew. He went up to Jerusalem for the Passover as he had every year since he was twelve. It was one of three major festivals every Jewish male was required to attend. Jesus, who was coming from Galilee, would have most likely followed the course of the Jordan River downstream until he got to Jericho, and then turned right and climbed those 18 steep miles going up to Jerusalem. Along the way he and his disciples might have sung Psalm 127, the one we used as our Call to Worship this morning. It’s one of the Psalms of Ascent, the ones you sing when you are ascending to Jerusalem. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain,” the psalmist insists. And as Jesus and his disciples made their way up the road they would have been thinking of the Lord’s house:
The Temple.
It’s not as if Jesus had never been there before. If he was, as Luke tells us, “About thirty years old” when he was baptized, and if he had been to Jerusalem three times a year since he was twelve, he would have been there dozens of times. But this time was different. This time he had been “epiphanized”: that is, the bright light of God’s glory had been shined upon him; he had been revealed for who he truly was; his secret identity had been made manifest in his baptism.
John the Baptist had been told, “The one on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” John had seen it with his own eyes. The next day he told his disciples, “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” After spending some time with him Andrew told his brother Peter, “We have found the Messiah,” and just after that Nathanael said to Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!” So, Jesus may have looked at the Temple differently than he had before. He may have felt some ownership. This was not just the Lord’s house, it was his father’s house, and—by extension—his house, too.
And there were people in there selling cattle.
I remember talking about that in a sermon I preached back in 2015. It wasn’t the whip of cords that jumped out at me that time; it was the idea that people were selling cattle in the temple. I said, “I went to a coffee shop last Monday afternoon, got a cup of coffee, sat down at a table, arranged my things, opened my Bible to John 2:13, took a sip of coffee, began to read, and there it was: “The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle….” And I nearly spewed my coffee on the sacred page. “He whaaat?!” I said. I put on my reading glasses and looked again, but it was still there: “In the temple he found people selling cattle!” And I wondered what it would take to come to the place where that seemed normal for anybody.
I had been to Jerusalem the month before I wrote that sermon, and I talked about the morning that I visited the Temple Mount—a broad, flat plaza the size of five football fields where the Jewish temple used to stand. At the time I visited it was under Muslim control, and I still can’t remember how my little interfaith group got permission to go up there. Maybe my friend Ammar Amonette, the imam, sweet-talked the guards. But we got to go inside the Al-Aqsa mosque at one end of the plaza and the beautiful, golden Dome of the Rock in the middle. I’m sure you’ve seen it in the pictures.
It was quiet up there that morning. We were almost the only ones there. I could stroll across those smooth, flat stones and reflect on all the things that had happened on that holy site without interruption. But as soon as my little group came down off that plaza and entered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City it was chaos: crowds of people were jammed into dark, narrow streets with merchant’s stalls on both sides selling fruit and nuts, meat and fish, trinkets and souvenirs. I saw a T-shirt hanging in front of a shop that had “the University of Alabama” written on it in Hebrew, complete with the slogan, “Roll Tide!” It’s not exactly what you would expect to see in the Holy City, but at least it wasn’t up there where the Temple used to be. And yet, when Jesus came to Jerusalem for the Passover that’s what he found: that broad, flat plaza had been turned into a marketplace.
You can understand how it happened. Someone figured out that instead of leading a heifer from Galilee to Jerusalem (one that didn’t really want to go; one that had a hunch things might not end well) it made sense to sell it in Galilee, bring the money to Jerusalem, and simply buy a heifer of similar quality there. Before you know it livestock pens were popping up all over the place, and every year, just to make things more convenient for their customers, they moved a little closer to the temple. As for the moneychangers, well! It was a service to the people. You couldn’t put Roman coins into the temple treasury. They had Caesar’s likeness stamped on them; they were graven images; clear violations of commandment number two. And so, for a small fee, the moneychangers would turn those filthy Roman coins into holy Hebrew shekels. And, out of consideration for their customers, they brought their booths as close to the temple treasury as decorum would allow.
Jesus went up to Jerusalem, John tells us, and “in the Temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the moneychangers seated at their tables.” It’s that moment I keep coming back to—that moment when Jesus looked at what was in front of him and saw the huge discrepancy between things as they were and things as they ought to be. I don’t think the disciples saw it. It had been that way as long as they could remember. And Jesus may not have even noticed it before, but now things were different. Now he had been revealed as the Son of God. He had a role to fulfill. It reminds me of those moments when I’m at someone’s house for dinner and the host says, “Would anyone like to say the blessing?” and every head turns toward me. Because I’m the minister, right? I’ve been ordained. Well, Jesus had been “epiphanized,” and whether or not his disciples turned to look at him he felt the need to do something.
What did he do? He made a whip of cords. It’s that moment I keep coming back to, but it’s not just that moment: it’s the one before. It’s the one when Jesus sees what’s going on and judges it. People had been buying and selling cattle in the temple precincts forever but when Jesus saw it that day he thought, “No. It shouldn’t be this way. This is my Father’s house. This is a holy place. There shouldn’t be cattle in here.” And then he realized that if anything was going to be done about it he would have to do it. Which raises the question: if you had come in here this morning and found people selling cattle how would you have gotten them out? Jesus looked around and found some cords—not ropes: cords. I keep thinking they may have been hanging over a rail so the dove sellers could tie their little feet together before handing them over to a customer. And as I see it, he took a handful of those, knotted them together at one end, and used them as kind of a flail to drive out these animals.
It’s not like he was whipping them, and I am almost 100% sure he wasn’t whipping people. This was not an act of anger—not in John’s Gospel at least—it was an act of judgment. This was his Father’s house. It was a holy place. And when Jesus saw people in there buying and selling, haggling over prices, sheep and cattle doing what they do, money changing hands in broad daylight, he thought, “That’s just not right. Get these things out of here!” he said. “Stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace.” It makes me wonder what other things Jesus would judge. What would he do, for instance, if he were standing in front of us this morning? What would he see that we stopped seeing a long time ago? And (Lord, help us) what would Jesus say if he watched ten minutes of the evening news?
I got a text message last week from a woman who is not a member, but who is connected to our church through her family. She said, “Jim: I know it’s late and I’m sorry, but I’m terrified. With everything that’s going on with ICE and deportations right now I’m scared to death for me and my family. My husband and I are both US citizens from different countries, and I’m scared of getting arrested or whatever they are doing. Please pray for us, my anxiety is through the roof!” This woman was adopted from Russia when she was a child. She married an African man and they have two beautiful brown boys. They are all US citizens, but she’s terrified, and it makes me wonder: What would Jesus do? Would he make a whip of cords? And if he did would he use it to drive out these immigrants, or those ICE agents?
In today’s text Jesus is not confronting the political system of ancient Israel, but the religious system. If I were comparing apples to apples I might wonder: What would Jesus say to the American church these days? I think about those churches that have come under the spell of Christian nationalism, the ones that believe America was founded as a white Christian nation, and that if you’re not white, or not Christian, you don’t really belong here. We don’t believe that here at First Baptist, and we might even begin to feel self-righteous about it until we remember that for 124 years—more than half of our history—membership in this church was restricted to whites only. If Jesus had judged our church in those days he might have said what he does in the Gospel of Matthew: “My Father’s house is meant to be a house of prayer for all people!” What other kinds of people have we excluded through the years? And which ones do we still exclude?
There’s a song I remember from my boyhood that says, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water, put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea, take a look at yourself and you can look at others differently, by putting your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.” Do you remember that one? It was written by a Canadian singer and songwriter named Gene McLellan and first recorded by Anne Murray in 1970. The verse that’s been playing in my head for the last week is the one that says, “Every time I look into the holy book I want to tremble, or when I read the part where the carpenter cleared the temple, for the buyers and the sellers were no different fellers than what I profess to be, and it causes me shame to know I’m not the man that I should be” (or, if you’re listening to the Anne Murray version, “not the gal that I should be”).
Yes. Before I begin to get all self-righteous and start judging the American religious system or the American political system I need to take a look at myself, and I need to try and look at myself in the way Jesus might look at me, which means (I think) that he would be far more forgiving of some of my sins, but far more critical of others. The disciples, for instance, knew that they weren’t supposed to lie, or steal, or commit adultery, and if Jesus had taken a long, hard look at them those might have been the first sins that came to their mind. But they didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to sell cattle in the temple precincts. They had to spend some time with Jesus before they figured out what kinds of things offended him. And so will we. We will have to get to know him on the deepest and most personal level before we can say with any confidence: “I don’t think Jesus would like this,” or, “I don’t think Jesus would do this.”
Right at the end of today’s reading it says that many people in Jerusalem believed in Jesus because they saw the signs that he was doing, but Jesus wouldn’t entrust himself to them because he knew their hearts. Well, he knows our hearts, friends. He knows if we are sincerely trying to follow him, or simply trying to pass ourselves off as Christians. So, here’s the challenge: “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water, put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea. Take a look at yourself, and you can look at others differently, by putting your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.” I believe that if you get to know him, really know him, you will know what kinds of things he would bless and approve, and what kinds of things would make him want to pick up a whip.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
